1.
After the election, the ballot-count stalled. For several days, the results shown on the Cable News were always the same – Biden at 254 electoral votes and Trump with 213. (As you know, 270 electoral college votes are required to win the presidential election.) There was nothing to report and the media reported it, simply repeating projections and election arithmetic. Trump seemed ahead in most places on election night itself, but this was deceptive. The candidate had told his supporters not to vote by mail but to cast their ballots only on the day of the election. Therefore, people went to bed on Tuesday night with the ominous sense that the debacle in 2016 was repeating itself. Florida was announced early: a solid win for Trump.
But during the next few days, election officials caught up with the flood of mail-in ballots and, slowly, but steadily, the tide changed in Biden’s favor. Then, Nevada and Pennsylvania seemed to slip into some kind of paralysis and the vote counts – called “dumps’ – occurred only intermittently and, then, in relatively small caches of ballots. This led to the sense that the whole mighty system had somehow ground to a halt and that wheels were spinning ineffectually in the strange-looking windowless sorting factories (they look like what you see of a post office when you look behind the counter) where anonymous, masked bureaucrats were counting the votes.
Throughout this eerie stasis, the weather was unseasonably warm. The days were moist and soft, with bright sunlight and scarcely a cloud in the sky. Normal temperatures in Minnesota were exceeded daily by about 30 degrees Fahrenheit – there were several days in which the highs were around 75 degrees, warmth breaking previous historical records. The sun seemed to not have much force – but, its light was sufficient, if gently applied, to make everything glow with a strange, supernatural radiance.
2.
The mild warm days and the breezy nights, together with the stalled vote count, made people restless. They wanted to get out of their houses. But the Covid virus was everywhere – people were sickening and dying in record numbers and many hospitals were overcome with casualties. Daily, infections increased at a rate exceeding 125,000 – mortality was also climbing at about 1140 deaths every 24 hours. Despite the fine weather, everything counseled caution – stay home! keep out of harm’s way!
But there is nothing more seductive than the last days of warm, fine weather before winter storms bury everything in ice and snow. So I drove ninety miles to Great River Bluffs State Park in order to walk in the woods overlooking the Mississippi. I listened to the radio as I drove and heard that, at last, Biden had been named as the winner of the election, on November 7, 2020 – that was around noon CST five days after election day.
3.
Wisconsin’s Black River spills out wooded hills into a complex delta of swamps and islands at its confluence with the Mississippi. Viewed from high on the forested bluffs, the wetlands below are comprised of lagoons like elongated cells closely crowded together, each body of water walled off by sedge marsh that is the bright yellow-brown color of sunburned prairie. In some places, the marshes encircle sand reefs or small islands dense with brush and scrub, willows growing in thick gardens on the higher points in the flood plain. In some places, whole glades have been flooded and dead trees stand like pale, crooked stakes pounded into the swamp. The main channel of the river is hidden behind its moat of ox-bow lakes and small islets, although downstream a few miles, the water-bore of the Mississippi pushes hard against some locks and dams, big piles of square concrete, heavy and blunt like the tombs of ancient pharaohs. Perhaps, there is some occult order to the river valley but from the top of the bluffs, the lagoons and channels are all entangled and chaotic, water prairies slit with oval lakes, each rimmed with sun-burned brown reeds, On the Minnesota side of the river valley, here about six or seven miles across, the plains are dissected into steep, narrow valleys, more like ravines – or, as they are called in this area, “coulees” – that slope upward away from the river. The valleys are bordered by lofty ridges and, in places, the soil has slipped away to reveal crumbling cliffs and overhangs. The sides of some of the bluffs are too steep to support woods and so appear as grasslands hung like blonde, sun-bleached pennants over the sides of the hills. This liminal country between the farmland stretching out above the hills and the wetlands in the valley is wild and seems uninhabited and many of the coulees are too steep and deeply cut to have roads running into their depths. Except where hillsides show hanging prairies or cliffs, the ridges and ravines are all densely wooded.
At the State Park, a mile long trail, entirely level, follows a ridge that narrows to a tree-lined corridor about 50 feet wide between two deep valleys. The path dead ends atop King’s Bluff where the high jetty of the ridge crests, cliffs invisible from the hilltop somewhere beyond the place where the trail is blocked by a barricade of stacked logs. From this overlook, the hiker can see across the pit of a deep, dark valley to the scimitar-shaped ridge of Queen’s Bluff, that hill’s flanks and top bald with steep, plunging patches of prairie. Beyond, the river valley with its procession of small oval lagoons extends toward a distant highway bridge crossing to Wisconsin, the parallel trestle of a railroad span, and a blue plain of water impounded behind the lock and dam, that expanse of water dotted with herons that appear as white pinpricks in the bright lake. Politics seems remote from this vista but, of course, there is no place exempt from the burden of human debate – the river crossings and dams here were once a subject of controversy, railroads made the old Northwest and destroyed its terrain as well, Lincoln, as a volunteer in the Illinois militia marched with troops chasing the Black Hawk Indians into this valley in 1832 – the massacre at Bad Axe occurred on the Mississippi fifty miles south of these heights. I am here on this windy hilltop, dead leaves skittering under foot, on a day of some historic import. But, then, all days have historical import, although always comprehended in those terms only many years later.
I make my way back to the parking place, passing happy groups of people walking the trail to the overlook. Most of the hikers that I encounter have little dogs either running in front of them or tagging along behind. The parking lot is now entirely occupied by vehicles and, indeed, some cars are now parked parallel to the narrow state park road next to the spaces allotted for visitors. I drive farther down the winding lane to another larger parking spot, access to a picnic ground where tables stand scattered among tall trees on the bluff-top. There’s a north and south overlook here, both perched on cliffs towering over the woods falling away to the river valley.
Two connecting trails link the paths in the picnic grounds to a quarter-mile walk from some cart-in campsites to the Kearn Valley overlook. Oddly, the first connecting trail from the picnic area to the loop road is quite difficult – the path drops steeply down into a ravine, descending 150 feet or so, and, then, climbs steeply back up to the road-grade. The trail is narrow and buried in deep windrows of fallen leaves and so it’s hard to see roots and stones protruding under foot. Beyond the road crossing, the next leg of the connecting trail is equally difficult – this path is even more narrow and steeper, descending into a grim, tangled ravine and, then, climbing to a densely wooded hilltop by a ladder-like ascent made over railroad ties terraced into the hillside to keep the trail from eroding into another trench-shaped gulch under the big trees. As I start down the trail, I stub my toe on a root buried in leaves and fall forward, ultimately dropping hard to my knees and, then, rolling to the side. I don’t like to fall and, at my age, it’s hard for me to get up when I have skidded to the ground. My phone has slipped out of my pocket and, on the facing hillside, a couple of hikers are cautiously slipping and sliding down the opposing slope. It’s embarrassing and I feel that it’s necessary to get up before these people come close and have to haul me to my feet and so I scramble around on hands and knees, find some footing and, then, try to stand – at first, it doesn’t work and I fall forward again and I can’t see anything nearby to grip for support. I make another effort, breathing heavily, and succeed in getting to my feet although I’m overbalanced and stagger forward down the steep hill as if about to fall again. Somehow, I keep my footing and am able to continue down to the crease in the hillside where the trail, after about five steps over level ground tilts steeply upward. The oncoming hikers are right above me and I am panting for breath and almost unable to greet them, but I feel I have to make the transit, get past them as they stand alongside the trail politely waiting for me. I mutter a couple words, forge past the hikers and, then, a thirty feet uphill, take hold of a nearby tree trunk, clinging there as I catch my breath.
Kearns Valley is another deep slot in the bluffs, wild and shaggy with trees and showing no sign of any human presence in the wooded gorge. I’m afraid of the trail that I have traversed to get here and so, beyond, the cart-in campsites, of course, deserted this day, I walk to the access driveway, hike up to the barricade and, then, follow the road back to the first connecting leg, the path that drops into the ravine and, then, climbs up to the picnic ground. I have a little pain in my knee. It’s terrible to be old and unsteady on your feet.
4.
Of course, President Trump doesn’t concede the election to Biden. This enrages Anderson Cooper and he says that Trump is “like an obese turtle flat on his back in the hot sun flailing around as he dies.” This simile doesn’t seem particularly apposite to me and, as an obese turtle flailing around after falling on the hillside trail, I don’t exactly appreciate the implications of the CNN newscaster’s words.
5.
Despite the full fury of the Covid, Biden’s supporters crowd together in Wilmington, Delaware to listen to the President-Elect’s speech. Kamala Harris also says some words, introducing Biden. Fireworks, apparently delivered by aerial drones, burst overhead. To prove his fitness, the 77-year old Biden trots on stage. He seems to have miscalculated the length of the jog – it’s a long runway that the old man has to navigate and I feel sorry for him. I hope he doesn’t collapse while we are watching. Most of the crowd seems masked, but they’re not socially distanced at all, and, in several big cities, mobs of people dance in the streets, also jammed together on urban blocks from which auto traffic has been diverted. Of course, if this were a Trump rally, the TV commentators would be censorious and disapproving – but no one criticizes these recklessly ebullient crowds. The double standard, I’m afraid, is in full view for anyone with eyes to see.
6.
The weather changes. The only thing constant is the torch of the Covid perpetually burning under every change in skies and temperature. People whom I know well now have the virus.
In the morning, a brisk wind tumbles out of the Northwest and the temperature drops. Five hundred feet above the ground, tatters of cloud torn by the wind, whip by overhead, moving with alarming speed under a backdrop of high, turbulent clouds that appear motionless, sculpted out of marble. The shredded clouds zooming by overhead seem somehow panicked and damaged. Honking, a flight of geese moves against the wind, vee formation battered by the gale and asymmetrical. It’s dizzying to see the clouds in the middle air sweeping by like freight trains overhead, the birds flying in the opposite direction to that motion, and far away the tilted towers and columns of the big storm clouds that seem to be entirely still. This seems to be some kind of puzzle in relativity theory, airborne objects moving with different velocities with respect to one another, and the covid ueber alles rising as a hot dome above everything else.
7.
Grocery stores show empty shelves again. Apparently, people are hoarding. Each day the number of people diagnosed with Covid increases – it’s now over 200,000 daily. Refrigerated semi-trailers have been sent to El Paso to serve as temporary morgues. In many places, the hospitals are reported to be nearing capacity and there is fear that people will die in corridors or waiting rooms for want of a bed. In the midst of this chaos, thousands of Trump supporters converge on Washington D.C. to fight counterprotesters. TV news shows mobs of screaming people none of them wearing masks. 125 Secret Service officers who traveled with Trump and guarded him at political rallies are sick with the virus. The President has yet to cooperate in any way with the Biden transition team. Indeed, the news is that Trump’s Covid team, such as it is, refuses to share information with Biden’s infectious disease advisors. And, so, the nightmare continues.
8,
On both the left and right, arrant nonsense is spouted on the airwaves. Outlandish claims are made with no evidence. The Right is more prone to farfetched, even fantastical, conspiracy theories. But there are smug and pervasive claims to cultural superiority made by men and women of the Left as well. These can be equally bizarre and, perhaps, more irritating because there is no one credible to call out liberal bias: all the media opprobrium is aimed at the crazies alleging Trump’s landslide victory, folks who seem to be self-evidently mad, fanatics of whom 70% assert that there is literally nothing that Trump could do that would cause them to withdraw their support. This madness is more or less complementary to the arrogant disdain shown by the Left.
An example of liberal condescension is an interview that I heard on the radio with the ever-winsome actress, Kate Winslett. The ostensible basis for the conversation was Ammonite, a 2020 film purporting to be about the life of Mary Anning, an early 19th century paleontologist. In the movie, Anning is given a lesbian love-interest, a plot point for which there is literally no evidence in the historical record – Miss Anning wrote to several women with whom she was very close; her letters have survived and, although warm, they aren’t passionate; she writes about her dog Trey and espouses conventionally pious religious beliefs. Winslett notes that the film is not a biopic and that it has taken liberties with the historical facts. However, Winslett argues that these liberties are, in service, of “normalizing” GLBT relationships – something that may well be praiseworthy although one wonders whether devising a bodice-ripping Victorian lesbian romance is the best vehicle for such an objective.
Of course, Winslett doesn’t acknowledge that only 15 years ago, President Obama, for instance, announced his undying enmity to granting the right to marriage for same-sex couples. The consensus approval that she claims with respect to such unions, therefore, may not be all that solid even today. Winslett nods to feminist thought when she claims that Mary Anning is unknown today because she was a woman working in a man’s field – that is, paleontology. This is absurd. Quick! Name your favorite male paleontologist living in Great Britain during the Victorian era. Further, Mary Anning was much celebrated during her life-time – she was praised by Charles Dickens and various scientists. Upon her death, the English Geological Society installed commemorative stained glass windows in a church near the fossil fields that she hunted and, in 2010, she was cited as one of the ten most influential women in science in the U. K.
Winslett goes on to say that she regrets working with sexual predators such as Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. This is obviously and purely opportunistic. She filmed Carnage with Polanski in 2010 in Paris. Of course, Winslett had to travel to Paris to work with Polanski because he was a fugitive from American justice in that city, hiding out in plain sight there because of charges of child-rape pending against him in Los Angeles. Similarly, she made Wonder Wheel with Woody Allen in 2017, many years after the sexual abuse allegations against that director were well-known and had been much publicized. So, it appears that Winslett’s recent contrition about performing for these men is little more than an attempt to capitalize on a recent wave of indignation against sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men. It won’t do for her to play the poor, misled naif with respect to these directors.
Ms. Winslett seems to regret some of the sex and nude scenes that played a role in making her famous. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be objectified,” she says to the interviewer. She is married to a former employee of Richard Branson, a man she met at one of the tycoon’s parties. He is named Ned Rocknroll. Ms. Winslett named her son by Mr. Rocknroll, Bear Blaze – the child protested being called Bear Blaze Rocknroll (a wise infant) and is now called Bear Blaze Winslett.
As might be observed by this screed, listening to Ms. Winslett for five minutes on public radio is enough to convert one into a rabid Right wing ideologue.
This conversion, however, will be reversed by considering the curious case of Tommy Tuberville, a hick from Alabama who is now that State’s Senator. Tommy Tuberville’s claim to fame is that he was a successful football coach for the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide. Exactly how coaching a college football team qualifies one for high office is unclear to me. (I should confess some partiality here: my nephew Dr. John Frederick Beckmann, an entomologist at the U of Alabama in Auburn, announced that he was interested in the Republican senatorial seat. Of course, he was thought to be unqualified since he was a mere bug doctor – exactly, how being a bug doctor prepares one to serve on the Senate is worth considering, but, certainly, he would have been a better choice for the office than this red-neck football coach.) Senator-elect Tuberville spoke his disciples. He recalled vividly how his own late-lamented father enlisted in the Marines at 16 and, then, drove a tank through Europe after Normandy. Tuberville said that his father was always proud that he had liberated Paris from the “socialists and communists.”
This remark displays such breathtaking ignorance as to achieve a certain sublimity when it comes to idiotic declarations by public servants. Not only is Tuberville, a man who seems to be about sixty, completely unaware of what was at stake in World War II, he, also, inadvertently displays his own father as either an incredibly stupid rural rube or a liar. Perhaps, he has just misremembered what his pa told him. In any event, to make this assertion also demonstrates an astonishing ignorance of pop culture – this guy has apparently never seen Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds let alone any one of a thousand World War Two war movies. He hasn’t watched (or read) A Bridge too Far or the thriller Paris is Burning (1966). Maybe, by accident, he saw the documentary Paris is Burning (1990) about transvestites in the Queens in New York – possibly this is the source of this poor man’s confusion. He simply forgot to mention that his dad liberated Paris from crossdressing homosexuals as well.
9.
The microbe that causes malaria (“bad air”) was hard to study because, for an important part of its life-cycle, it goes underground in the gut of a mosquito. Nature loves to hide.
On the first day, I walked some paths in the Nature Center near the great white bunker of the Hormel Mansion. The trails were familiar to me but intersected in ways that I didn’t exactly recall. Within the sere woods, distances seem to elongate – a looping trail in the forest twists and turns for a mile or more, but, then, emerges from the trees only a few hundred feet where it entered. A quarter of a century ago when I last spent considerable time in these woods, a plantation of fir and pine stood alongside the boundary to the mansion property. The trees had been inserted into the earth in straight lines and had grown into colonnades embedded in deep, soft red needles shed by the evergreens. Several of the stands of trees were labeled on little wooden markers: “Douglas Fir”, “Norway Pine” and so on. Now, the markers are all gone and a certain entropy has established itself in that garden – the colonnades no longer run true and there are saplings at intervals between the ranks of trees to the extent that, in some places, the artificial forest’s alignments now seem almost natural.
On a path near Dobbyns Creek, the stream that meanders through the woods, I saw a strange-looking squirrel, a creature that walked in an ungainly manner, crossing a concrete section ahead of me where a culvert fed ooze from a narrow creek into the little river. The squirrel was long and narrow and didn’t seem to have much of a tail and it walked with a waddling gait. After observing the animal for a moment, I realized that it was an otter, black as night and shaped like a quadruped eel. The otter slipped down to the river bank, but, then, turned to stare at me. I stood completely still and the otter didn’t move either and, so, for a minute or more, we looked at each other or, in each other’s direction, because I suppose neither exactly beheld the other. Then, I took a step forward and the otter dropped out of sight. I hurried to the edge of the river, but there was no sign of the animal anywhere. The stream’s water was black with the gloom of the autumnal forest and, at a bend, the creek had undercut a tree so that the trunk stood over a writhing tangle of roots dipped in a dark still pool.
The next day, I took a path far from the parking lot, a trail that skirted the woods for about a mile and, then, passed several glacial erratics, boulders shaped vaguely like altars. Beyond the grove of trees and the altars, the trail crossed an oak savannah with trees broadly spaced in chest-high, pale-yellow grass. It was very windy and the bare boughs overhead shook their bony fingers at me. Thirty-five years ago, this trail led to a marsh where a meadow on a promontory supported a single oak, one the most shapely trees that I have seen, majestic and isolated from the rest of the forest, a great spreading arbor where birds gathered in its branch and squirrels scolded one another. The tree was blasted by lightning and crumbled into the wreckage of a moldering stump and some big, jagged deadfall, now ghostly gray on the meadow. A bench commemorating some worthy, also now long dead, sits on the grass where the tree once cast its shadow.
A hundred yards past the remnants of the lone oak, the air brightens with something like calliope music. It’s clear and loud enough to startle me, a flute-like sound vibrating in the windy air. Then, I can hear several voices giggling loudly. I spin around to look behind me, but the path is completely empty – indeed, I have seen no one this afternoon except a single girl, spectral in black with a very white face, walking alone at the edge of the forest. The piping stops abruptly and I can’t hear the giggling anymore. Scanning the horizon, I see storm clouds piled up and trees gesturing at the wind, but no one abroad.
Then, two deer bound out of the tall grass, gracefully leaping over fallen logs or puddles of water hidden in the thistles and reeds. One of the deer is elaborately antlered. The animals cross the trail and, then, simply drop out of sight. I hurry behind them to see if I can track their progress across the savannah. Where they seemed to fall away, slipping down into some ditch in the grass, the prairie is completely level. It’s as if the deer have fallen through a trapdoor that is now wholly invisible.
I walk around the edges of the oak savannah. On the horizon, I can see the turret of a silo. I have gone a long way across open country, the prairie here split by little pools of water that reflect the grey, windy sky. After a quarter of an hour, I find myself approaching several big boulders half-buried in the high grass. These are the altars. Somehow, that path has looped and I have apparently come back to where I started. It is very disorienting. The directions that I thought that I carried in my mind have switched places.
On the mile walk back to the parking lot, I walk along the tree-line where the wind has toppled three trees, torn them apart and dropped them on the trail exactly where I was walking an hour ago. The storm sings in the tree tops. In this windswept landscape of dark grey and brown and black, everything is alive. Perhaps, I am the thing least alive in this place.
10.
In South Dakota now, the covid positivity rate is 60%. The virus is eating the state. People in South Dakota were told that the covid infection was a hoax and, so, this summer they gathered in great numbers for a Trump rally at Mount Rushmore and hosted a quarter-million people at the Sturgis motorcycle rally. A nurse caring for covid victims in Sioux Falls observes that many of the virus-deniers argue with her before they day – “I don’t have covid,” they say, “this is the flu, just the flu, or, maybe, pneumonia.” People would rather be dead than wrong. Several people, the nurse reports, claim that they are dying from lung cancer. “It’s a strange thing,” the nurse tells the TV interviewer, “when people would rather have lung cancer than admit they have contracted covid.”
11.
A small plane crashes into a Los Angeles suburb. The plane skids through a neighborhood of humble white houses, little bungalows on a quiet residential street, and, then, bursts into flame. On the internet, you can see a video of the plane crash caught on surveillance tape. The video shows several storefronts and a sidewalk where a man with his back turned to the camera is sweeping the pavement. To the man’s right, there is a busy street where traffic is passing and, then, a large vacant lot that extends to the circle of little cottages around a cul-de-sac. The plane enters the frame from the left, very low, only a few feet above the ground and, then, it skids, rolling so that a wing suddenly flashes in the air like a knife-blade before being torn apart. An orange fire-ball billows up over the bungalow roof-tops. And while all of this is happening, the cars on the busy street roll by without stopping or, even, slowing, unaffected by the fireball a couple hundred yards away. And the man sweeping never pauses, doesn’t look up from his work, and just keeps moving his broom over the sidewalk.
It is trite, but meaningful, I think, to recall Brueghel’s pellucid “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” – the plowman leaning into his labor, the little ship under sail and approaching the harbor, Icarus’ pale legs vanishing underwater in the green-blue water.
12.
The virus amplifies itself. Grocery store shelves look looted again. People are hoarding toilet paper. I suppose the situation scares the shit out of them. The museums are once more shuttering themselves, closing for six weeks. Kids from college who are infected with the covid, lie about their symptoms, even to themselves, I suppose, jet home and spread the disease to their families and friends in the towns and cities where they live. Trump refuses to concede. The car is careening out of control with no one’s hands on the steering wheel.
13.
Before I went to bed, I read ten pages in Patrick Roth’s Gottesquartett (God Quartet). For several years, Roth was the president of the Southern California Jungian Society. In this new book, published in 2020, Roth gives advice as to what one should do when he or she encounters a dead person in a dream. Roth asserts that the dead person is a messenger and, therefore, presents an opportunity to ask questions. He argues that dreamers should never fail to confront these figures and query them as to conditions on the “other side.”
Not surprisingly, in the hour before dawn, I found myself in the village of Kenyon, waiting in line at a Subway restaurant. In Kenyon, the Subway occupies a corner store-front next to the public utilities building. A court proceeding was scheduled for later in the day, an odd thing because there is no courthouse in Kenyon. I recall that the light in the restaurant was warm and amber and the walls were paneled in soft-looking woods.
Next to me, waiting in line, was a very close friend. This man has been dead now for about five years. He was about twenty years older than me. He looked compact and healthy and his complexion was rosy. I recalled Roth’s admonition and, so, I asked him: “What have you come to tell me?” He seemed mute. The dead man looked at me with a quizzical expression as if I were the one who owed him an explanation, as if I were, somehow, intruding upon his repose. “Please tell me, what you have come for?” Again, he looked at me with a baffled expression. I repeated my question several times and there was no response and, so, suddenly, I was very angry and I cuffed him hard, hitting the side of his head with the side of my hand. He had a cash register in his head and there was a digital display that flashed some letters at me before spitting out a receipt. The message showing in the digital display was hard to read, first OR, than NOR. I didn’t understand these words. The court appearance followed, a ZOOM hearing with crowds of attorneys showing in a half-dozen separate boxes on my lap-top computer. The arguments had something to with the recent election.
14.
A week before Thanksgiving 2020, at dawn, the sky has the patina of old ceramic, pale blues and greens all blended together and luminous as if reflecting light from elsewhere. The heavens are glazed and glow like the pottery in an ancient Japanese tea service.
Yesterday, 189,000 people tested positive with the Coronavirus in the United States. About 1800 deaths were reported. The country is on-track to add a million or more cases every five days. About ten-thousand people will die every week.
15.
The day is warm and bright and the skies have cleared. The sun pours down on the brown and grey earth, the fields ravaged by harvest and prickly with stubble. As I am walking my dog at noon, I meet an old Black man standing at a street corner. This is a place where the residential streets run between houses and neat lawns, the four roads extending away in each of the cardinal directions. Although it is entirely level, this street corner somehow gives the impression of being like a crow’s nest, a high place, from which you can survey the world in all directions.
The old Black man is well-dressed. He has steel-rimmed glasses and wears a natty tartan beret. When I greet him, he says: “Sometimes, this town is so eerily silent.” I know what he means. Looking in all directions, there is no traffic and the sidewalks are completely empty. Even the wind isn’t stirring.
“You’re right about that,” I say.
16.
Rudolf Giuliani, always mentioned with the epithet “the President’s personal lawyer,” calls a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Giuliani hunches over a podium and rants about conspiracies that have deprived the President of victory in the recent election. It’s not worth watching except for ghoulish reasons and the networks quickly cut away from the debacle. So far as I can understand, Giuliani is saying something about the voting machines being wired in such way as to flip votes on command by dark forces in Venezuela, some of this cabal linked to George Soros (a Jewish conspirator associated with Elders of Zion) and Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who has been dead now for seven years. Of course, the burden of the ninety minute harangue is that the election two weeks ago must be wholly discredited, an outcome that would strip many Republican legislators of seats that they won in the contest. Implicit is the threat, now characteristic of Trump’s twilight political style, that if he doesn’t get what he wants he will tear down the whole system and leave not one brick standing.
Giuliani is perspiring and this causes his black hair dye to run in sinister rivulets that bracket his wild-eyed face. With the sludge running down his jaws and trickling onto his throat, he looks genuinely monstrous. If you want conspiracies, I will give you one: Giuliani isn’t human anymore – he’s some sort of beetle or arachnid that has assumed a form remotely similar to a human being, but subtly unconvincing, uncanny, as it were, a space alien wearing a man’s skin, or an automaton or reanimated corpse. The alarming aspect of his appearance is not mitigated by the bizarre tableaux of attorneys flanking him. A very tall woman looms over him, afflicted by some sort of rigor mortis that makes her move stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster. Her face seems painted onto the front of head. On Giuliani’s other side, a young woman is close to him. She has features like an antique doll, a mask-like visage that is curiously inexpressive. The whole group seems unsettling and grotesque. They are like figures from a painting by James Ensor, puppet-like caricatures of human beings, spidery masked personages, a couple of skulls jawboning one another.
Giuliani’s flop-sweat is something that I have seen before, but I can’t quite identify where I remember observing this phenomenon. Then, I recall a press conference filmed in Iran in which a minister of health, if I recall correctly, was denying that Covid was spreading throughout the Islamic Republic. The man’s face glistened with sweat. He was already infected with the disease that he denied existed. I suppose, after the cameras departed, he went off somewhere to die.
17.
A client whom I have represented for 25 years calls me. He is a successful businessman recently retired from operating a very complex, technically sophisticated manufacturing firm. The firm’s revenues are about 25 million dollars annually and my client’s business employs a staff of engineers and highly skilled technicians. The work that my client’s company performs is exceptionally challenging with a fearsome potential for disaster.
After a few minutes discussion of a business matter, my client asked me about whether I believed in the dangers posed by the coronavirus. This put me on my guard. Political discussions (and everything about the virus has been politicized) can go destructively awry very quickly. I made some noncommittal answer. The businessman, then, told me that he knew no one who had been made seriously ill by the disease. “The death counts are a hoax,” the businessman told me. He said that hospitals had been instructed to identify every death in their wards as due to Covid. For instance, he told me, George Floyd was claimed to have died of Covid but, in fact, perished as a consequence of a massive Fentanyl overdose. (George Floyd died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck for about nine minutes. I’m not aware of any rumors that Floyd died as a result of Covid – I think he was found to be infected with the virus after his death, but not that Covid was the precipitating cause of death.) My client, then, said that doctors were taking the temperature of the dead and reporting fevers. “But my nurse friends tell me that when people die, they are all hot and sweaty and that when you roll them over, their backsides are all soaked.” In other words, dead people warm up in the process of dying. This was news to me. I thought corpses were cold, not hot. After an excited harangue of five minutes, my client told me that the Covid was just another flu and far less dangerous than most strains of that illness.
When I mentioned this conversation to someone who knows this client well, I was told that several nurses who are friends of the man’s wife had been seriously ill and forced to quarantine for two weeks. Presumably, they were the source of the macabre physiological information purveyed to me by this man. Contrary to his assertion, about half of this man’s close friends had family members who had been made seriously ill by the coronavirus.
18.
A few days ago, I saw several large colorful semi-trailers parked around town. These were marked Schwann’s and showed a robust black and white cow standing in a green pasture by a rippling creek. Schwann’s is a ice-cream company that runs a factory a hundred miles away. I hadn’t noticed the refrigeration trailers in town before, although, sometimes, you encounter them on the freeway.
Make-shift morgues masquerading as ice cream freezer-trucks?
19.
On Thursday, November 19, 2020, my daughter, Angelica, was working with a developmentally disabled child at the school where she is employed. She changed the child’s diapers and provided other care of this sort. On Friday, around 5:00 pm, my daughter was informed that the child had tested positive for the Covid virus. Before I came home from work on Friday afternoon, my office manager informed me that my secretary, who had been off-work for a couple day, had also tested positive for the virus. I wonder if this will be one of those narratives, found in a bottle, as it were, in which the writing just trails off: “And, then, I learned that...”
20.
On the sidewalk at night, walking my dog – something moves ahead of me in the darkness. What is this? A deer tentatively venturing onto someone’s front lawn. I stop to watch the deer. Some headlights are approaching on the boulevard. The deer reverses direction and bounds back across the road. And, then, three smaller deer follow, all of them leaping in the air as the headlights pierce the shadows. I suppose that the deer browse along the river that runs in a wooded trench though our town. When they are startled and come up from the river, the animals find themselves navigating residential neighborhoods where there are street lamps and curbs, flaring headlights but also sweet shrubs and flower beds to nibble.
21.
One theme of network and cable news coverage of the virus is that a comprehensive federal response is needed. But, viewed objectively, government intervention in this crisis has been botched from the outset and, certainly, hasn’t improved as the pandemic has progressed. First, government authorities, in league with prestigious medical enterprises, denied that there was any problem at all. For about six weeks, the public was assured that the virus could be confined to a few isolated outbreaks. The Mayo Clinic pronounced: “If you can hear these words, you have nothing to fear from the virus.” Then, with dizzying speed, some states reversed direction and locked everything down. This made some sense in New York City and several other big urban areas where infections rates were climbing – the notion was to “flatten the curve” referring to graphs showing increase in infections. “Flattening the curve,” in turn, was supposed to prevent hospitals from being overrun by infection cases that no one really knew how to treat. The problem with this strategy is that it was adopted in New York City where the media is located resulting in a copycat rush in many states to follow suit, closing down economies that had not yet been penetrated in any significant form by the infection. Minnesota shut down entirely when the rate of infection was relatively low. These shut downs, in turn, wreaked economic havoc and so the government pumped money into the system, issuing checks to those who had lost their jobs due to the infection (and, indeed, to millions of others as well – the pay-outs were subject to large scale fraud and theft.) Then, despite the professional opinions of almost all physicians, economies were prematurely re-opened, initially with success, but, then, with alarming surges of infection in many places. The more the government urged people to wear masks to avoid infecting others, the more the public in some places rejected this message. It’s clear now that the shut-downs in most States and the government funded unemployment checks were grievously mistimed. Throughout most of the country, State and Federal governments reacted much too aggressively too early in the pandemic and, then, found themselves without political will or means to address the deadly surge of the virus that began in November and, now, has settled-in to ravage almost all of the country. When people desperately need subsidies, none are available – the political parties are unable to agree upon a plan to compensate those who are without work and, with the election concluded and Congress in a lame-duck mode, no one is willing to spend any political capital to remedy the economic and medical disaster now unfolding. And, throughout this whole debacle, there have been persistent shortages in medications, respirators, even personal protective equipment necessary to shield doctors and nurses from the infection that they are treating. We make assumptions of competence about government response that are wholly unwarranted. If the landings at Normandy had been handled with a similar level of negligence and folly, the entire invasion fleet would have sunk in the waters of the Channel a dozen miles from Omaha Beach.
Everyone responded to the virus as if it were a short-term problem. But it has not been short-term in its effects at all. This is characteristic of a Democracy led by media with a tendency to over-estimate crises when they are first identified, but, then, to ignore them when they cease to be interesting to most of the public. Everyone now acts as if the calamity of the hour is the most abiding disaster than can possibly occur until something new distracts the public’s attention. Each election, therefore, is an apocalypse, the last election in the history of the Republic, the vote to end all votes. A wild strain of the apocalyptic clouds all action. It’s as if no one can plan for next month let alone three or four years in the future. Future? What future?
22.
There will be no climactic denouement to this chronicle. My daughter, Angelica, is negative for Covid. Our office secretary remains off-duty on quarantine. Other people in the office who worked closely with the sick secretary have been tested, also with no disease detected. So, this account will have to muddle forward for who knows how long.
23.
At the Nature Center, where I have been walking recently, one trail eludes me – this is the Blue Stem Trail, a loop that is accessed by only one spur path and not otherwise linked into the system of trails innervating the 565 acre preserve. It’s my objective to stroll every one of the trails at the Nature Center but this loop isn’t easily reached and stands apart from the rest of the tract of woodlands and prairie meadows.
Finally, a couple days after Thanksgiving, I found my way to the Blue Stem loop. The trail commences at a point one and a half miles from the parking lot. With Jack, I reached the place about 3:30 pm, the sun low in the horizon and showing red mingled with faded blue through the lattice of bare trees along the western horizon. The loop wraps around a big prairie that is completely burned. The charred grassland is a complex pavement of hard black tufts, each about six to eight inches around and elevated above the surrounding ash to the height of my pointer finger. This sort of tufted terrain, studded with bristly black stubble, would be very difficult to navigate – a hiker would have to step from blackened tuft to tuft, always risking turning an ankle at each stride. The burned meadow is very large, about two football fields wide and probably a half-mile long, a black wound in the trees and fields. The edges of the meadow are lined with graceful white birch trees that shimmer in the twilight. On the north side of the meadow, there’s an enigmatic cottage, entirely white with a grey tar-shingled roof and a utility pole poking up adjacent to its side-wall. There are no windows opening into the building’s white walls and the structure stands apart with no trace of a path or driveway leading to it. Although the trail feels very remote, in fact, it is probably closer to other manmade structures and inhabited places than other parts of the Nature Center. The graceful fringe of white-stemmed birch trees flows elegantly into the backyard of a great manor house. This is a place at the end of a private road where an old man who had something to do with editing and publishing Reader’s Digest once lived. It was never clear to me what this man was doing in Austin – he looked like an elderly hippie with a great fluffy beard and long straggly hair and was, obviously, incredibly wealthy. He’s dead and gone now and I don’t know who inhabits his elaborate mansion, visible in its rear elevation from the Blue Stem trail. Through another skein of trees, I can see the groomed fairways and tees of the golf course. Where the meadow opens to the East, some black cattle are grazing in a distant pasture and there are farm buildings, steel sheds at the edge of distant shelter belts and, nervously peering over the horizon, are the whirligigs of big wind turbines spinning on the Dexter ridge. In the gloaming, the red lights atop those tall towers flicker on and off like Christmas tree lights.
We circumnavigate the burned meadow and, then, return to the oak savanna where an iron bridge like cast-off agricultural equipment crosses over the black oozy bed of the creek or one of its tributaries. Just as we leave the loop path, a man and woman hustling through the gloom appear at the head of the trail and set off toward the charred field. It’s too late for them to be attempting this loop, almost a mile in length and located a long way from the parking lot. It will be dark before they get back to safety. The trails are broad but confusing and it would be frightening to be in these woods alone after nightfall. We hurry along the hedge rows and through the edges of the forest toward the parking lot. In the shelter-belt to the West, the sun has set and a red glow similar to what can be seen in some of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings (particularly the sky in “The Great Enclosure) illumines the stark trunks and boughs and branches of the shelter belt along the road.
As it happens, there’s no need to fear for the wanderers after dark at the Nature Center. The moon is full and comes up out of the shrubbery brighter than a street lamp, the lunar surface all gouged with bluish seas and mountains. This kind of moon makes the winter night brighter than the wan winter day.
24.
The dire prediction looming over this Thanksgiving: Happy Thanksgiving, mourning by Christmas time – that is to say, people gather for Thanksgiving, infect one another, and, by Christmas, some of them are dead.
Notwithstanding this declaration, millions travel over the four day Thanksgiving weekend.
25.
There are many infections.
At the Nature Center, I circle a pond, wrapped in small trees disfigured by being drowned half the year. At the center of the pool, there are several small islands, also comprised of little trees ravaged by being half-underwater for most of the year, jagged spiky clumps of dead wood poking up out of the dull sheen of ice that has formed where the pond is deepest. In the shallow water, where the turf dips down to the pond, the wind ruffles unfrozen parts of the small lagoon so that its surface shimmers with scales of light. Overhead, clouds chase clouds across a windy sky.
At the far end of the ponds in their shadow of dark crooked wood, a trail not on the map leads through a stand of squat, black evergreens to a place where there is a plastic table and several big boards covered with maps of the county under plastic. An orange four-foot long styro-oam cooler latched shut sits under the table and there is a heavy metal tripod, as tall as a man, dug into the gravel drive with a hook hanging down from its center. Two fifty-five gallon drums, tightly sealed, flank the table and there is a small storage dumpster, also orange and the length of a car, sealed tightly with a tarp held down by heavy rubber bungee cords. A serrated hacksaw with tufts of fur on its blade rests on the cooler under the table. A sign reads CWD Sampling Center. CWD refers to Chronic Wasting Disease, a brain disease akin to “Mad Cow” disease that afflicts deer. I have no idea what kind of activities take place here. A gravel road connects the site to the distant horizon.
Many plagues and many infections.
26.
Everyone in my family, Julie and Angelica, have tested negative for Covid so far. Everyone remains on edge. Every painful twitch, every cough, every moment of inexplicable chill or unwarranted flushing warmth feels like a harbinger of doom.
One of my partners is now, at home, quarantining with the virus. His son, with girlfriend, drove home from College and there was a family Thanksgiving and predictably enough, infected everyone in the family.
In Minnesota, people are dying at a rate of 75 a day, half of them old folks in nursing homes. The vaccine will be available for a tiny percentage of health care workers, perhaps, next week – that is, in the middle of December 2020. The vaccine serum must be stored at minus 100 degrees and requires two doses to be effective. It feels like the vaccine will arrive about one month too late for most people.
Professional football games are now being canceled. You know that the situation is dire when this sort of thing occurs.
27.
At the George Floyd memorial in south Minneapolis, counter-protesters have ripped up and, even, burned some of the improvised tributes located next to the big mural. Art conservators from the local museum have been recruited to the Pillsbury Center, a few blocks from the site where Floyd was murdered and where the mural was painted. Apparently, the conservators are working to restore the artifacts damaged by the demonstrators. This seems a bizarre misunderstanding of the makeshift nature of these memorials – these are spontaneous artifacts and their slow, but sure, destruction by the elements is part of their charm and meaning. I understand that outrage may arise from the way that these tributes were savaged. But, it seems misguided to recruit people trained to restore Lakota ceremonial garments or Baroque paintings – for instance, the Poussin “The Death of Germanicus” at the Art Institute – to conserve and restore crepe-paper flowers and placards written in Sharpy placed in windrows against the uptown mural.
28.
Most people, I think, consider themselves as apolitical – formerly, they limited their partisan activities to collegiate or professional sports. But Trump, whose modus operandi, is to stir up division in all possible ways has insinuated political meanings into all aspects of life. This is like pouring grit into an intricate system of clockwork gears and springs. Too much friction and the mechanism grinds itself to destruction. At a grassroots level, political agitation is engineered to make people care about things that would otherwise be remote to them – cultural nuances arising in big cities are far from the country concerns, foreign wars, esoteric aspects of tax policy, the sorts of things that ordinarily interest only what were once called “policy wonks.” Trump’s innovation is to make people care passionately about policies and institutions that don’t affect them in any real way. He injects apocalyptic rage and hatred into controversies about which most people shouldn’t care at all. In this way, as in many other aspects of his presidency, Trump reveals himself to be esthetically, and fundamentally, a Man of the Left. It was liberals who used to declare that the personal is political; Marxists who excavated the culture for traces of economic influence and systems of power – previously, Leftists, like Brecht, proclaimed the tyranny of the political over the personal. Trump’s great innovation is to apply epistemological notions (truth is relative and may be deconstructed) and Leftist ideology (there’s no such thing as the personal) to right-wing politics.
Here’s an example of how this works. My immediate readers will understand this instinctively without needing any explanation. But I am writing, of course, for a posterity that will be baffled by the events of this last several years.
A couple weeks ago, Bureau of Land Management representatives announced that they had discovered a strange aluminum monolith in a slot canyon somewhere in the Utah wilderness. The monument was about 12 feet tall, a triangle of reflective metal standing in a sandy draw with one of its edges pointing in the direction of a deep fissure in the red rock cliffs. Viewed from certain angles, the thing looked very much like the monolith that figures in Kubrick’s 2001. BLM said that the object was in an impossibly remote location and that it would be dangerous to release information as to its coordinates – sightseers would get lost in the labyrinth of narrow canyons and have to be rescued from the inhospitable desert. In its press release, the BLM said that its employees had discovered the monolith purely by accident while taking census by helicopter of big horn sheep in the habitat reserved for them somewhere in the maze of the Canyonlands. The BLM press release, further, noted that it is illegal to install art works (if that’s what it was) on public lands and that it didn’t matter “what planet you were from” – the rule applied to all entities. BLM implied that the monolith had some intrinsic value and that no one intended to remove it from its remote desert location.
More than a little disinformation, as it happens, was contained in the BLM declaration. First, the monolith wasn’t as remote as advertised. In fact, it was somewhere near Moab, and, reportedly, only 1200 feet away from a popular four-wheel drive trail. When the government said that it intended to keep the location of the monument secret, this merely inspired explorers to discover the monolith’s location and, then, publish it geographical coordinates on the internet. Predicably, dozens and, then, hundreds flocked to the site. The picturesque red rock coves and spires were soon disfigured by garbage and toilet paper fluttering over the fins of scarlet stone and long queues of jeeps were parked along the four-wheel drive lane near the canyon where the monolith stood. (Reporters noted that motorists who had misjudged the arduous road were being towed back to Moab, a rich source of profit for the local tow-truck operators.)
About ten days after the monolith was discovered, a group of young men filmed themselves tearing the structure down. They proclaimed to the camera that the object was garbage and that detritus of this sort had no business disfiguring the pristine wilderness. The video showed them knocking the monolith over and, then, removing all traces of the structure from the landscape. This act was obviously politically motivated, a kind of discourse by vandalism similar to the destruction of the tributes at the George Flynn memorial – the concept was that nature should be kept inviolate and that the hoard of sightseers now tramping about the slot-canyon country were unwelcome here. The monolith, it seems, had managed to inspire the rage of a group of Leftist environmentalists, fanatics for the purity of the wild, and, indeed, far more radical and intolerant than the BLM authorities entrusted with managing the area’s resources.
Later, additional monoliths appeared in other parts of the world. One of them showed up on a mountainside in a remote National Park in Bulgaria. Another monolith was erected under cover of darkness near Atascadero, California. This monument appeared on top of a mountain and was identical, as far as I can determine, with the Utah object. In this case, the monolith inspired the wrath of Right Wing thugs. A group of young men video-taped their destruction of the monolith. In the video, the kids are said to make foul-mouthed references to Qanon conspiracies and chant Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” Swilling energy drinks, they yank the monolith down, curse it, and, then, erect a cross – America, they maintain, in the context of anti-Semitic slurs is a Christian country.
So something presumably intended as apolitical, aluminum monoliths mysteriously appearing in the boondocks. took on a distinct political cast. The artifact was repellent to Leftist eco-warriors because it represented human intervention into an otherwise pristine natural environment (query: how pristine if there is a well-used four-wheel drive route the length of four football fields from the object?) The same exact monument in California inspired hatred by Right Wing White Supremacists who announced themselves as Christian Trump supporters. Remarkably, what seems to have been intended as prank and reference to a famous movie now over 50 years old, engendered partisan political rage in the radical fringes on the both the Right and Left. The only thing these passionate partisans could agree upon was that the monolith had to be destroyed.
29.
The virus atrophies old reflexes. It’s hard to imagine going to a movie, particularly now that the weather has turned cold and icy. I can’t imagine attending an opera or concert, going to a bar, attending a sporting event. Where do you park for such things? How do you order in a restaurant without making a fool of yourself? What is the discourse required when meeting strangers? What is the etiquette? Why leave the house when you can have food delivered? Why go to the theater if you have a functional Tv set?
30.
The vaccine is here.
The Cable news have become IN – that is, the Injection Network. On all stations, the camera shows people in masks being injected in the arm by other people in masks, some of them with clear plastic visors. Eyes visible above the black or pale blue masks don’t flinch. (Who knows what is happening to the rest of the face?) In the first ten minutes of one hour of CNN coverage, no less than 15 people are shown, stoically posing for the camera as they are injected. Perhaps, 50 million people will be injected with vaccine by the end of the month.
December 15, 2020
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