Monday. Our Catskills cabin is one of three houses along a gravel drive off the state route that cuts through the town built around local ski areas. We’re in the newly redesigned cozy two-bedroom; to our south, a large, suburban-ranch style is vacant; to our north, an A-framed two-story — columned porch, two outbuildings, all freshly painted, immaculate — is occupied: a German shepherd on a long chain greets our arrival with warning barks.
Hours later our neighbor passes like a rural cliché: baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans, dirty-blond beard scraggling toward his chest, standing on a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. The Girlfriend hails him; he switches off the ATV, on which he keeps his feet straddled. I hop off my backyard chair to chat: good to be on good terms with the neighbors. He stays leaned forward at the waist, angles his head toward us. He couldn’t be friendlier.
“You folks up for the weekend?”
“A week, actually.”
“Oh! Good for you! I appreciate you bringing some sun with you. Getting out of the city?”
“Exactly,” The Girlfriend says. “We needed a break.”
“I get it,” he says.
“Beautiful country,” I say, gesturing to the Catskills. “How long you lived here?”
“Since I was a kid,” he says. “My parents came up from the Bronx. We’d vacationed here for years, but then in 1992 they decided to move up.”
“How’d they decide that?”
“Well, they decided after I got jumped,” he says. “I was 12.”
I do the math; that makes him 40 years old. From this distance I’d have guessed closer to 30.
“That makes sense,” The Girlfriend says. “When you’re a parent, safety is everything.”
“Well, I’d snuck out of the house. It was after midnight. I was messing around, ended up in the wrong place, wrong time.” He takes his hand from his waist, shakes it.
“I lived in the city then,” The Girlfriend says. “Things were so different.”
“Yeah. But like I said: wrong place, wrong time.” His hand repeats the dismissive gesture.
I interpret the unspoken: “The kids who jumped me were black or Latino; my parents became late movers in the White Flight era from New York City. They may have held racial animus; I don’t share it, at least not in a friendly conversation with strangers, to whom I’ll go out of my way to communicate tolerance.”
I ask about none of this, feel friendlier to him all the same.
We chat a bit more; he says his second dog, the one that stays unchained, may come down for a friendly visit. We discuss the bear we saw upon arrival. (“They’re probably confused; so many restaurants are closed, their regular dumpsters are empty. They’re citified. But they won’t want to bother you.”) We discuss local hikes. He heads down the drive, sputtering up an hour later with 2-by-4s strapped to his ATV front, bracing thick folds of black plastic sheeting with one hand against the rear.
The Girlfriend feels better up here, but I continue to fight the ennui The Kid described last week. Too many of my social media encounters, from folks of every political stripe, are filled with rage, ignorance, nastiness. (“Tara Reade is a Russian shill! You’re a dupe!” “You’re slut-shaming a sexual assault victim! You’re a misogynist!”) Too, I’m affected by "Station Eleven," a gripping novel that depicts a terrifying post-plague landscape, similar to Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road" in its “all-against-all” struggle for survival.
Others seem to be seeking positivity. “Endurance is fortifying,” insists David Brooks. The Times collects 14 essays which, with varying effectiveness, urge us to seek joy.
A college friend posts: “Crazy question: Is there anything you are doing in quarantine that you want to integrate into your life when we no longer need to stay in place?” Among other things friends are: making a series of videos discussing pulp novels; recording music for the first time in 15 years; learning the harmonica; handwriting letters; playing with their children; gardening; meditating; sewing; cooking; sleeping.
“What about you?” says The Girlfriend. “You’re writing every day. You’ve been more productive in CoronaWorld than I’ve ever seen you.”
“Well, yes. But this hasn’t exactly been my most productive three-year stretch.”
What causes me despair isn’t lack of productivity; it’s a paucity of human decency. Perhaps it’s the isolation. I can cite plenty of examples of neighbors, distant strangers pulling together in CoronaWorld. But I witness and participate in too little of it.
I console myself with Philip Larkin.
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
— Philip Larkin (1979)
(New York state numbers on Monday: 352,845 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.4 percent; 114 dead, to a total of 22,843, up 0.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 792, to a total of 84,231, up 0.95 percent.)
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