I stood on the edge of a tunnel. I could look down it in both directions. It didn’t end, so far as I could tell. It was wide enough for two big trucks to pass abreast. The color was a uniform misty gray. The light never changed. There was never a breeze. There were only two things there. They stood across from my vantage point, near the opposite wall. Both appeared to be packages, though neither had any logo or label. One was a squat cylinder that might have held a half-dozen dinner plates. The other was a tall rectangle about the size of an old-fashioned stereo speaker. They, too, were gray.
My bout with Covid-19 brought me this hallucination. For two weeks, as I lay in bed coughing, I saw it at least once a day. I had no doubt at all that the place was real and that I really stood beside it. In my delirium, I came to know the gray hall pretty well. The pandemic had slammed the brakes on our headlong rush into a touted future and had shut down the entertainments that greased its wheels. The tunnel, I conceived, was the thoroughfare along which all the imported goods and services were supposed to travel, but for the whole time I saw it nothing moved or changed.
It made a sort of sense to see the tunnel this way — still, dormant, empty of goods — because so much that I needed could not be had.
My doctor told me to take my temperature. I could not buy a thermometer. To clean off the toilet seat with disinfectant wipes. No such product available. To use disposable paper towels and tissues. None to be found. To wear a mask. I coughed all over the two I possessed, and there were no more anywhere.
My hallucination was a vision, and this is what it told me: If you insist on bringing an endless stream of items into your life from around the world, you will bring with it unwanted guests. Then, your busy, Technicolor life will turn still and gray. When you treat the world and everything and everyone in it as parts of a vast web of goods and services, the living beings who are at its nodes will suffer.
Rapid, constant round-the-world exchange doesn’t bring just a single invasive malady. Look at what has happened to North American trees since World War II. First, we accidentally imported the hemlock woolly adelgid, a pest that has ravaged the hemlock, one of our most important conifers. Then came the Asian long-horned beetle, hidden in shipping pallets, which threatens maples and many other hardwood species. Recently, we added the emerald ash borer, another pallet rider, which is all but eliminating ash trees over most of their range. Now, there is the spotted lanternfly, which is deadly to grapes and to many fruit trees. In the wings is yet another possible malefactor: An Asian roundworm may cause a new disease on American beech. Just as earlier we brought Dutch elm disease and the gypsy moth from Europe, now most problems come from Asian trading partners.
What is happening to trees once happened to people. When Europeans appeared in the so-called New World beginning in the 15th century, they brought not only their bodies, their cattle, their trade goods, their crops and their weeds but also their diseases. It is estimated that 90 percent of the Indigenous people were killed over the succeeding century by European maladies. Small pox was the worst, but Europeans brought or spread more than 30 epidemic diseases, some from their homelands, some from other colonies: measles, flu, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, Lyme disease, malaria, yellow fever.
Covid-19 is just the first virulent pandemic disease of our present world concatenation. How many more will there be? And how deadly? How quickly in succession will they come? My case of the disease gave me its vision of the gray tunnel, but it also showed me one way out.
I had the good fortune to recover in a small town. Social distancing is easy when the population is in the hundreds or the thousands, but that was the least of its virtues. This was not a throwback, not the town of yesteryear, but a new town some of whose people had been there for generations, others for weeks. My cure did not come down the gray hallway, but from that mixed community. I was unable to go out. Things came from down the street. The milkman brought the milk. The egg lady delivered the eggs. (In her recycled cartons, she tried to alternate blue and brown.) The meat people raised all of their own animals. Food passed through few hands before it reached me, and it came reliably.
My wife told two friends that I was sick. They mobilized a team to help us. My wife would get a call to say when dinner would arrive. Almost every meal came with a formal menu, neatly written out and with explanations as needed (“rice yellowed with turmeric, not saffron”). At first, I could eat very little of the food, but just its presence there in front of me gave me courage. People went out of their way to make their best dishes. A delicious hot roast chicken, and French onion soup. Arroz con camarones. An amazing 15-bean soup with chunks of ham. Apple walnut cake paired with lemon verbena tea. The biggest chunk of chicken fried steak that I have ever seen.
As I recovered, I began to take walks. Right outside the door was a house wren that sang loudly and persistently every morning. We live on the edge of a forest that grows on what once were pastures and fields. It was a pleasure to see how the trees were finding their place in a new woodland, and to see and hear the creatures who lived there. One afternoon, it started to rain. I heard beside me the noisy opening of a huge golf umbrella, but it was in fact a bald eagle, who had been sitting in a nearby tree on the trail. We shocked one another. He rose awkwardly into the air, threading his way higher and farther off, where he settled again. Here was a world not without us, but whose rhythms and struggles were its own.
The tunnel is not inevitable. One silver lining of Covid-19 is this: We may build small communities again. It isn’t easy — gossip, competition for scarce resources, political differences — but it is good for our physical and mental health, and good for the nation. We know our neighbors. There is no sense that the egg lady or the appliance repairman is a less important being than the company treasurer or the documentary filmmaker, or for that matter than the governor of the state. When someone is suffering, neighbors effectively rally to help the person, and they don’t ask for anything in return. Political choices involve people that we have met, and their work is visible.
The historian Arnold Toynbee once suggested that every civilization reaches a point at which it can go neither forward nor back. The conservatives and the progressives both burn with hyped-up fervor: One side thinks that Covid-19 is a hoax and that vaccines are a vast conspiracy, while the other thinks that gun owners are stupid troglodytes and wonder what signs to put on public restrooms. The only way out, Toynbee wrote, is transfiguration: You must draw a larger circle in time. You draw farther into the past and as you come around the circle you find yourself in the future. With that larger view, you suddenly see old things in a new light. Maybe that time has come.
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