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.

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 Eighty Seven

The morning begins with sunshine, but as the day goes on smoke descends, growing heavier. I can smell it on the air, though only a hint here and there. The sun glimmers somewhere behind all that smog, an ember, distant and almost abstract, no longer a star. Driving down roads everything is in shadows that don’t change, though it feels that they must either deepen or dissolve. Yet they remain as the day goes on, never relinquishing their hold.

As with so many things this year the fires and their smoke have overstayed their welcome, casting a pall upon our lives. It is almost too easy a metaphor to apply to everything that is happening.

The grippe reborn has a way of increasing our tendency toward solipsism. It is not just that following the quarantine protocols forces us inward, drawing us away from the normal day to day interactions with strangers we might otherwise have, though that is certainly a piece of it. The dread lord’s powers are universal, touching everyone, everywhere, but the effects are very much local and personal. What is strange is that every piece of news from elsewhere is taken as proof of the success of our approach or as a clear demonstration of our utter failure to act properly.

We are intimately aware of our contexts, but oblivious of others and how they may or may not apply. Yet we have no qualms with extrapolating from any story or study or rumour and applying it to what is happening here without any sense of what is comparable between the two situations. It is a fundamental demonstration that we do not care about these other people and places, except insofar as they support our argument, whatever it may be. Let the grippe touch them, let it stay far from our own doors.

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 Eighty One

We awaken to a hazy morning, smoke from distant southern fires reaching us again. The past weeks have been filled with images of smoke-filled Pacific skies in a land of sun. The smoke casts everything in an unreal, alien light, one I am very familiar with after our summers of forest fires. It gives the days an apocalyptic feel, that goes well with these apocalyptic times.

Of course many people declare that it is too simple to say that these fires are the result of our climate apocalypse. The drought that ravaged those Pacific regions these last years would have happened regardless of human activity, though our actions undoubtedly worsened it. And our fire management practices have exacerbated conditions in forests, trying to stop all fires and leaving a tinderbox that can only ignite an inferno, instead of allowing regular fires to burn in a way that can be better contained.

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 Sixty One

Last evening, as my love and I prepared supper, the wind shifted, after what had been a bright and sunny day, and the sky was clouded with smoke. The stench of it was soon everywhere and we had to rush to close the windows. As we ate dinner we watched the clouds of smoke grow heavier and heavier, blanketing the sky with a foul miasma. Yet by the time we went to the bed the wind had shifted again and the sky was clear, the stars visible above.

The fires that produced this smoke were from two thousand kilometres away in the great empire where a raging inferno consumes the redwood forests along the Pacific coast. It is a vivid reminder, not that we need one during these strange days, that what happens far away can have tremendous impact on our lives. And what we do now will have echoes through the years, as Newton told us long ago.