THE THREAD | Revisiting the Dispatches
This week marks two years since I began sending The Thread as a weekly newsletter. It began as a way for me to create my own ritual in the midst of so much disruption, and to share my writing with you in the midst of isolation and lockdown. This week also marks 30 months since the first Covid shutdown in March 2020.
As I prepare for my book release in two weeks, I’m revisiting the essays and poems published in the book, reflecting on their origins, and reflecting on the many events, changes, and disruptions that prompted so much of my writing. Today I am sharing an essay that was first published on Killing the Buddha in the early days of Covid. I hope that you, between the bookends of Then and Now, might find something in these sentences that prompts your own remembrance of all that we’ve come through.
DISPATCHES FROM ISOLATION
Abandon your plans, nearly all of them: Abandon your concept of a family trip, your plans for staying in hotels, visiting museums, dining in restaurants, or dropping in on friends along the way. Abandon most of your plans, except for the quiet house in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a promise of isolation that you desired before it was mandated. Hold that rolling skyline at the front of your mind as you load your car with luggage and food and children. Abandon apprehension. Adjust expectations. Kiss your wife passenger-side. Just drive.
Keep your hands at ten and two. Watch the ridge of your knuckles on the wheel, the dry valleys between the knuckles where dry skin flakes off from days of washing them incessantly. Look out beyond your own white knuckles, through the windshield. Look how those Tennessee hills rise slowly eastward and become the knuckles of soft mountains. Drive through those valleys, watch the rivers roll through. Loosen your grip as night falls. Watch the mountains and valleys grow darker.
A virus will transmit, a car will transport, and recently your priest said that the sacraments will transform. And now pandemic has spread quickly around the country and world. Due to the risk of spread, you can no longer take the sacrament of communion.
So, you drive. You drive east toward nightfall, over state borders, through mountain passes, through fog and rain. You take sunflower seeds, a handful at a time, and place them on your own unblessed tongue. Nothing to utter now, only the sound, the crack of each shell between teeth, the chew and swallow of seed, the spit of the spent shells into a cup. This mantra of the mouth, this rumination, this ritual, you learned it from your father during many late night drives to keep him alert, awake, to keep God with him. And also with you.
You recall a news report you read years ago. A herd of elephants lived in a remote region of the desert, and during a few years of drought they were forced to travel greater and greater distances in search of water. Herds that have elders can survive years of drought because the elders hold the memory of droughts past, the memory of maps and paths toward more rivers and seas. But the elders of this particular herd had already died. The memory died with them. Not one of the living remembered the way.
Right now the question on everyone’s mind seems to be, When will this pandemic end? But the more important question seems to be, How will we find our way through it?
It’s late now. A few miles off the highway you find a campsite in a national forest, entirely abandoned except for the ranger still at her post. You pitch the tent at the shore of a quiet lake reflecting a thin cloud cover. Your sons build a fire. You eat hot dogs and s’mores, tell ghost stories, watch the firelight flicker across these young faces who suspect very little of what might happen in the coming days, weeks, months—as if you know much more. You seize this image of their innocent smiles, the crackling sound of their songs and stories, you cling to it, hoping it might inoculate all of you with a resolve that can outlast your worst fears, all that you worry about, whether or not they will come to pass.
You don’t get much sleep. You can’t stop thinking about the miles and months ahead. But in the morning you step out of the tent and find the sun rising, the fog lifting above the lake. You breathe deep, tasting the salt still on your tongue. You wake the children. You pack up the tents and make breakfast. You load the car. You see what is in front of you and summon the courage to love in the face of so much loss. All of these simple gestures, they wage the transformation of everything, and daily. You abandon plans. You drive.
What I’m currently reading: Andre Aciman’s Homo Irrealis, Laura E. Gomez’s Inventing Latinos, Kaitlin B. Curtis’ Native
What I’m currently listening to: All Things 1997