Soundless Nights

It has rained again, I could hear it even though out here unless there is a strong wind, you can't hear the rain at all.

I always seem to hear it anyway.

And that's what woke me up at ~4 AM when I ate some cherries. The grandkids picked cherries yesterday at a nearby farm, a tradition in our family.

One of the clearest voices on Covid-19, one everyone should be able to trust is Sanjay Gupta, a medical doctor with a gift for explaining illnesses in ways those of us untrained in medicine can easily understand.

Here's how he describes our reaction to the virus and why it is inadequate:

"We want to kill it. Render it lifeless. But that is impossible. Why? Because this virus is not even alive. It is just a string of RNA in a fatty envelope. They are the zombies of the microbe world. Without us -- the hosts -- the virus is nothing, lacking any ability to grow, thrive or reproduce. It cannot even be cultured in a petri dish for scientific research. It can only grow in living cells, like the ones our bodies provide in abundance."

With an enemy like that, our military options would appear to be limited. If the battleground is our body, what's going to be left when the war is over? Or at least when. peace is declared.

***

A determined young woman is cultivating a community garden in the front yard here. She planted the first crops several weeks ago, but deer arrived one night to decimate the small tufts of green. For some reason, the deer left one plant untouched.

Yesterday the woman was back to erect a tall net fence around the garden. Her theory is this will deter the deer.

When I was a boy we had a garden out back that did not require a fence. There were deer nearby but they stayed in the woods.

Wild animals including deer have been increasingly emerging as pests preying on our urban and suburban gardens.

It's a simple formula: Destroy their habitat and they will destroy ours.

Two of my backyards in the city, on 28th Street and on Hampshire Street, had small pools -- one natural and one man-made. They both were home to fish. Every night, raccoons would come to try and catch the fish.

***

Story meetings inside media organizations can be fun. Reporters are typically out on the streets (though not so much these days) developing sources and observing the visible signs of change. Their job is to find out what is new.

In the story meetings, editors hear their pitches and make assignments. The the reporters go back out, get the story, come back in and publish.

That's the way it's supposed to work.

You can tell a lot about a colleague by listening to what she thinks a story is, because the best journalists don't let themselves fall into predictable patterns; they remain open to new ways of seeing the world.

This proves to be a difficult type of self-discipline to achieve. Most people seem to settle into a perspective on the world that feels comfortable and fits the facts as they see them.

It's an analysis, an ideology, a way of coping with uncertainty.

But now, with uncertainty all around, ideologies seem pointless. Can anyone explain to me what is conservative or liberal about a pandemic? And I don't mean whether this or that government response was adequate or soon enough or far-sighted enough. 

What is political about "a string of RNA in a fatty envelope?" Nothing, I would submit. It veers neither left nor to right; it doesn't favor one party over another. It cuts much deeper than that.

Are we capable of cutting deeper than that, or is the best story we can come up with is something more familiar, comfortable, self-referential?

On this topic I am doubtful. The world squabbles while that little string of RNA replicates. We are diseased within and whatever invasive techniques our doctors develop to "save" us will leave us on the other side of this pandemic still saddled with competing narratives of what we just lived through.

In one of my favorite movies that is not a romantic comedy, "In the Heat of the Night," a widow who's murdered husband had been trying to build a factory in a poor Southern town witnesses the law enforcement people charged with solving his crime fighting among themselves.

In a memorable sequence she says something more or less like this: "Why kind of people are you? What kind of place is this? My husband is dead. Someone in this town killed him. I want you to find out who. Otherwise, I will pack up my husband's engineers and leave you -- to yourselves."

When the day arrives our doctors leave us once again to ourselves, we'll need to confront that question:

What kind of place is this?

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