August 13, 2020
Day 162
I’m in a bad movie. Intermission is over. On with the show.
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Miracles Abound
18 Jun
June 18, 2020
Day 1,649
There is a cat in town who spends her days in Pinky’s, a bargain store where almost everything is on sale for two dollars, or more, or less, depending. Her name is unknown. Cats don’t tell us their names. They will tell you that you may serve them and that they enjoy your company so long as no demands are placed on them and the food keeps coming. They do this by returning, purring, rubbing up against whatever is handy in your vicinity and presenting themselves to be scratched. The people who work at Pinky’s call her Alley Cat and she has been a fixture there for eight years, patrolling the aisles or holding court on the counter between the cash registers. When the weekend comes one of the ladies takes her home and on Monday morning back they come together. Alley Cat is set down outside the store and roams at will the local environs until she decides it is time for her to be inside. She will then plant herself at the closed doors and wait patiently for someone to go in or out, at which time she will walk in, jump up on the counter or disappear in the back. She is friendly and likes to be stroked or have her head rubbed. She lives her life receiving love and giving love.
Smart cat. Lucky people.
There is a dog who spends his days at an auto repair shop on the edge of the industrial area just outside of Whitianga. Going into town you round a sweeping turn on the highway and look way up the road on the right. If he’s there, he’ll be standing close to the verge, holding a sturdy black radiator hose in his mouth, watching oncoming traffic for a special vehicle only he knows. When he sees it he lunges or prances and shakes the hose and runs back and forth with obvious and contagious joy. If he’s not by the road and it’s summer he can sometimes be seen in the shade of a two-sided sign arranged like an A-frame under a nearby tree. The grass is un-mown there, long and soft and cool. Sometimes he can be seen supervising an important job taking place inside the garage but most of the time he on duty by the road. Leaving town he’s on the left, a hundred metres past the turn to the refuse centre. Lately when I see him I’ve taken to lightly tapping my horn as we approach and to my delight, Horace (our name for him, not his), tail wagging happily, grabs the hose off the ground at his feet and jumps and shakes it vigorously. I swear you can see him smiling as we pass.
He’s made a friend, said hello, invited us to play and lives in a state of sheer joy that he passes on to all who see him.
Two creatures, both conscious and aware, happy with their place in the world, full of joy, spreading love. Never saying a word.
Miracles abound.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
16 Jun
June 16th, 2020
Day 1 (Again)
Despite the sometimes acerbic tone some of the entries in this diary have taken, I am, at heart, not a cynic. The fact of the matter is that for my entire life I have pitched my tent in the unruly, but happy camp of the romantics. Hafiz lives one tent over and Basho somewhere across the way. I consider myself in good company and would not change a thing. That being said, at this moment in time, writing in bed with Goldberg’s Variations playing in the background and the last minutes of this unique and irreplaceable day slipping into history, I am gobsmacked and the cynic in me is laughing and laughing.
Earlier in the day I’d made a run down the 309 and into town for supplies for the pathway that is my current project. I was loading thirty bricks and three bags of bedding sand into the back of my car at PlaceMakers when Bopper, a genial yardman there, came up and asked if I’d heard the news. Bopper always has some tidbit of gossip or chatter on the jungle telegraph to relate so I humoured him and asked what was up? He proceeded to tell me that we had two active cases of Covid-19 on the books and that it happened because somebody was let out of quarantine to attend a funeral in Wellington. Bopper being Bopper, I took everything he had to say with a grain of salt, finished my supply run by strapping two 4.8 metre retaining wall boards on the roof rack, paid my bill and raced home to crack my computer, log into the Ministry of Health to see if he was right.
Here’s what the numbers say…
So here we go again… 2 New cases. Zero Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active and probable cases and factoring in 22 death is… Sorry, but you’re going to have to do the math yourselves. I can’t wrap my head around it.
After 24 days of no active cases in the entire country, we let two women fly in from the United Kingdom via Australia, placed them in a ‘managed isolation’ facility for 14 days but then let them out to drive 642 kilometres in a private vehicle to Wellington to ‘comfort’ a relative after a death in the family. ‘Compassionate exemption’ was the term used to describe it on the government press release. An entire country with five million souls free of Covid-19 and totally out of lockdown and we decide that the ‘needs’ of two people outweigh the possible consequences of spreading a highly contagious virus among an unsuspecting population. A six hour journey and they had no contact with anybody? Right. Who the hell made the decision to let them do that? It beggars belief.
The early press release was couched in wordy bureaucratese to make it sound as though everything was under control, but things were clearly were not. Ever hear the phrase that an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications? Well that press release was the government version of somebody saying, ‘it sounded like a good idea at the time’. Several hours into the news cycle and already the powers that be are stating that, “No more exemptions will be allowed”. You think? It’s tantamount to them announcing that, “Several dozen horses have escaped from our stable but don’t worry, we’ve closed the doors now”.
The contact tracers that have been sitting idle for 24 days are hot on the trail of everyone who was on the flight, all of the people in two international airports in two countries, the staff and other people in the managed isolation facility, every person at the funeral in Wellington and anyone that anyone might have come in contact with these two caring but selfish knuckleheads on their journey by car from Auckland to Wellington. Details are few and far between this early in the story and I cannot wait for the finer points to be revealed in the coming days. There will doubtless be more tap dancing from the powers that be as this unfolds. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has got to be saying, “They did what?!!” to anyone on her staff brave enough to go near her while all over the country a feeling of dread is beginning to replace the cautious optimism we had during the past three weeks.
It is said by the wise that there is very little difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning. That’s kind of where we are now. The process of tracking and tracing and isolating (this time without any compassion, I hope) will ramp up to full speed. Sweden will say, “We told you so”, the threat of lockdown will loom again and everyone will be watching the numbers once more and furtively checking their supply of toilet paper.
As for me, I am officially over it. If it all goes south and I end up taking a long dirt nap would someone please mine these pages and cobble together the story of my end of days? I’ve chosen the title and put together the cover below to save you some work. Thanks.
Cheers, D.
202020
20 May
May 20, 2020
Day 60
Up early on a beautiful, clear and cold morning to return to the doctor. He said to put the lime in the coconut and call him in the morning. Other stops included the main op-shop for the first time in two months. Found some treasures there, including a light fixture for above the washer and dryer for $5. Amazing value to be found if you know what you’re looking for. Found a GoPro knockoff for $5 in a smaller op-shop around the corner, waterproof case and all. Going to hook it up to a motion sensor and see what sort of critter is digging up the leaves along the edge of the walkway to the workshop shipping container. While Valerie shopped for groceries I used some of the disinfectant spray I’ve been using around town and some paper towels to wash the inside of the windshield of the car. The sun is so low in the northern sky now that no matter what time of the day we’re driving there is constant glare at certain spots on the 309 Road. It was better going home, but I missed some spots so there’s still work to do. Ammonia based window cleaner will be next.
I designed the base for our faux tile floor for the shower last night and began to cut the pieces of timber I’ll need to complete that job. The afternoon passed in a blaze of glory and evening found us firing up the burner to heat water for our showers before a dinner of steamed chicken, mushrooms and potatoes. Watched the movie A Brief Encounter on YouTube and reflected on how fortunate we were to have found each other and to have been in a position to do what the protagonists in that story could not.
Tucked Valerie into bed and then checked the day’s numbers. They are encouraging, tantalising, even mesmerising and they are shown below.
Zero New cases. 5 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases is 96.2%. Four Zeroes on the board. 35 Active cases.
There is a chance.
There is hope.
There is going to be a respite while a vaccine is developed.
The story of our finding this place to build our home is one of miracle after quiet miracle, each of which reaffirmed our belief that the Universe supports those who make a leap of faith.
We could not agree more.
Stay safe and let your thoughts manifest the change you want to see.
Goodnight.
Dancing in the Moonlight
13 May
May 13, 2020
Day 53
Rain on and off again today. Winter is officially here and the drought is broken for sure and at last. What is also official is that for the first time in five years the quail have not left to winter down in the blackberry cane thicket near the community vegetable garden. It seems about thirty in three groups of fat and happy and thoroughly friendly birds have decided that the pickings are easy and the company nice here at Lot #18. Where once we could back off the feeding for a few months and rest and relax, we now have a new paradigm of our own making. It’s a happy challenge and the quail are worth it. Seeing them standing patiently on the steps outside our bedroom window, looking in at us, calling ‘Good morning! What’s up? We’re here!’ is so beautiful it melts our hearts. We walk outside and they come down the steps and skitter and dash into the grove and out again and set to with a will when we scatter their seed on the pavers. Life is good, life is good, life is good!
I am finally healed. My lungs are clear as they ever get and that’s a good feeling. Valerie’s back is slowly mending and her stomach, which has suffered terribly from the cocktail of medicines she had to take, is slowly recovering. Yogurt is now on the menu and things are looking up. We spent most of the morning in bed listening to wind buffeting the trees and rain drumming on the metal roof. Inside we are snug and warm and though I never got to replace the roof this summer, it will probably last until next year.
After a late lunch of sausage sandwiches and soup I went out to the workshop and made headway on projects. I finished fabricating a new and better mount for my homemade laser sight and flashlight attachment for my crossbow. Tested it until it was spot on, then made seven new bolts using epoxy, nails and knitting needles. I built a magnetic calendar from some small tile squares, magnets and glue. Found the parts for the lamp repair and got them ready for tomorrow. Organised the shelves and the spare parts and hardware bins. Lots of tiny steps, each taken at the right moment, contributing to the greater whole, all while the river of time rolls majestically past.
Wrapped up at dusk and found that one of our neighbours dropped off a mother’s day package for Valerie that her daughter had couriered to the estate gate. They also left some groceries for us from a trip they’d made into town. There is a buzz in the estate, in town and even countrywide, that you can feel deep down. We are moving to Level 2, stage one, tomorrow. The country is going to open up internally, climb back onto the saddle and ride. Whether we can figure out a way for external visitors to join us in our rodeo is another story, but for now, we’re going to see whether we can stay on top of the numbers and emerge into the sunshine of a new day.
Checking the figures before dinner I see that we have gone another day without a new case and there are still five Zeroes on the board.
Zero New cases. 4 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 93.6%.
For 53 days we’ve felt like this…
Now we feel like this…
Lots to do yet. Many questions to answer, but for now, for a day or two while we shift down another level, we’re going to have to be excused for smiling just a little.
Thank you all. Stay safe and good luck.
The Things Not Meant for Me
11 May
May 11, 2020
Day 51
3 New cases. 15 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 92.5%.
And this, since it represents progress toward wherever it is we’re going to be in a few weeks.
New Zealand is moving in three step phases to Alert Level 2. Most businesses will be able to reopen with new guidelines for social distancing in force and certain provisos re maximum capacity of establishments in place. I’ve got some timber to buy and there are some time sensitive documents that I have to get into the bureaucratic pipeline so I hope the government will be open for personal business. Those are the only things I’ll be out doing over the next few weeks other than, as you have no doubt figured out, watching the numbers.
We appear to have dodged the bullet, but as that fellow from Sweden warned, we still have to maintain our quarantine of incoming visitors and figure out how to cure/treat/prevent/mitigate Covid-19 for the long run. So there’s still people out there pulling the trigger and bullets will be flying and all it takes is a few bad breaks and happy people sharing a beer (Bars are the last in line for reopening for just this reason) to reverse the gains we’ve made thus far. But it’s another step in the right direction and that is good.
I started writing this diary because things were, across the board, on the cusp of going seriously awry. I had done what I could to prepare in a material sense and as lockdown loomed I realised I was like a passenger on a hijacked plane, cell phone in hand and little time between the slowly unravelling present and the implacable unknown future. Only I had more time than those poor souls who can only text a few lines to their loved ones before their plane disintegrates around them. It was a gift I did not want to squander. I had time to gather my thoughts and put pen to paper with that long arm from the grave to say…
That I apologise to all I have hurt in my long life. It was not my intention. I was young and ignorant, untried and unsure. I made decisions that experience has taught me could have turned out better had I gone another way. Much later, when I was older, Clavell’s description of prisoners of war in Changi fit me well. Of them, he wrote, ‘These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.’ In the eyes of the woman I loved my crime, too, was vast. Like all the people who had ever hurt her, I was a man. My mistake was thinking that she would know that I was different. In the end her constant fear became a self fulfilling prophecy. I am sad at how things came to pass, but I was not those other men and to be tarred for so long with the same brush became unbearable.
There is the brother I never knew because I never asked about his life. It is a shame and a sadness that is hard to bear. My brother deserved more and I am sorry I never gave it to him. There was a sister once who wanted to be right more than anything else and got exactly what she wished for. Nothing to apologise for there, but had I known then what I know now, I’d have altered my course a few degrees to help her find a better way.
To my co-authors whose long and heartfelt labors of love saw only the slush pile of various agents offices, I apologise. The stories were good and true and though they float now on Oblivion’s Sea with countless others, there was worth in the writing. I know this to be true and I offer this knowledge in exchange for the time we spent filling them with life. That they were stillborn, silenced before their time, is unfortunate. I apologise not a second for striving, but wish that you had been spared the long ordeal of being tied to my falling star.
To the keeper of the light across the channel, I would have loved to love you better. I am a slow learner and thank you for the patient way you showed me.
Every villain is a hero in their own mind. I never meant to hurt anyone. I’m sorry if I did.
The End (I Hate to say I Told you So…)
10 May
May 10, 2020
Day 50
2 New cases. 3 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is still 91%. This number is going to climb slowly from here on out, but climb it shall.
(A picture of the moon out of my window)
In other news today I found the video report below…
…and hope it is not inappropriate to quote Winston Churchill.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
In the meantime Covid-19 burnout continues worldwide. People are tired of there being such an inconvenient thing as a global pandemic and hearing about it endlessly. Because I am sensitive to everyone’s feelings I am going to stop going on about the contagion. We as humans have seen much worse and survived to invent his one. The worldwide economy is reverberating discordantly, the skies are empty of chem-trails and the seas are getting cleaner by the day. Anyone who was reading has nodded off or found better ways to amuse themselves under whatever version of ‘lockdown’ they’re under, so it’s time to move on. If I don’t make it, I’ll send up a flare. If I do make it, you know where to find me, studying Kiwi and Mandarin and watching closely as one era ends and another begins.
Not having Covid-19 to kick around any longer I have decided to branch out into clairvoyance and share some predictions which will come true very shortly. It is my hope that they may help you to plan your soon to be changing future.
- In response to the collective impotence and lack of vision evinced by the rest of the world and as a follow on of its already stated policy towards Taiwan, China is going to take over the renegade island militarily. It will crush all major resistance within three months of the start of hostilities (which will not be called hostilities) and will commence re-educating the survivors with extreme prejudice. There will be ham-handed attempts by America to intervene through a series of useless U.N. resolutions, vague bluster and empty threats, while China, under the policy of We Own Everything except Covid-19, will shut down all maritime traffic through the South China Sea save for its own commercial and military vessels.
- A full court diplomatic and economic press will tie the hands of every country on the planet, giving China time to present the takeover as a fait accompli. As the nation of Taiwan will no longer exist (just ask China) the United States will reason, quite logically and conveniently, that it no longer has to adhere to any treaty obligations it had with the former non-nation. They will hoist a Mission Accomplished banner and leave the area before the paint on the new signs at Taipei’s airport has a chance to dry. What once was called Taiwan-sheng or Taiwan province will cease to exist on paper even as it is subsumed by the invaders who will name themselves something innocuous but patriotic. Something snappy like The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere Forces of Reunification. What? It’s been used before? No matter. Move along please. Nothing to see here.
- China’s Renminbi, or Yuan, will become a global currency and will challenge the U.S. Dollar for supremacy. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-it-own-3306355
- China will land men and women on the moon, set up a permanently manned base there and claim ownership of the Earth’s satellite. https://www.space.com/13331-china-space-race-moon-ownership-bigelow-ispcs.html
- https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-proposes-establishing-moon-based-special-economic-zone/
- China will take over Australia and New Zealand through aggressive commercial practices and strategic purchases of key industries and land blocks.
- Before item number six happens I will have shuffled off this mortal coil.
- Before I do that I predict that I will say I told you so.
Thinking Too Much?
7 May
May 7, 2020
Day 47
People are back to barreling up and down the dodgy road into town even though the road maintenance crew hasn’t devoted any time to grading or spreading fresh gravel for over six weeks. It is slick when wet and dicey when dry and its back to business as usual now. Same in the grocery stores. I’m still the only person wearing a mask and social distancing lingers mostly in people’s memory. You can see them thinking about it when they get a look at me as I pause to wait for them to move or for a space to present itself so that I can go around them. The meanderthals (yes, still spelled with an ‘m’) are back in force, parking their carts on the opposite side of an aisle and then blocking the other half while they compare best values or wonder why they’re there in the first place. Only the checkers with their blue gloves and disinfectant wipes at the ready still hold the line against a complete return to the good old bad old days.
Latest buzz is that New Zealand will be moving to Level 2 some time in the near future. The news is full of stories about what that will look like for travel, the hospitality business, shops, salons, bars and bistros, but no one is saying when the move will take place. Gatherings of less than a hundred people will be okay but no more than that. Sports events will be held but without spectators. Schools will reopen but with some sort of social distancing enforced or implied, whichever turns out to be more practicable. There is still talk of opening the Tasman border so that folks from Oz can visit here and vice versa.
New Zealand has done well so far and more power to us, but I hope the powers that be are keeping a weather eye on the appearance of unexplained community transmission. There’s going to be a fine line between too much and too little control and I hope we err on the side of conservatism.
Elsewhere in the world there seems to be a deadly fatigue setting in as countries, cities and communities try to come to grips with the fact that the cure (inefficient, poorly maintained and apparently unenforceable lockdown policies) is worse than the disease, literally. In those areas where first steps were not taken quickly enough and clusters of hot spots took hold and grew unchecked, most people seem resigned to taking their chances one way or another. They need to work and shutting down the whole country for the sake of the few young who will die, the larger number of obese people and the even greater number of ‘older’ people destined to lose their lives doesn’t seem to them, at this juncture, to have been worth it. They think all the hospitals know what’s in the wind if they find themselves in a hot zone and no one seems to be thinking about walking in the shoes of the health workers at the front lines of these battles. People are bored and broke, sometimes clueless, often conscientious, tired of being under the gun of Covid-19 and under the thumb of governments telling them what they can and cannot do. Never mind that what they’re being told to do is, on average, fairly sane policy.
\
In trying to find some clarity re lockdowns versus no lockdowns I found the following Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdIOvzOfQPc on the subject. I am not buying into any of the conclusions made in it nor am I saying you should watch it. I only put it in here to show you the producers take on the two sides of this still flipping coin. I did read all 223 comments and found them to be most interesting. We are still in the early days.
Speaking of days, here are this one’s numbers…
1 New case. 16 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active case is 89%. Two Zeroes on the board.
So what is the answer? Is it lockdown hard and make it work, as New Zealand appears to be on track for?
Or is it what some might say is the more sensible, real world, solidly pragmatic Swedish approach?
Which one you believe is more effective will probably depend greatly on your age and/or whether you have other traits that increase your susceptibility to the Covid-19 virus. I’ve been living the New Zealand plan and I like my odds, now and in the future. I hope for the very best for Sweden, but I have to wonder at the cost. As for the American plan(s), well, I’d rather not say.
(Carol, Russell? You guys okay?)
Way Out
6 May
May 6, 2020
Day 46
Can you see it? The tiny patch of light green tucked into the hillside in the middle left? The picture was taken by a dear friend servicing one of the trap lines that crisscross the estate. For just a moment the trail opens up near the summit of Totokoroa, the hill we own a quarter of, and she can look down on us as our day, and hers, unfolds. This is where we live, in a tiny bubble of love floating in a sea of green on an isolated peninsula of an island nation far out to sea in the southern Pacific Ocean.
(We’re in the middle of the swathe of deep green near the centre of the peninsula jutting north [to the right] at the bottom right hand corner of this picture of New Zealand’s North Island.)
From a small antenna on our roof we receive radio waves from the rural broadband system and when I hit send on this post, a signal will be broadcast in packets of discrete ones and zeroes and my thoughts and these pictures will enter the ether and digital eternity. I know that’s an oxymoron of sorts, but it will do for now to describe the way we communicate with the outside world. The phone is a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) one that mimics all of the features of a normal land line except that the internet needs to be up and the power on in order for it to work. Cell phone signal is intermittent so we don’t have one and don’t need it or miss it. Mail is delivered to a box just inside the big iron gates at the entrance to the estate a couple of kilometres to the left of the left hand border of the first picture.
The camera is facing east, down toward Whitianga and the Pacific and the endless blue miles of Oblivion’s Sea. Of the compound there is not much visible. If you enlarge the photo the pixels will get larger but the image will become confused. The white structure is the former kitchen storage container. The main house sits behind the lone tree rising from the centre of the green clearing of our front yard. Nothing else can be seen and in time, with the help of some black paint, even the slab side of the shipping container will be camouflaged and disappear into the hillside. We are one with the forest and becoming more so with each passing day. It’s a good place to ride out a storm.
Today’s weather report says the following…
2 New cases. 14 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to actual cases is 88%. Zero Zeroes today and another death, bringing this nation’s total to 21. Such a small number compared to our population and to the number of deaths from Covid-19 in the rest of the world, but it matters. It mattered to the person who died, it matters still to their family and ultimately, it matters to the family of man.
The View from Deep Time
A small postscript, if you will, to put things in a wider perspective. It is easy, and entirely understandable and human to be concerned about Covid-19 and its impact on our daily lives but whenever I see the diagram below I am comforted to know that the world’s going to be fine and that I’ve got time to get it right farther on down the line.
I’ll look for you there.
Stay safe and remember…
Breathing Easy (or Not)
5 May
May 5, 2020
Day 45
For the record, I am ill. Under the weather. Sick. Feeling poorly. Less than ideal.
I have a recurring headache, a tiny off kilter trembling centered just behind my cheekbones and numbness in my hands and fingertips, but the real kicker is a persistent migrating congestion in my lungs that despite my best intention and mumblings about a river in Egypt, will not go away. Wheezing with the slightest exertion, every now and then hawking up mucous and spitting it out on my work bench to examine it for green streaks or blood or aliens, then wiping it up with a paper towel and continuing with my work, I’ve been ever mindful that Valerie has been unwell for far longer and that I cannot afford to be sick. Yet sick I am. So I telephoned my doctor and told asked her to look at my chart for May 7, 2019 and write me a prescription for whatever I had back then. She did and I’ve been taking prednisone and I’ll keep you informed.
Lungs, lungs, lungs. People tend to take them for granted until there’s a glitch. If the malfunction is serious then they don’t worry long, but that’s not often a problem as the lungs usually don’t just pack it in suddenly. That’s more the heart’s department. Lungs are the long suffering organ of the human body. They absorb a lifetime of a smoker’s choice of combustion byproducts and hang on until the bitter end, fighting all the way to do their simple job of getting oxygen into the bloodstream. Or they are filled slowly, year after year, with coal dust inhaled by a miner trying his best to put food on his family’s plates and after a few decades of this there are no unspoiled alveoli to speak of in the tortured passages of his airways and he dies of Black Lung. Asbestos fibres are another killer that starts out in the lungs, and true to form, that unsung organ soldiers on for many years before giving up the ghost and taking its owners with it.
Tuberculosis, cancer, emphysema, the names of lung diseases are legion. My particular disease is asthma. I daresay there are a great deal more obscure lung diseases that start with the letter ‘A’ that come before asthma but, nevertheless, I’m right there in the ‘A’s’, so I have that going for me. Considering what’s happening in the world right now, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about vaccines, and in my research I’ve come across several accounts of people who developed asthma right after they were vaccinated as children. Vaccinated for what, you ask? Tuberculosis is the main one. My grandfather had tuberculosis and lived, only to die of emphysema much later from chain smoking Marlboros. In looking into what was in vaccines back then I ran across a recurring chemical named Thimerosal.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html
Back in the day (mid 1950’s), almost fifty percent of Thimerosal was composed of mercury, which was used as a preservative. The mercury was considered an inactive ingredient, but, by weight and dosage, it’s use pushed children way above the limits for mercury poisoning then and seems to have been in use until the turn of the century.
What does a three year old boy in the 50’s know of any of that? Precious little. I was simply the child in our house who had asthma and that was that. Luck of the draw. I dealt with it as well as I could and never complained. It was was it was. Looking back though, and talking with childhood development specialists I realise that the disease had to have taken its toll on my energy and stamina throughout my youth and thus affected my ability to absorb information during school and to process it afterwards during the homework portion of life. I was always behind and while I am not blaming the disease on my lack of Nobel Prizes on the mantelpiece, it did affect the course my life took.
I remember being responsible for the exiling of all furred pets from our house, for being excused from the work of sweeping out the basement during monthly cleanups, for being the sick one, of having to be cared for just a little more than others in the family. When I wanted to join the cross country team in high school I ended up being the manager instead. Pop Warner football league for two years in my early teens was a struggle, first because I was a skinny, lightweight kid and second because I had no wind.
When my number was called during the 1972 draft (last year of the draft for Viet Nam and I won the lottery with number 68) it never occurred to me to use my asthma to dodge that responsibility. Instead of being hoovered into the army I chose to enlist in the navy and then had to lie through my teeth re my medical history to make it to the physical at the induction centre. There I held my breath, no pun intended, because though I had no special love for, or desire to be in the navy, it was something I’d set my mind to and I did not want to fail at it. As it turned out, I had a pulse and the rest was history. (Though I did have to repeat the lie when I volunteered for submarines and then again to be selected for naval nuclear power school.) Fire fighting training was a challenge, as I did not want to have an asthma attack when they placed us in the training building on hose crew teams and then set the other half of the building on fire. Same with the tear gas training room. Always wondering if I’d suddenly lock up and pass out and be kicked out. But I never did and never was. My lungs ceased to be an issue for for the next 38 years unless you count the times I stayed too long in the same room with a dog or in a house where a dog or cat lived. I learned about albuterol inhalers and exercise induced respiratory distress and I was smart about my exposure to allergens and I coped.
Even living on the Big Island of Hawaii with its constant VOG did not hold me back. I worked on a wind farms and in a restaurant for a while then joined Atlantis Submarines in Kona, Hawaii. After my career as a tourist submarine pilot (had to be SCUBA certified then for maintenance requirements – another test for my lung capacity) I worked construction (lots of treated wood sawdust and few masks). In 2010 I was able to pass a rigorous spirometry treadmill test in order to be in the running for a job at the summit of Mauna Kea at the Keck Observatory. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got the job after the first candidate they chose couldn’t handle the altitude. A curious thing about working at the summit is that without exception, everyone behaves as if they are short of oxygen up there – because they are. Once in the door and assigned to shift work at night I found I was able to handle the low oxygen levels fine and did so for the next 6 years.
Then a leap of faith into another life and love led me to my last physical examination, the one required to be granted a residence visa for New Zealand. This one was not too hard and I passed with flying colours. Found the property we live on now and began building from nothing and over the last four years noticed something strange. For some reason, whether because I was living in the midst of the rot and genesis of a podocarp forest, or because I was (say it ain’t so) getting old or perhaps my life of breathing asbestos from navy ships or VOG or sawdust or extended periods of extreme high altitude were catching up to me, I don’t know, but for whatever reason, take your pick, my asthma had returned.
The building of a house alone, using a shovel to slowly excavate and sculpt and shift the land, clearing under-story trees and scrub, all these and more are candidates for being the possible or cumulative cause for my lungs diminishing in capacity. Personally, I think it’s age and a short use by date. I’d gotten a few respiratory infections that I couldn’t shrug off as quickly as I’d hoped, but nothing serious. I kept on working (the house wasn’t going to build itself) and was doing just that up until two months ago (actually, I’m still building, but I’m using scavenged or saved materials) when along came the Covid-19 Contagion. Hey, presto! – and suddenly I’m thinking about my my lungs more than usual, which, for me, is saying something.
The fact that I’ve got a lung infection right now (which is being seen to and worked on, thanks to Valerie’s persistence and love) was the catalyst for this post, but the contagion is the active ingredient. I am, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, one of the herd destined to be culled. One of Darwin’s least fit, so to speak. I am that person the young are talking about when they blithely say, “He was going to die sooner or later”. (Come say that to my face and see who meets St. Peter first.) But the young are young, they want to be out of lockdown and back to doing whatever the smartest people on the planet do, so I understand. I wish I could fast forward a few decades to that time when the realisation that they were not quite as smart as they thought sinks in. The expression on their faces would be priceless and of course there’d be the spectacle of them being marginalised or dismissed by a younger and equally clueless generation. Different people learning the same lesson over and over again. Life on earth.
But it’s not all bad. There are some bright spots out there for the discerning observer to see. First of these are today’s numbers, fresh off the press from the New Zealand Ministry of Health…
Minus 1 New cases. (How that happens I know not, but I’ll take it as read.) 26 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 87%. And an exciting first today – 3 Zeroes in the Zeroes department. Notable among these is the first day since the count began that there was no change in the number of confirmed cases. ZERO growth. That’s yuge, to paraphrase a politician of note. Really yuge. No change in the number of people in the hospital and Zero deaths again over the last twenty-four hours. Bada-bing, bada-bam, bada-boom! I love it. It’s a big day for New Zealand and big day for me because I have a vested interest in continuing the long saga of my lungs, specifically the part where they keep working.
On that note I saw a video posted by an emergency room doctor who said that though the current paradigm has doctors preparing for and treating patients suffering from the Covid-19 virus as pneumonia and/or ARD cases, they should in fact be looking deeper because, he said, it appears to him that everyone he’s treated and who has died appeared to be suffering from high altitude sickness. Which I had Zero trouble with during my time at the observatory. An obscure connection? Perhaps. But it’s good news to me and it gives me hope, because, unlike the person in the photo below, who gives me no hope, I know what it is like to really have difficulty breathing.
You can’t make this stuff up.
(On second thought my friend Russell Gayer could make it up. https://www.amazon.com/One-Idiot-Short-Village-Characters-ebook/dp/B079848Q3K
On third thought, he probably did, and paid that lady to do it. Kentucky’s not too far from Arkansas.
Give me hope for the human race, Russell. Tell me you put her up to it.
ironwoodwind 