March 19, 2020

Yesterday morning I slept until 8:30, far beyond my usual 4:30 or 5:00 natural rising time. And I woke with a dry cough. I really did. But once I was upright, symptoms receded to just the sore throat (which is gone today). My slight symptoms yesterday were enough to keep me six feet away from the folks I passed during my morning walk on a beautiful spring day framed by blue skies and scattered with daffodils.

There were fewer cars on the road, but plenty of dog-walkers and bikers and pedestrians to say hello to as they passed on the opposite side of the street. As I walked, I listened to a history podcast about the 1918 “Spanish Flu” epidemic, which my grandparents lived through as teenagers. My maternal grandmother, thirteen at the time, tended the ill but didn’t get sick herself. They called her a carrier my mother now tells me. Why have I never heard these stories until now? Maybe takes a pandemic to resurrect the oral history of another pandemic. Mom calls nearly every day now. She passes down her own mother’s memory of watching from the upstairs window as the dead bodies of her neighbors were carried out and loaded into wagons. 

In the spring of 1918, the first Americans who came down with the flu had only mild symptoms, and most recovered quickly. By fall the flu bug had somehow grown stronger and not only were people getting sicker—they were dying of influenza. Hospitals were filled to capacity and still the number of sick increased. Local health boards, desperate to stop the spread of the illness, outlawed public spitting and the shared drinking cups set out at public fountains. Private homes were converted into temporary hospitals. More illnesses and deaths. Health boards adopted increasingly stringent measures—some communities staggered work and shopping hours. Tents were erected to serve as emergency hospitals. Public gatherings were banned. Local authorities closed bars and theatres—then schools and churches. Some communities required anyone appearing in public to wear gauze masks and, as a last resort, citizens were confined to their homes. Historian Nancy Bristow says that where more extreme measures, such as distancing and quarantining, were adopted early in the wave of illness, the death rate was substantially lower. 

In a way, I feel like COVID-19 is drawing me closer to past generations who knew suffering and uncertainty and restriction. I think of the similarities and differences between us. I have not sent a son off to war, but I have two daughters who are seniors in college far away from us and probably staying (in Albuquerque and Boston) for the coming weeks and months, whatever may come. When my kids here at home planted spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, I thought of victory gardens.

After I’d been back from yesterday’s walk for about an hour, I heard my cellphone buzz. My son-in-law had texted me from downstairs where he and my eldest daughter live in what we call the “basement apartment.” Both of them have mild cold symptoms, his text said, including a headache (for her) and shortness of breath (for him). No fever for either of them. Should they quarantine?

I said yes. Email your doctors and let me know what supplies to send down. (The requested list of provisions included a frisbee, lest you worry.)

It feels like overreacting. Like we’re being silly. Then I remember what Nancy Bristow said on the podcast—that early adopters of extreme measures during the 1918 pandemic had significantly fewer dead bodies carried out of homes and carted away. 

In my afternoon research, when I wasn’t refreshing my coronavirus news feed, I read more about the 1918 influenza in Oregon. I came across an image of temporary hospital beds at the Salem fairgrounds, rows and rows of them, waiting to be placed in a tent hospital. Only this image was not from one hundred years ago. The image was taken yesterday at the Salem fairgrounds where a temporary hospital is being constructed to house 250 beds. Forty miles north of Salem, my small-town hospital has already erected a tent for triage. Like this is really happening. Like we’ve seen the lightning but haven’t yet felt the thunder’s crash.