One of the medical experts interviewed on cable news this morning offered this sound advice: “Stay home. You won’t catch the virus there.”
My problem is I can’t stay home. And it’s not because I’m uninformed or don’t believe the experts. I know home is where the safety is, with the caveat that family members show up from time to time. They include a college-age granddaughter who flew home and moved in with us when her school shut down. She’s probably here for the duration of the sheltering-in-place time period.
We try to limit other family contact as much as possible. And keep the grandkids outside when they come over. That make sense.
But safety isn’t the only thing that lives with me at home. Anxiety lives here, too, and depression. And a lack of normalcy, which tends to magnify the previous two.
It’s not normal for me to hang around the house all the time, watching too many cable-news reports on COVID-19, fretting up a storm of emotion and counting the things I’m not getting to do. The normal things.
Like going to 12:10 p.m. daily Mass at St. Isaac Jogues, where the small, spiritual collective is a gift I miss almost as much as the blessing of the Eucharist since masses were suspended. Or like stopping by one or several favorite coffee or bagel shops to sip or munch and commune with pals.
Or heading to the YMCA to wrestle the Nautilus machines and chat with the regulars there. Chatting is part of the workout. A friend once called me “the mayor of the Y” because of my conversational workout style.
Or how about those necessary stops at the downtown library, to check out the new arrivals or featured books and hang out for a while over in periodicals, reading newspapers and magazines.
All normal. All personally enriching and affirming. And all either shut down or deemed off limits during this period of undetermined length when those of us who can and should are directed to shelter in place and be socially distant.
Staying home is good for your personal safety these days. But it’s not good for your emotional well-being. At least, it’s not good for mine. Not every day. Not all day.
So sometimes I have to go out and do my sheltering in other places that are socially distant and, I think, quite safe. But they’re also fun. And normal.
I felt that comforting sense of normalcy when Mary and I and grandchildren Keaghan and Jackson pulled off Highway 79 on Monday and drove up the narrow asphalt lane to the currently closed Bear Butte State Park visitor center, the starting point of the trail leading to the Bear Butte summit.
Now that’s normal. That’s familiar. That’s inspiring. And so was our hike, even though there were some not-so-normal moments along the way. Typically, you might expect to meet five or six or seven people going up and down the Bear Butte trail. Monday, we met 20 or 25.
I suppose they were doing what we were doing, “sheltering” in some other place, looking for some exercise and a sense of the everyday. The normal. The necessary.
I went in search for the same things the next day during a trip that took me first to Jewel Cave National Monument to look for early blooming pasqueflowers. I didn’t find any, but I loved the hike along the Hell Canyon rim, which challenged the legs and filled the lungs and elevated the spirit.
That wasn’t quite enough, however. So, I drove back to Custer, got a salad at a drive-through and headed down to Wind Cave National Park to hike in on the Cold Brook Canyon Trail. The path runs from a little parking spot and sign along Highway 385 down through the canyon to a fence separating park land from U.S. Forest Service property. Somewhere along the way, I hoped to see or at least hear a canyon wren.
I did a couple of things wrong in preparation for that hike. I left my binoculars at home. And I forgot to go online and listen to the song of the canyon wren, to increase the chances that I would know it if I heard it.
Oh, in a more long-term case of forgetting, I still haven’t gotten the testing I know will reveal the extent of my hearing loss, which is most pronounced on high-pitched sounds, like bird sounds — including, I presume, the canyon wren.
It’ll probably be a while, too. I don’t think I’ll be seeing the audiologist anytime soon, especially now that this week we’ve confirmed the predicable: a case of COVID-19 here in the Black Hills. And since the patient is a health-care worker who came in contact with more than 100 people, it seems likely that we’ll have more.
Which is why it’s so important, especially for those 60 and over and those with underlying health conditions, to shelter in place and practice social distancing. Social distancing is really physical distancing, of course. And we can stay at least somewhat socially connected through social media, texts, phone calls and Facetime, although nothing matches real face-to-face time for me.
But I like the term “social distancing,” so I’ll continue to use it. I’ll continue to do it, too, even though sometimes you have to buy groceries and go out for other essentials. And sometimes you have to go out a lot farther than that. At least, I do.
To me, there are few essential more important than hiking and fishing and back-country sitting and watching and listening. I did very little sitting but a lot of looking and listening down in Cold Brook Canyon on Tuesday. But I never saw a canyon wren. I might have heard one a couple of times, calling down from a canyon wall above the creek, mixed in among other bird calls. But I can’t be sure. It was windy. My hearing is flawed. And I forgot to do the refresher course online before I went out.
But going into the canyon and coming out, I heard the prairie dogs just fine, and strolled up to within a few yards of their holes before they disappeared. I saw bison both before I went into the canyon and after, which is just the way I like to see them — away from the hiking trail.
It was a beautiful hike. I saw two other hikers who apparently walked part of the route and were heading back in front of me. And a young woman pulled up to the small parking spot at the trail head as I was pulling out.
She said she was going for a run on the trail.
“Great day for it,” I said. “And there’s no buffalo between here and the fence.”
“Good to know,” she said.
But there were plenty of buffalo elsewhere along the road. And I stopped for a while to watch three riled-up bulls paw and spar and snort at each other. Then I took the 7-11 cut-across road from Highway 385 over to Highway 79, admiring the flow of Beaver Creek at the shuttered Trout Haven Ranch along the way.
I drove south to find Angostura Reservoir wide open under gathering clouds and an increasing northwest breeze. But it was 58 degrees, so I pulled out the spinning outfit and pitched a lead-head jig into some familiar spring walleye water.
After two or three dozen casts in four or five spots, I considered the pushy breeze and decided that was all I needed of spring jig fishing, for now. So, I packed up the gear for the hour drive back to Rapid City.
Driving north on 79, listening to NPR and catching updates on COVID-19, I realized that I had spent most of the day feeling exhilarated and engaged and, of course, normal. I went for hours without thinking about a virus I’d never heard of six months ago and how it has changed our lives.
I almost forgot fears and the anxiety they produce.
You could say the day was a diversion bordering on an illusion. And maybe it was. But it was also another reality that exists outside of the deranged, distorted, intimidating reality of living — and, sadly, in some cases dying — with COVID-19.
It was a return to the normal that I miss every day when I’m sheltering in place at home.