Following the presidential election, the vaccines to ward off the coronavirus became a reality and hopefulness flowered for a close to what, through executive inaction, ineptitude, and disingenuousness, had become a needlessly grave pandemic. Despite this sign of better times to come, winter loomed and it promised to be brutal.
A sequel to the coronavirus-black death editorial for The Richmond Times-Dispatch from the preceding April made sense. There was also more grist for the mill. During the warmer months of 2020, a habit had developed: an hour or two each day on the front porch for reading by turns polemics and novels. The summer reading list included Albert Camus’ The Plague (a rereading) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The opinion I wrote exceeded the canonical length but the editor at the newspaper found the space to run it whole. I’m thinking maybe a trilogy is in the offing as the vaccines take hold and the pandemic subsides, something focused more on social, economic, and cultural implications of pandemics, less about the diseases themselves. We’ll see.
“A Coronavirus Winter: Historical and Literary Lessons,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18 January 2021, A13 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-a-coronavirus-winter-historical-and-literary-lessons/article_f4f237e8-ad4a-5ef1-bf28-88bc669507c3.html).
As the spring 2020 semester lurched toward its online denouement, it was difficult not to think about the world that year’s graduating class would be confronting. The coronavirus, despite Donald the Obfuscator’s assurances, was not going away, the economy was in freefall, and uncertainty reigned. The closest recent analogue to these students’ circumstance was the class of 2009, the group whose prospects had been buffeted by the Great Recession. The class of 2020 faced a highly contagious, deadly disease and a depression-level economic dislocation. Nothing like that had ever happened to me; however, my grandparents had endured the Great Depression and there was perhaps a lesson to be had from their – especially my grandfather’s – experience.
I wrote a brief essay. It’s the most personal item on the blog. It was too long for an editorial, so the question was where to send it or even whether to send it. I contacted the editor of The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise and give him right of first refusal since the essay dealt with someone from the region. Radio silence ensued, so I withdrew it and sent it to Style Weekly. I should have gone there first. Style Weekly is Richmond’s alternative newspaper. It is a boon to the city that it survives online and especially in print when so many, like The Boston Phoenix and The Providence Phoenix, have folded. It’s been staple reading for me since The Better Half and I settled here.
“Lessons in Sacrifice,” Style Weekly, 20 May 2020, 11 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/lessons-in-sacrifice/Content?oid=16027130).
Through March 2020 and into April, as the coronavirus spread, hospitalizations surged, and the death toll climbed, the fear it engendered grew as well. To this point, everything I had submitted to a newspaper or magazine had been written from the perspective of a concerned citizen with no special expertise. As it became evident that the coronavirus would be no fleeting event, expertise came into play. I knew a bit about the Black Death, the mother of all pandemics. If a comparison between the plague and the coronavirus might lend people perspective and allay their concerns in a small way, it seemed worth doing. I wrote an editorial-length juxtaposition of the two diseases. Although I was reluctant to mention an academic qualification – it’s the opposite of persuasive for some readers – it was relevant, so I included it. An effort was made to keep the tone non-partisan. I dispatched the thing to The Richmond Times-Dispatch and soon heard back from one of its opinion page editors. It would run in the Sunday edition. My exchange with the editor was pleasant. I had to provide a head shot. That didn’t thrill me, but The Better Half did as well as she could with the material given her.
“Coronavirus and the Black Death,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 April 2020, D1, D3 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-coronavirus-and-the-black-death/article_c3f6f286-6efb-5ea4-86db-253d825cb5b0.html).
This letter was written at a watershed moment, the dividing line between the beforetimes and the way most of us, indeed nearly all of us, have lived for more than a year as we wait for the aftertimes and wonder how different they will be, for good or ill, from the beforetimes. Every meaningful moment has a context, whether personal or collective. This one had both sorts of backdrop.
In autumn 2019 I committed myself to teaching Norman and Plantagenet England at the University of Richmond. Since it didn’t require extensive new preparation and represented found money, it seemed like the thing to do. The return to the classroom was not jarring and the students were above par, so it was pleasant enough. However, a specter shadowed the semester. News of a dangerous virus in China made the rounds and parts of China were placed under a lockdown so draconian that – I was convinced – its like would never be tolerated in America.
I was not overly concerned about the coronavirus. The US had suppressed potential pandemics, such as the 2014 Ebola scare, effectively enough. I may have contracted the swine flu (H1N1) during summer 2009 and, though no walk in the park, I survived. Beyond this, my sense of scale regarding the brutality of pandemics may have been distorted by overfamiliarity with the Black Death. My principal concern was for a Chinese student in the course. She was quiet, unfailingly polite, and only mildly at sea. I think she was from the Wuhan region and ugliness directed at Asian students was being reported.
Despite this background noise, the early weeks of the semester went smoothly. As spring break approached, the great turn came. The Better Half and I had long planned to visit family, for her a trip to the Left Coast, for me the biannual trek to the Bluegrass. As the break neared and reports about the virus grew more alarming, we discussed the merits of taking our respective journeys and concluded that it remained safe enough and that there might not be another opportunity to see people for a while.
She Who Must Be Obeyed departed a day or so before I did. I taught my final class on Thursday, 5 March, raced home, retrieved a rental car, and aimed it westward. As per custom, I spent a night in Lexington but, instead of staying downtown, I’d booked a room at a Candlewood Suites on the periphery, partly to save bucks, partly because The Boss and I had spent five months in a Candlewood in Richmond during The Great Radiator Incident of 2018. I drove to Elizabethtown the next morning and learned that the Commonwealth’s first confirmed case of the virus had been detected in Lexington while I was there. Wonderful.
This established the tone for my sojourn in The True Land of Lincoln. The information regarding coronavirus became more and more disturbing and The Chief Non-Executive’s statements and behavior increasingly unhinged. I was sent on a mission by The Better Half for supplies. The rental car’s trunk car was filled with toilet paper, paper towels, antibacterial wipes, pasta, and canned and jarred food. The peculiar reality, even in this early phase of the coronavirus, was that neither hand sanitizer nor rubbing alcohol sat on any pharmacy shelf. Had the aspiring eBay profiteer – the enterprising yet sociopathic gentleman from Chattanooga who purchased every bottle of hand sanitizer in every small town he could reach, including some in Kentucky – struck Elizabethtown? Need it be mentioned that bottles of bourbon found their way into the trunk as well? Yes, it need be mentioned.
The Mistress of the House returned to Richmond the day before I did. I arrived just in time to hear The Clueless One’s 11 March address to the nation.
For The Better Half and me, 11 March marked the beginning of living a different way. It had nothing to do with Donald the Unserious’s speech from the Oval Office. He’s an untrustworthy source, though his acknowledgment of a problem was revealing. A myriad of credible sources made it clear that rough skating was on the horizon.
There was no return to the classroom. The University of Richmond extended spring break for a week to ease the scramble of shifting from in-person to online instruction. Since I was responsible for one course and didn’t know when or whether I would be teaching again, my minimalist solution was to place videotaped lectures online and conduct discussion through electronic message boards.
The Precious One and I entered a personal lockdown in which our house became our realm and we ventured outside no more than necessary. We were among the privileged who could live that way during what became a full-blown pandemic. We waited it out until a vaccine was developed. So many others didn’t enjoy that luxury.
While I was in the Bluegrass, The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise ran a column by Martin Schram, a Tribune News Service guy, that assailed the cost of Bernie Sanders’ flavor of Medicare for All. It struck me as both factually challenged and wrongheaded, so a letter was sent. It appeared in print on 12 March, the day the new regime began for us.
Martin Schram, “It’s Time to Look at Figures Behind Talk,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 8 March 2020, A6; “Let the Voters Eat Pie Charts!” The Grand Island (Nebraska) Independent, 9 March 2020 (https://subscriber.thenewsenterprise.com/content/news-enterprise-03082020). The above link leads to the e-edition of article in The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise. Access to this is likely limited by the newspaper’s paywall. If the paper posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The following link is to the version that appeared in The Grand Island (Nebraska) Independent (https://theindependent.com/opinion/columnists/let-the-voters-eat-pie-charts/article_87954042-5ffb-11ea-a512-f3617f84ed71.html).
“Analysis Offers Limited Look at Figures,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 12 March 2020, A6 (www.thenewsenterprise.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-to-the-editor-march-12-2020/article_2105db42-b1f8-5e8d-b1ea-1f07face731f.html).