I Remember Everything*

Reflections on the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic

We are traveling home from a nine week teaching tour to rural villages in the Southeast Islands of Alaska when we start hearing the word Coronavirus echoing in all the public spaces around us.

We’ve just lugged 53 instruments around from place to place by floatplane, mail boat, ferry, and jets, bringing music education, our puppy, and all the love in our hearts to children who live in these tucked away places.

There are very few people on our route with whom we feel safe expressing our true political colors. This is the Trump era, after all, and these are, by and large, very conservative places. And we are working. So, mostly, I am inwardly worried and scratching my head, wondering what to believe. We’ve heard about stranded cruise ships full of dead and dying people, and cases of infections beginning to surface in the US. Headlines are all wrought with fear, and just about everything in the world is politicized. Palpable tension surrounds every conversation about this news sensation called COVID-19. Suddenly a novel, rampant virus is no longer an indisputable, scientific fact, but something we get to have an opinion about. One must decide upon a stance to take. A side must be chosen. And we hear people are losing their cool over toilet paper.

Several folks are wearing masks on the planes we take between Sitka and Anchorage, and then from Anchorage and Fairbanks on March 10, 2020, as we return home from this epic journey. This, of course, is just days before everyone will go into lockdown.

We arrive to our little cabin the woods hungry to see our people, and go directly to Ivory Jack’s, a bar in Goldstream Valley, to attend the weekly Old Time jam. There is a musician across the circle from us visiting from Juneau. He will call me days later to say that he is Juneau’s first confirmed COVID case, and that, according to the CDC, he was contagious at the time of our interaction.

This could explain why I’ve been short of breath, and needing my inhaler so much. I never usually do, unless I have a respiratory infection, and then my childhood asthma will rear it’s ugly head. I call my doctor to report my dry cough and other symptoms, and to tell her I’ve had close contact with someone with a confirmed infection. She says I need to be tested, and gives me the address of a pop-up testing site.

We load into the Subaru and drive to town through a steady flurry of snow, to arrive at an old bank. After being vacant for some time, it has been newly resurrected as a COVID-19 test site. We slowly enter the parking lot, creeping over four or five inches of unplowed snow, making our way through the maze of construction cones. We are the only car here, but it’s clear they have prepared for an onslaught. It takes a few moments to turn this way and that though the labyrinth of cones, and when we go astray, a nurse wearing short socks and Dansko’s runs out of the building in her scrubs and mask, waving her arms as she picks her way through the snow to redirect us.

Finally, we reach the covered area of the drive through. We pull up, roll down the window, and speak to the masked nurses in the bank teller window through the microphone. They send some paperwork out to us through the pneumatic tube, then point to where they want us to pull into a cordoned off area in the parking garage.

Here, we sit in our car in what can only be described as a set for a low-budget dystopian movie. Tyvec paper has been hung to section off an area where we sit waiting for a doctor to appear. When he does, he is masked and wearing goggles, PLUS a clear, plastic shield over his face, gloves, surgical scrubs and a cap. We watch as a nurse helps him into a paper robe. He approaches the car, and motions for me to crack the window. “Nope, nope, not that much!” he says, stepping back until I bring it back up a little. He explains that he will be inserting a swab into my nose, and counting down from ten as he swirls it around each nostril. I am not to take my mask down until he says it’s time.

He reaches in through the crack in the window and jams the swab so far up my nose I feel it tickling my brain. He shouts over the roar of the HVAC system in this makeshift parking area, counting backwards as he spins the little brush in circles. TEN. NINE. EIGHT….as I crane my neck towards the opening, willing myself not to pull back or sneeze. Then, snapping the long handle of the swab off into the vial and closing it, he takes several quick strides back towards the building, where the nurse helps him out of his protective gear, shoving it all into a hazmat bag.

Now she stands about ten feet from the cracked window of our car, shouting that, to be precautious, until we learn our test results (which should take around 14 days), my husband should stay home from his essential job. “You will need to sleep in different rooms, and use separate bathrooms,” the nurse yells. We stare, blinking at her, explaining that we have a one room cabin and an outhouse. She understands. It’s Fairbanks, after all, and we are not unusual in this. “Just do the best you can,” she says.

The test comes back negative, but I remain short of breath for a few weeks. Perhaps my lungs are just reacting to the whole world suddenly being slathered in hand sanitizer and bleach. It’s hard to say.

Other than the one jam we attended at Ivory Jack’s, we haven’t seen our friends in the two and a half months we’ve been touring. One scheduled gig after another gets cancelled, and when “social distance” orders are officially put in place, our spirits collapse a little. We might need physical distance in order to stay safe right now, yes. But, what about our mental health? Isolation seems like bad medicine.

Musicians need people to play music with. We’d only just moved to Fairbanks from Anchorage about 8 months earlier, expressly because of our love for the community there. The people of Fairbanks are WHY people move to Fairbanks. It’s not for the weather, I can tell you that.

The month of March is still full-on winter in Interior Alaska. Berms at the sides of the roads still reach eight feet high, Snow lies deep in everyone’s yards, and on the trails. The light does begin rapidly returning in the spring, and temperatures are somewhat warmer. Mainly the thermometer hangs out between -20 and 0 degrees Fahrenheit, as opposed to -50 and -20, in the colder depths of the season. We hear that people in other towns are having social gatherings outdoors: cocktail hours on their porches amongst daffodils and such, but that option is limited by the climate in Fairbanks.

We live in a neighborhood called Dog Patch, on an old dog mushing trail in the birch forest. This area is populated with fox and moose and lynx, and lovely neighbors. My days begin to take on a much simpler rhythm: wake and cook. Walk the dogs and cook. Play guitar and cook. Fill herb orders like crazy.

And not so simply, I spend a lot of time listening to hold music. “Thank you for calling the State of Alaska Unemployment Office. You are the… 57th… caller.” As gigging musicians and music instructors, an important stream of revenue has been abruptly cut off. Alaska is such a small world that when a technician finally picks up, she happens to be a former midwifery client of mine in Anchorage, who recognizes my name while confirming my identity.

My husband is a bush pilot, and considered an essential worker. He provides transportation, mostly in a Cessna Caravan, to people who live in rural communities inaccessible except by small plane. He is more or less a taxi driver in the sky. He brings Public Health nurses out to villages, and delivers folks to their doctor appointments. Sometimes he flies wildlife biologists, and sometimes social workers from the Office of Children’s Services, traveling to remove kids from their homes. These are hard days. Occasionally, he even transports corpses when an Alaska Native person dies outside of their home village, and according to custom, must be returned to their natal ground.

Everyone in Alaska is very worried about remote villages with no health care infrastructure. It’s especially crucial that we maintain strict social distance, in order to protect the health of so many vulnerable people my husband works around.

I’m a practicing herbalist, and suddenly my phone is ringing off the hook. Everyone wants immune system support. They want to stock up their home medicine cabinets. They want to know about anti-viral herbs. They’re worried about their child-mother-brother-grandma…who has developed a cough. I’ve never been this busy with my herbal work.

Panic buying is real for them, for us, and for everyone I know, even though no one really wants to admit that’s what they’re doing. My dog is most important to me, so I stock up on many bags of food for her. Ten. Yes, ten. Alaska is at the end of the supply line, you know, and I simply cannot live without my dog, who cannot live without food. At least, that’s my logic when I keep pushing the quantity arrow UP another click, and then another, in my cart on Amazon Prime.

I send my children bottles of herbal tinctures, and hope they are being safe. My (then) 23 year old son is a person who struggles with having paranoid schizophrenia. When I call him, I learn that explaining the need to be precautious during a deadly, politically polarized global pandemic to a mentally ill person is very complicated, indeed. I scour the internet, searching for grocery stores in the Idaho Springs area of Colorado that will deliver groceries to him.

Luckily, our freezer is still chock full of moose meat and fish and blueberries from the bounty of last harvest season. Now we brave a trip into town with masks, and head to the grocery store to stock up on frozen and canned fruits and veggies, bags of beans and rice, and maybe some more toilet paper. But the store looks like Soviet Russia. Everyone is white knuckling their shopping carts. Normally-friendly Faibanksans are grabbing the last small bags of lima beans off the shelves as quickly as they can. Fear dances in eyes that dart above face masks, measuring out six feet around themselves as they careen toward the check out line. So much non-verbal communication is lost without facial expressions to read. I think of the wide-eyed babies I see, taking in all the masked faces. This is life on Earth now.

In the parking lot, an older man struggles to pull his cart though the sludge of half plowed snow and gravel. It is heavy with water bottles, and I step towards him, reaching for his cart to help pull it back on course. He shrinks back from my extended arm, and I realize that what was once a kindness is now a potential death threat. I mumble an apology into my mask and return to my car.

John Prine dies, and something breaks inside me. I cry like a baby when I hear the news, and sing every song of his that I know. This has gotten downright personal, now.

Some friends in the Pacific Northwest create Quarantine Happy Hour on Facebook, and we tune in regularly with our larger music community. It is a touchstone, and a reminder of why we persevere. We play a set of music for it ourselves, and tears stream down our faces as the little hearts and happy faces pop up from familiar names, watching on the other end.

There are stories of bodies piling up in hospital gift shops, and in refrigerated trucks. We watch videos of Italians singing together through open apartment windows, and people in New York City banging pots and pans in the streets, cheering nurses just getting off shift. Their faces are worn with grief, and deeply grooved from masks worn all night in the ICU.

At home, we live in our jammies. We record videos of ourselves playing songs in our bathrobes, which we float across social media like a game of Marco Polo. Friends: We’re still here. Are you out there somewhere?

We drink too many margaritas and create a flow chart called, “DO YOU REALLY NEED TO PUT YOUR PANTS ON?”

Meanwhile, we are in a housing crisis. Our landlady needs her cabin back, as her son must return from somewhere in Asia unexpectedly.

We drink even more margaritas.

This begins a long process that will entail six moves in two and a half years. When we first arrived in Fairbanks, we were told finding a place in Dog Patch is hard to do, but we were set on living in that neighborhood “Good Luck to you,” everyone said. We find six. We joke that we’re not sure if the neighborhood is holding onto us, or trying to shake us off. By the end, we feel that if we have to move one more box of herbs, or reposition our very full freezers again, we might truly lose our minds.

Every place we find is only temporary, until we convince a man to sell us his house. It is one that was not for sale, but only winked at me with a beam of sunlight glinting off a window in a certain way when I passed by one day. Something about it just told me it was meant to be ours. After 18 months of continuing to ask him to sell, he finally relents, just as the first booster shots are being rolled out.

Meanwhile, when we go out to ski, we encounter neighbors on the trail who stand 30 feet away and won’t pet our dog. And we understand. They say they are washing their mail, and I feel a pang of guilt that I have drawn the line just in front of these precautions. Perhaps I’ve been being irresponsible. Still, I’m losing my grip on what is really necessary. Since they lifted the restrictions, it seems to be every person for themselves. No orders coming from on high means we all get to interpret the risks according to our own sense of reality. Which, apparently, has become ever more subjective, and more politically divided than ever.

Then George Floyd dies. I can’t breathe as I watch people who have written I can’t breathe across their face masks, fighting for the wrongful death of a man who couldn’t breathe. We donate to the ACLU, and to Black Lives Matter. It all seems fruitless. Hopeless. But these protestors swell my heart 10 sizes with their fortitude and conviction, and their sense of social justice. Though I am thousands of miles away, I march the streets with them in spirit.

My son (the one with schizophrenia) loses his housing situation. The longer story is, he calls the cops to protect his sister from his abusive, piece of shit-father, who throws him out because of it. We get him a ticket, and help from afar to push him through TSA with no ID. It takes multiple phone calls all night, and when he arrives in Fairbanks on a Saturday evening at the end of November in the year 2020, he has nothing. No ID, no coat, no winter clothes suitable for Fairbanks at all. Just some slippery Doc Martins, torn up skinny jeans and his precious gold chains (don’t ask). We put out a cry for help, and my son is shocked by all the people who donate items to his cause. He is truly blown away by the generosity, and well outfitted by Sunday night.

An extremely kind friend and neighbor — my one COVID bubble person — agrees to rent me her spare dry cabin. Her daughter has been occupying it, but is currently away, stuck in Tennessee. This is a huge relief, as we need a place my son can stay — somewhere other than the house we are temporarily housesitting. (Because: remember, we are having a housing problem, ourselves.) His all night pacing is going to make us lose what’s left of our minds in this big cabin-style house with no doors.

My life will quickly be consumed by trying to keep my son safe. I educate him in the ways of dry cabin living, drive him to appointments, haul his water, make him meals, and check in four times a day to hopefully prevent him from burning down my friend’s hand-built, very sweet little place, and admit him to the hospital twice in the first month.

I become a social worker over night, but under the most impossible conditions. Hold times are long, and sometimes end with disconnection. All State office buildings are closed to the public. You can’t get a birth certificate/social security card/ State ID without a birth certificate/social security card/ State ID. The weekend he arrives, I am on the computer all of Sunday, and the phone all of Monday. But by the end of business hours on day two of his being in Alaska, I’ve got him moved into his own cabin, and all lined up with food stamps, Medicaid, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, a dentist, furniture, bedding, and clothes. Cross country skis, even!

I die a little from the kindest of our beautiful friends. Then I die a lot from the stress, when the whole arrangement goes to shit within three months. Then I get a puppy.

None of these stories have ended. They never WILL ever end, I don’t suppose. We are not going back. COVID will be with us forever, with who-knows-what coming down the pipeline next. I, myself, have had three confirmed cases so far, and my health is different, poorer — possibly permanently — because of this. We have all lost people that were important to us. The poor have become even more desperately poor. The rich, even more disgustingly rich. Black and Indigenous lives, and the lives of People of Color still Matter, and we still aren’t seeing enough evidence of that.

Most folks, no matter how hard they work, are barely making it. More and more civil rights have become threatened. Authoritarianism is on the rise, world-wide. Too many people have become unhoused. Have become orphans. Have become refugees with no where to go. Wars have broken out, and continue to rage on. Single parents still have no idea what to do about childcare, and can’t afford to take a day off of work. Yet children still get sick — including with COVID infections.

Life is conducted more and more on screens, keeping people ever more isolated in real life, and more falsely connected, digitally, where they are increasingly manipulated by bad actors and through AI (and, gosh! Who knows what all?). The pressure is still to take sides, to stay divided, to worship the one, most important thing that we must hold onto at any cost: INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. A thing that has never really existed in human history until recently.

Good grief, we are all stressed out of our minds, and from what I can tell, many of us are experiencing life in our country as though we are in throes of a great depression. I shared this observation with my very wise Uncle Alfons the other day, asking if he agrees.

“Do you think that’s what this really is, and they’re just scared to name it, because everyone would go apeshit?”

He paused for a moment, then said, “No. They wouldn’t be able to afford ape food.”

*The name of this piece is borrowed from the last song John Prine ever wrote and recorded, just before his death from COVID-19.