Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Twelve

Summer in the Lost Quarter typically means rodeos. Cowboys and rough stock move from town to town  with crowds gathering to watch the performances. Bucking horses and bulls. Wrestling steers and roping calves. Racing horses around barrels. Some towns will have wild cow milking. Others will have wild horse races. Children strap hockey helmets on their heads and clamber on the backs of sheep who race across arenas in a frenzy to loose themselves from this encumbrance.

This year will be different with the dread lord’s return to these parts. All the rodeos have been cancelled, the crowds forbidden from gathering and the participants unable to travel to the events. It will be a sad thing for many of the towns have few events that bring people together in celebration. Many of the events have origins going back a century or more. Wars and floods and other calamities have not forced their cancellation, but the grippe reborn has.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Eleven

Last evening as I sat reading before retiring to bed, we received a tornado warning and were told to seek immediate shelter. The window opposite the couch I was seated upon faces east, toward the heart of the Lost Quarter, and there I could see the terrible storm building. There were dark clouds with flashes of lightning roiling in their hearts. But above our home there was only bright skies, the clouds painted red and pink in the setting sun.

Storms rarely move west in these parts, usually pushed east by the winds coming down from the mountains, and this storm was no different. It went east and south, mostly sticking to the open prairies. It was strange to watch the turmoil of the clouds from such a distance. The air around us was calm, hardly a breeze stirring, while several kilometres away the swirling of the clouds suggested a gale was passing through. Though I could see lightning dancing across the darkening sky, no sound of thunder reached us. Even the movement of the clouds wasn’t really visible, I just intuited it from their shapes which went from sharp and defined to inchoate.

It has been a season of thunderstorms in these parts this past month, which is unusual. Normally we would only just be starting into the storms as the summer heat reaches its zenith. That heat has yet to truly arrive – the warmest it has been is the low to mid twenties – yet every few days seem to bring another tremendous storm. Vast thunderheads fill the sky, the wind shrieks, rain and hail fall in cascades, while thunder rumbles and lightning flashes. They pass quickly, leaving pools of water and glistening leaves in the sunshine in their wake.

The tornado never materialized from the clouds as the storm passed through the plains and out of existence.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Nine

A week spent with my love wandering mountain towns and visiting glorious, crystalline lakes, glacier-fed amidst towering peaks that seem to extend beyond the sky. The wind blowing through the stands of pine trees sounds like rain falling, a haunting melody that I can still hear playing behind everything now that we have returned to our noisy settlement.

It was restorative to be away, even if reminders of the grippe reborn were still everywhere. There were far fewer people in the mountains than there would be typically at this time of year with the borders of the dominions still closed to outsiders, but so many were wearing masks as they wandered into stores. Streets were closed off to cars allowing restaurants and bars to set up on the streets. Local tour guides spoke of new protocols and current events, with no further explanation required.

We visited a lake that twisted its way along the base of several mountains, forming a basin at their centre, like two hands cupped together with fingers outstretched above. Wandering its rocky shore we dipped our toes in, threw stones at the water, and sat upon a great boulder listening to the waves lap at the shore, while staring up at the snow covered peaks. For a time the greater world receded, the grippe and all the rest, and there was only the lake and the two of us sitting in watchful silence.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Two

We are heading to the mountains west of the Lost Quarter in the coming days. Normally they would be swollen with people from all over the world, the streets of the villages echoing with sound of dozens of languages. Now the mountain trails and camping spots are empty by and large, even though the quarantine restrictions have been raised and most everything is open. It seems a fine time to visit, a fine time to spend some time away from the Quarter and our home and all the usual toil and worry that has been a part of our days.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred One

Over the century mark and no end in sight. The days persist and so do I.

We are into summer truly, I now have tomatoes nearly as tall as I. The chard and spinach threaten to overtake everything.

Persistence does seem the order of the day. Waiting as well. For the defences we hope can turn aside the grippe reborn. For the jobs we hope will be there when they are finally erected. For the end of quarantine laws and the freedom to travel and go about our days free of protocols.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred

Satchel Paige came to the Lost Quarter, it is true, barnstorming through those vast, arid plains. In those days baseball was the only game of summer and every little town along every rail line hosted tournaments for any team to attend. All the greats, banished from the major leagues, came north for exhibitions of their talent.

I met a man, an old rancher with a protruding gut, who still spoke with awe of the time he witnessed Satchel Paige pitch, of meeting and speaking with the great man himself.

I often wonder what those barnstormers thought of their journeys to the Quarter, of the games they played and the feats they performed in front of hundreds when they should have been before tens of thousands. The trips were arduous, even in those days of rail lines, the ways not always the same. As now, there was never any guarantee that a way back home would be open to them.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Ninety Nine

It has been cloudy most of the day, a strange and vast bank of clouds hovering above and seemingly immovable. There is not even a whisper of a breeze, so rare for the Lost Quarter. The air is humid as it never is in this dry land, though no rain seems imminent.

It all seems ominous, a portent of some approaching doom. I am left restless, chasing my thoughts to nowhere. A feeling I am left with so many days now, especially with my love returned to her tower to work. She was the anchor of my days and now I find myself adrift, flitting from idea to idea and settling upon none of them.

The feeling has come upon me again, with a kind of weight that seems to press against me. The terrible knowledge that our battle with the dread lord shall be a long while yet, its resolution unclear, and there is little I can do to change that. It ebbs and flows, most days never touching my thoughts, until finally the totality of it strikes me anew.

The world we knew is gone, never to come back; the world to come is still out of focus, unrealized, waiting to be shaped. Which of us shall get to do the shaping?

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Ninety Eight

There is a grove of trees in the Lost Quarter that was planted by one of the first of Those Who Came, not long after Those Who Went Away were sent into their sorrowful exile. He sought to break the terrible winds that are as much a part of the Quarter as its grassy plains and rolling hills. At one time the trees must have been in rows, but they have long since grown beyond those confines, leaving winding looping paths through the undergrowth.

In my youth I would often wander those secluded trails. It was like entering another world, closed off from the surrounding great plains, the view of the horizon absent as it was nowhere else in the Quarter. Every year some new trees had sprouted, and older ones had fallen over dead, so that the paths were never quite as you remembered them.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Ninety Seven

There is a crossroads not far from my home where much of the city comes and goes, or so it seems, on their way to other places. They do not linger, hurrying on to their destinations for there is little to see. I pass it most days on my way to here or there, hardly giving it a glance or a second thought.

There are two apple trees nearby, in full blossom, where one can find some shade. Dogs will often come to sniff about and mark their territory here, while their owners look on impatiently. This morning as I walked on the opposite side of the crossroads two dogs met there, snapping and snarling, held back and dragged away by their owners.

Later as I returned a dishevelled man with a shopping cart stood under the trees yelling at everyone who passed, incoherent with rage and desperation. He accused us all of committing nefarious crimes.

Though filled with anger his screams were almost mournful, as though he did not expect anyone to actually listen to what he said. And in truth no one did. A few people stepped out of their homes to see what the commotion was and I paused on my way through the crossroads, but none of us gave him more than a glance. Once we saw who it was, a man of the streets, addled by addiction and without hope, we all simply walked on and went about our days.

Eventually a police officer came and talked with the man awhile, listening to his yelling, and talking in quiet tones, urging him to move along. When I passed through the crossroads later, there was no one beneath the apple trees, an absence that felt strangely ominous.