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 Six Hundred Thirty One

Winter has arrived at last in these parts bringing snow and cold with it. As I sit here I can see the snow steadily drifting down from my window. The sky is heavy with clouds hanging just above the city. This weekend I went out to buy a gift for friends going through some troubled times and for the first time this season had to put on a winter jacket and all the associated winter regalia. The air was bracing in my lungs, crisp and cutting.

It is something of a relief to see that familiar white. Not only is it more fitting for the season – the gleam of snow under the moonlight and streetlights goes well with these long nights – it is much needed. After a dry and hot summer, the fall was warm and just as dry. The rivers in this city are as low as I can remember them being. As much as I have enjoyed our temperate autumn, we will pay a price for it next spring if winter doesn’t bring substantial snow. These last six months, beginning with the unbelievable heat of June, the smoke, fires and drought of the summer, and the unseasonably warm fall and the flooding and storms to the west all seem like a grave pronouncement that climate change will be impacting us for the rest of our lives. We can no longer pretend that is a problem whose effects will be felt later.

What times we live in. For the first half of my life it seemed that the world was steadily getting better, the great struggles of the century reaching a peaceful conclusion. The Berlin wall fell, the cold war ended, apartheid as well. There were trouble spots and problems one could see looming, but they all felt manageable. Then the towers in New York fell and madness followed with it. One cannot help but look at the last twenty years and see a steady decline of our institutions and the fabric of our societies.

And now we are faced with existential crises – of climate and the Grippe Reborn. We have tried to meet these challenges and have succeeded in some cases and failed in others. What I am left with is the sense that none of this will be easy. It will be hard work and it will require much of all of us and our institutions. There is no guarantee we will be equal to the task.

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 Five Hundred Thirty Three

Harvest is in full swing in the Quarter. With the sweltering June and July and no rain to be seen, the crops are ready early, what little there is. Driving through the countryside one can see the swathed fields and busy combines threshing the grain. I remember those long days. A hot lunch would be brought to the field, eaten on lawn chairs set up in the stubble, so that there was no need to drive back and forth to the house. Dinner would be sandwiches and cucumber and tomatoes from the garden stuffed into an ice cream pail, picked up by whoever was driving the truck hauling the grain to the bins. It would be eaten while working and the work would go until it was dark and dew started forming on the swathes.

As a child those days always felt momentous. Everyone on the farm was focused on the task at hand and every moment was given to it. I remember the agony of equipment breakdowns that stalled the harvest in good weather. Having to race into town to get this part or that, hoping it didn’t have to be ordered. Or the despair when it rained, stalling out the harvest while waiting for the crops to dry so that they could be cut and combined. Every day of delay was another where there might be frost at night and the quality of what was being harvested would be ruined.

My love and I have had our own harvest this past week as we journeyed to a farmers market where the Hutterite brethren sell their wares. We bought peaches and nectarines from across the mountains, and beans, corn, cauliflower and more from the local brethren, all of which we then spent days cutting and blanching and freezing. Laying in supplies for winter. In my own garden the tomatoes are beginning to turn, though it is a small crop this year despite all the heat. The smoke seems to have affected the germination. We have plenty of herbs though and chard and kale. Soon enough I will be drying the herbs and picking all the tomatoes before the frost sets in, leaving them to ripen indoors.

Autumn remains one of my favourite times of year. Many dislike it because they see it only as harbinger of winter, a sign that warm days at an end. But for me it will always be a time where the fruits of our labours are realized.

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 Five Hundred Twenty Six

A week of rain showers and cool. The mornings crisp and autumnal, announcing the coming season. It feels abrupt after the endless weeks of heat. I wandered by the river this morning and the water was higher after the rains than it has been since June. The sky is still blue, the smoke still absent for the time being, only thin clouds sketched across the horizon.

An odd time, not quite fall, but not feeling like summer any longer. We have been stranded in some nether region for much of the summer after the exultation of spring when the inoculations against the dread lord arrived and his powers began to decline. The smoke came first and then he returned, diminished to be sure, but still present, still stalking those who have declined the doses. The number of those affected and in hospital has steadily risen, while those taking their doses has dwindled. For a moment in the spring it truly felt like we would thwart the dread lord’s desires, but now it is unclear what awaits us in the fall and the winter. Will we be overwhelmed again or will the doses tell the tale? Everyone awaits the answer with dread.

I myself am confident in the inoculations, both for myself and my love and us all. They will carry the day in the end. But with so many still without, both here and around the world, it will be some time before that is the case. So we are left in this strange state where we will not face the quarantine measures of the last year, but we are still not free of the grippe reborn. How does one live in that world? We learned to live in the quarantine zone, exhausting as that was, and though we wanted to return to the world of before, that was never possible. Instead we shall have to learn to find our way in this one.

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 Five Hundred Nineteen

After the drought, the deluge. It has been a month and half since we had any rain, but last evening the skies finally erupted. It is still raining now as I write these words, a steady, soaking downpour. The smoke from the fires across the mountains, which had been as bad as it has been this summer these last days, has been beaten from the sky by the rain. The air smells glorious. Damp earth and thankful vegetation. The sense of relief, after so much dust, smoke and despair, is palpable.

I can recall the moment when the two towers fell. It felt then like the end of an era and start of a new, uncertain one. The ending of things is often ugly, bloody, and the end of the era I came of age in is no different. It was announced some time ago that western forces were leaving Afghanistan, but now that the day is actually here chaos has been unleashed. As always, those who said they were building the state, its infrastructure and armies, were simply lining their pockets, leaving a hollow shell that quickly crumbled under the advance of the Taliban. Twenty years and what was accomplished both there and in Iraq, those twin responses to the twin towers? Nothing but blood and ruin.

The last twenty years have seen the decline of the American project. It’s institutions are sclerotic, it’s focus inward, its democracy teetering. In Afghanistan, those who we claimed to thwarting have been restored. In Iraq and Syria it is hard to say what will come next, only that the peoples of those places will have little say in the matter. Tragedy upon tragedy. Twenty years worth and no end in sight.

With our inglorious exit from Afghanistan (and I say our because the Dominions have been involved in that project from the beginning and many have died for it) we seem to be embarking upon a new era again. One of American decline and retrenchment. One of dislocation from climate change, that will undoubtedly spill over into wars and migrations that will destabilize the current order of things. To say nothing of what another year, and more, of the grippe reborn may result in. All of us will be struggling and uncertain as we try to go about our living in the face of all these crises that seem to be compounding on each other.

It is difficult to watch the scenes of desperate, despairing people crowded into the Kabul airport, climbing onto planes, clinging to them even as they take off. They know this may be their only chance to get out before the lives they had are gone. Some will manage to get out surely, but so many others won’t. They will be left to whatever fate awaits them, however grim. We will read stories about it in a few years time, of how terrible all that followed was for them, and we will think again of how awful it is and wonder what we could have done differently. And we will hope that someday we are not the ones crowding an airport desperate for any way out.

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 Five Hundred Ten

It rained yesterday, the first time since the deluge that brought an end to the terrible heat wave in June. There has been day after day of hot weather since then, but we have yet to see another thunderstorm.The smoke, from the fires started by the heat wave, has persisted, stopping any thunderheads from forming as they typically would. It has even delayed my garden. Tomatoes have been late flowering and other plants have been slow to grow.

The rain was a piddling amount, barely enough to get the ground wet. But it was enough to clear the skies of smoke. For the first time in a month the sky is visible. Even on those days when the smoke wasn’t noticeable in the air there was still a haze above, a blanket over the sky. Now I can see clouds, actual clouds, for the first time in weeks, and behind them the glorious blue sky. I had forgotten how much joy there is in watching clouds drift by, their changing shapes, of seeing birds circle and dive and dart, of being able to see for miles and miles. It is a weight off my heart in a way I had not entirely expected. A normal day in these increasingly abnormal times.

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 Four Hundred Ninety Eight

The smoke persists, day and night, ebbing and flowing in the sky above. Hour by hour it changes. As I write this the sky is hazy and grey, the sun a foreign red, but the air feels sweet and cool on the ground. A few days ago the sky was much the same but the air below was much heavier with particles that made it hard to breath. Other days you can see the smoke lingering in the air, wisps of it floating amongst the buildings of the city, casting everything in a shadowed, apocalyptic light. A perfect accompaniment for these apocalyptic times.

The fires burn over the mountains to the west, and to the north and east as well. We are surrounded and the days are hot, with no rain to come, so there is nothing to quell the flames. Many of those fires will still be burning until the snow comes. Some may even manage to smoulder through the winter and start up again in the spring if there isn’t enough snow. And so, we will be living in a smoke filled world for the rest of the summer at least. Even a day like today, when the smell of smoke isn’t evident and the air is fresh, the haze in the sky persists. I cannot remember the last day where we had a truly blue sky of the sort the Quarter always offers. Those endless, breathtaking vistas have been stolen from us and we are left with a smaller world to inhabit.

This is one of the hottest summers I can remember, just day after day of heat. One benefit of the constant haze is that it prevents it from getting too warm, so instead of low to mid thirties, we’ve simply had high twenties. With no rain and so much heat the crops have burnt up everywhere. There is hardly enough grown to bother cutting for feed for the cattle. And everywhere the pastures are being exhausted, while the hay fields won’t produce enough to feed the cattle over the winter. It all spells disaster. My parents, although they claim to be retired, still run cattle in pastures in the Quarter. They will have to sell them early because there isn’t enough feed to keep them for the rest of the summer and fall, let alone through the winter.

With the dry, hot weather, swarms of grasshoppers have arrived to eat what little of the crops there is. I remember those hordes of grasshoppers from the dry years of my youth. You would walk through a field, each step sending up dozens of the creatures, the hum of their wings portending a kind of doom. Pestilence, drought, locusts and fire. We can only hope we manage to avoid famine.

Movies and books about pandemics and other disasters give the sense of a sudden shift, the ground giving way and then everything collapsing with society broken into a thousand pieces that can never be put together. That feels foolish now, impossible to believe any longer. Instead we have these slow moving apocalypses, where we can see things going wrong but the change is slow enough that we can find a way to get used to it. The disaster ebbs and flows. Some days the air is sweet, even if the sky is hazy, others the smoke swallows everything.

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 Four Hundred Ninety One

While the grippe reborn lingers, beaten back by the inoculations but still possessing its deadly powers and waiting only for an opening to return in force, we are faced with new crises. Or the return of old, forgotten ones in greater force. Whatever hope we had of a quiet summer without worry seems to have vanished, as we are reminded every day of all that is wrong with our current world. It is hard not to see it as a broken place.

The heat of several weeks ago sparked innumerable fires across the mountains to the west and smoke now blankets the western dominions. The air coats my mouth and my lungs every time I step outside. I get headaches and my eyes itch. There is no end in sight to the fires, with hot dry weather forecast for weeks to come. The smoke will remain, a constant reminder of the changing climate and its consequences. This summer seems scripted to remind us of all that awaits us. Ruined crops, choking skies and terrible heat that forces us indoors. It is hard not to feel some urgency to do something, yet as soon as the smoke drifts away we will forget about this and return to our more petty squabbles.

It is already happening with the other crisis that has confronted us in these last weeks. A crisis of forgetting, of not seeing, of looking away. Those Who Went Away have always been here, despite our attempts to banish them, to make their culture and very being vanish. They have remained, but it was for us as though they went away, for we chose not see them. We stole their children, took them to schools whose goal was to remake them into us. We succeeded only in unmaking them.

This is the legacy of the Dominions, broken people who we have barely acknowledged, because we knew who was responsible for that breaking and it was too terrible to contemplate. In the last weeks the graves of the children who perished at those schools from neglect have been discovered. Discovered in the same sense that Europeans discovered the Americas. It has always been known there were graves in these place, but the full extent has never been clear. Now we are beginning to get a sense of the scope of that tragedy and the numbers are unimaginable. Two thousand already and hundreds of sites still left to be investigated.

There was an outpouring of grief and consternation when the news of the first graves came out. That continued with the second school and the third. A fourth discovery was just made and the response has been much more muted, hardly a ripple of concern. As always, we have begun to look away, to forget and to not see, because it is too difficult to contemplate what has been done and what needs to be done now to help set things right, though nothing could ever do that. Every nation is built upon a lie, a story we tell ourselves until we believe it to be true. Ours is no different, though we like to pretend that isn’t so.

It is all too easy to despair in the face of these intractable problems, to give up. Yet that is the worst thing we can do. We must face these things and try to do some good, however futile it may seem. That is the only way forward. Where do you begin? With what you can do to make a difference, however small.