It’s easy to forget about the rest of the world when you’re off somewhere with a fishing rod in hand.
You can feel isolated and secure, as if the chest waders that keep you dry while you thrash around in the water will somehow insulate you from all that threatens beyond your tiny world of fish and fishing.
But yesterday a text from my son shattered the illusion of any meaningful separation. It arrived with a “ding” as I stood in my waders just out of the water on a sunny shoreline, eating a sandwich. It read: “Just intubated a COVID patient.”
He was responding to a text I’d sent a few minutes earlier asking how things were going at work. Until recently, things had been mercifully slow at the Twin Cities hospital where he and his wife work as emergency department doctors. But pace has been picking up lately, and not in a good way.
If you know much about intubation for COVID-19 patients, you know it’s the procedure of inserting a breathing tube through the mouth and down into the trachea to secure an airway and help them breathe. It’s a sign that the patient’s condition is very serious, often critical. It’s also a particularly dangerous time for health-care providers tending to the patient, because they must be very close to the patient’s mouth and aerosols are being expelled from the airway.
I texted back: “Be careful.”
A few minutes later, his text came with a smiley face and: “Always.”
Then another followed, as if he knew the old man on the lake needed more reassurance: “Two masks. Double gloves. Goggles, gown, etc.”
They’re smart and young and strong, but I still worry
My son and daughter-in-law are smart, well-trained, well-prepared doctors, young and strong and in excellent shape. They know what they’re doing, and they’re careful about it.
I know all that. And on a conscious level, it comforts me. Still, they’re on the front lines in the fight against this dangerous disease. And they go home to two of my grandchildren. So, like anyone with loved ones on the front lines of this fight, I still wonder and worry. I also check in with them from time to time, even when I’m off casting — well distant from other anglers, of course — into the blue-green illusion of safety and distance at some focus-fetching lake or stream.
Geography does matter in this, of course. I don’t wear a mask when I’m out on the water alone. And there is some isolation` and some degree of safety just in living where I live. Last I checked, Pennington County had just 11 confirmed cases of COVID-19, even though any reasonable person understands full well that there are more out there not confirmed.
How many more? Who knows? We haven’t been testing much out this way, as the focus has been on hot spots East River, especially in Sioux Falls. So, we’re obviously missing some cases. How many is anyone’s guess.
My friend Sam Hurst and I talked about that the other morning as we strolled along the strip of grass and trees that separate north from south lanes on West Boulevard in our neighborhood. I was on my daily stroll with the dog. Sam saw us coming and ambled over from his yard to join us, falling in beside me an appropriate 10 or 12 feet away. It was good to see him, in person. It had been a while. And since he’s both a journalist and a guy in my age group, we had plenty to discuss beyond politics. Like, well, the thing.
“You keep waiting and wondering why it hasn’t really happened here,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Every day I get up thinking this is the day we’ll have 30 more confirmed cases in Pennington County, instead of one more.”
Instead, we have seen the explosion in Sioux Falls tied to the Smithfield pork plant. And we have seen the much-smaller pockets in Huron and Yankton and now, it seems, in Aberdeen. And nine deaths, so far, in the state, the first of which was a Pennington County man in his 60s who apparently contracted the disease while in Florida.
Fighting complacency as the numbers stay low
But since that individual tragedy, we haven’t had much to shake our calm here in the Black Hills. No frightening upticks in cases. No run on hospital beds. No more local deaths. Not yet. So I suppose we can be excused if there’s a creeping complacency about the coronavirus hereabouts. And there are ebbs and flows in our commitment to safety.
Speaking of ebbs, we walked past a backyard party at a home in our neighborhood the other night, noticing that the merry group was violating the 10-person limit and the 6-foot distancing standard. The rule at that party seemed to be about 10 inches. And the night was young.
That was discouraging. But my shopping trip to our nearest Safeway store the next morning was not. Much had improved since my first masked visit there three weeks earlier. As I mentioned in a previous column on this blog, I felt way out of place, because masks were rare. And not one Safeway employee that I saw was wearing one.
Spacing was an issue during that trip. Few followed the directions at the door to honor a two-cart-distance rule. The self-checkout was clogged and claustrophobic that day, and I left thinking I wouldn’t be back much until they improved.
They did. I learned about the changes during an extended chat with my friend, Jeremiah Murphy, at a park near our homes in the West Boulevard area. We keep in touch by text and social-media messaging. But we hadn’t had real face time, as opposed to the smart-phone kind, for weeks. That’s a loss. Real face-to-face conversations matter in a friendship.
We stood 10 feet or so apart for an hour and a half, talking politics and government and family and COVID and relishing the essential humanity of our exchange. He encouraged me to try Safeway again.
I did, the next morning, and I was gratified to see that all of the store employees wore masks. All of them. That mattered to me, because I’m still self-conscious about wearing the mask. I still feel kind of silly. And when I walk into a store and all the employees are wearing them, I feel affirmed and comfortable and supported. I feel safer, too.
I also feel like those people care about my safety and their own. That makes me more likely to return.
Following the COVID-19 guidelines: Some stores do, some stores don’t
A store employee stood at the main entrance limiting inflows to maintain plenty of space for shoppers inside. All shoppers wore masks, and all were clearly aware of social distancing. When I went through the self-checkout, I was the only one there. And when I finished checking out, the employee who monitors the stations hustled over to sanitize the one I’d used.
That’s all good. No, it’s all great. It’s also far from uniform here in Rapid City, as I assume it is elsewhere. Hurst said, for example, that he went to Lowes at about the same time I was at Safeway. And his mask was a rarity. The place was filled with construction types, picking up construction-type stuff. Tough, outdoor folks, accustomed to outdoor work, where social distancing is, well, hardly a focus of the workday.
But at Lowe’s they were inside, along with everybody else, including Sam, who’s a couple of years older than I am. Masks would have been nice, for the customers and the staff.
That’s easy for me to say, of course. I don’t have to wear the things during a full work shift, which must be tough. I don’t even have full work shifts anymore. So, I wear masks when I shop or whenever, as Dr. Anthony Fauci says, I can’t control the 6-foot space around me. Then I get them off as soon as I can, because I don’t like wearing them. I wear disposable gloves when I pump gas and sometimes when I shop, especially if I have cuts or scrapes on my hands from the last fishing strip.
I didn’t catch much on that last trip, so I didn’t have any new cuts or scrapes. But I got the waders wet, hooked and released a few bass and enjoyed lunch in a beautiful place far from the flurry of face masks and fears that COVID-19 brings to our lives. It was another successful getaway day, up to a point.
That point was when I heard that “ding” from my phone reminding me that there’s really no getting away from the dangerous realities of COVID-19, or the need for us to take it seriously.
That’s as clear as a text from my son.
