Going to Guyana

I have very little memory of how I got to Guyana.

That’s one of those improbable sentences that I never thought I’d have occasion to utter or to hear. It ranks up there with “My, you had a very difficult elephant!” That latter comment was addressed to me as the result of a required tourist ride I took on an elephant in Thailand. The elephant assigned to me veered off the appointed trail and went down a steep incline to munch on some attractive vegetation there. The incline became almost a sheer drop into a river. As the elephant made its way down, down… the safety bar on my bench atop the animal broke. But for the mahout’s restraining arm, I would have been catapulted off the precipice to almost certain death.

The sure-seated mahout who’d taken this roguish behavior all in stride, was finally able to urge the elephant away from its preferred snack and get it onto more level ground. When the ride was finally, mercifully over and we went back to the elevated platform where I could dismount, one of my fellow tourists uttered that unforgettable line to me – “My, you had a very difficult elephant!” I should perhaps make that my epitaph. Somehow, it seems globally applicable.

But my own declaration that “I have very little memory of how I got to Guyana” might also capture the spirit of my journey through life. However, I’ll leave the selection of an epitaph for later. For the moment, I’ll explain how, for years, I targeted Guyana as a destination, but then ultimately have almost no idea how I made it there.

Why, Oh Why Guyana?

Since I was a teenager, I wanted to go to Guyana, a country that sits on the map like a stovepipe hat on top of fat man Brazil. That fascination came about as the result of a description I’d once read of the place as a startling combination of British colonial times and of wild untamed rain forest. One rare traveler there said the streets of the capital city Georgetown were lined with faux gaslights, suggesting a proper London street in Sherlock’s time. But wrapped around one of these antiqued light poles in Guyana, he’d seen – a giant anaconda.

That contrast was irresistible. I felt someday, I’d have to go and see that kind of oxymoron for myself. The image suggested a huge caduceus in real life, a snake wrapped around a staff. Of course, in the intervening years, the few people I heard of who’d been to Guyana or its neighboring countries disabused me of the idea that I’d witness any such startling sight. They said the old Victorian streetlamps had long since been replaced with more prosaic street lighting. What’s more, they said large snakes are rarely seen in Georgetown anymore.

Still, I wanted to go. The name “Guyana” means “land of many waters.” In addition to having what’s reputed to be the tallest sheer-drop waterfall in the world (five times the height of Niagara Falls), it has many big rivers and their tributaries. People with ornery, rebel spirits still independently pan for gold along these waters in ways reminiscent of the Alaskan goldrush of the 1890’s. They guard the secret of their claims and watch their backs as they come into the frontier-like town of Bartica (about 400 miles south of Georgetown) to exchange their gold for cash, which many quickly spend on booze and “hostesses.”

I’d long imagined myself panning for gold and diamonds along some hidden waterway where anacondas still could be found, and perhaps even digging for emeralds along the Roraima plateau. I wouldn’t be doing this in the spirit of yet another colonial conqueror stripping a country of its resources. I’d just do it a little, like someone going fishing for a day. It would be a way of briefly sitting amid the exotic nature of the place. And it would give me bragging rights. I could say I’d panned for gold in the rain forest. No one could ever again call me a dull stay-at-home with that kind of intrepid chapter in my background.

But I had another inducement to go to Guyana. A woman from the Jewish community not far from me in Chicago had become President of Guyana. Talk about unexpected sentences directed a person’s way! Janet Rosenberg Jagan had an unexpected life! She was a student nurse at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dental student from Guyana. After they married, she went back with him to Guyana where the two of them became political activists and rose in the ranks. Cheddi ultimately became President of Guyana and has been considered “Father of the Nation,” having helped ferry the country into independence from Britain. Janet held high offices in tandem with him.

When Cheddi died in 1997, there was a brief period of rather bitter vying among the country’s political parties. But Janet, then in her 70’s, was finally tapped to run for President as a compromise candidate. She won, becoming only the third woman to be President of a country in the Western Hemisphere. At first, there was a bit of grumbling in some quarters about her election. There are almost no European/American white people in Guyana, so some of the citizens there wondered what an older Jewish woman from Chicago was doing as their leader. But Janet Jagan ultimately won praise from most of the country’s factions. She served as a leavening influence, lending herself to the concerns of both the black citizens whose ancestors had been brought to the Caribbean as slaves, the East Indian citizens who had arrived as indentured servants, and the smaller aboriginal Indian population.

If a movie producer from the past had been inclined to take a comic view of this history, I could see him starring Rosalind Russell as the Jewish woman from Chicago who becomes President of a banana republic. (The Irish Rosalind Russell had famously played a Jewish woman from the Bronx in A Majority of One.) I daydreamed about following in Janet Jagan’s footsteps, in a more modest way. If one Chicago woman could become a notable figure in this Caribbean culture – why couldn’t I? There was so much about Guyana that still seemed to be undecided, open-ended. It floated in my imaginations as a polymorphous place where anything and anyone could happen.

No One Ever Goes to Guyana

Over the years, I made tentative inquiries about how to get there and what to do when I got there. But I was always faced with the same brick wall of indifference and incomprehension. Most people had never heard of British Guiana (become Guyana in 1966). They vaguely thought I was referring to Guinea, “a place somewhere in Africa, isn’t it?” After the Jim Jones tragedy, a few more people had heard of the place, but still weren’t sure where it was. They were universally amazed when I told them that Trinidad was not far off its coast. Everyone knew Trinidad. What? There was a whole country close to the U.S. that no one had ever heard of? “Why I must have passed it when I took that Caribbean cruise last summer! How come I never heard of it?”

Indeed, it became a mystery to me why no cruise ships ever stopped at Guyana. I’m still puzzled about that. One partial explanation has been that the country can’t maintain harbors to accommodate big cruise ships. The many rivers flowing through Guyana and emptying into the ocean carry so much sediment, that harbors become silted over shortly after they’re dug. The Guyanese government hasn’t been able to afford to continuously dredge harbors. (Things might soon change though. As I’m writing this in 2021, it’s been predicted that Guyana will soon become the richest country on the planet due to the discovery of offshore oil deposits. Everyone will love it then. But I loved it even when it was poor.)

My attempts to get to Guyana over the decades met with another kind of obstacle. That was people’s sheer unwillingness to even entertain the idea that any outsider would want to go there. All the travel agents I consulted gave a uniform response to my questioning. “Why Guyana? No one ever goes to Guyana.” In fact, the second half of that rebuff was repeated at me so often, it became a sort of catchphrase around my house, uttered as a synonym for anything that just wasn’t going to happen. “For the tenth time, Liz says she’s going to lose weight. Hah! No one ever goes to Guyana.”

Surprisingly, this reluctance on everyone’s part to even contemplate my intentions extended into Guyana’s own officialdom. At one point, I got the idea of calling the office of the Guyanese consulate in Washington. I thought I’d be warmly greeted. I pictured a functionary sitting in a dusty corner office, as lonely and uncalled on as the Maytag repairman of old TV commercial fame. Surely my rare interest would bounce like a birthday balloon into that functionary’s drab, anonymous existence.

But the assistant consulate with whom I spoke ran true to form. When I asked about pamphlets, recommendations for tourists, she rather brusquely said, “I wouldn’t know. No one ever goes to Guyana.” And that ended that conversation.

What’s So Great About Guyana?

This was all very strange. I thought Guyana would have been a frequent destination for Americans. It’s the only South American country where English is the official language. Most of the residents there speak a Guyanese Creole when talking casually among themselves, but revert to a crisp King’s English when speaking to people who might be foreigners. So Guyana affords a rare opportunity for an American to really get to know a Third World Country first-hand, rather than filtered through interpreters.

The weather is a year-round pleasant 80° with ocean breezes wafting through Georgetown. However, there is a rainy season which has caused many of the structures to be built on stilts and to be surrounded by drainage ditches into which all kinds of muddy slop and trash can accumulate.

Although there was a significant amount of bauxite mining there in the decades after WWII, most heavy industry has generally ignored it. Many sources rate its rain forest the densest, most untouched in the world. However, there are a wide variety of ecosystems in Guyana to explore. Although the place looks small sitting there with its sister countries of Surinam and French Guiana atop the massive Brazil, its area is actually larger than the combined areas of all the countries comprising Great Britain. So there are savannahs, plateaus, mountains, as well as that immemorial, Joseph Conrad rain forest.

So what’s not to like? The mystery of Guyana’s unpopularity made it all the more beguiling to me. But after that consulate’s unpleasant dispatch of my interest in touring the country, I sort of gave up. The years rolled by. Of course, during all that time, I could have just hopped on a plane. But I’m not the kind of seasoned traveler who can just go cold to exotic places. I need accompaniment, guidance. It was only recently, with the endless possibilities made available on the Internet, that I thought to check again how I might join a tour going to Guyana.

Get Packing

Surprisingly, the world still seemed largely oblivious to the place. But searches did turn up a couple of companies that now featured tours of Guyana. Several of these companies looked a little sketchy, and only operated inside Guyana itself, running day tours to that famous Kaieteur waterfall or to other brief special-interest destinations in the country. One or two companies that advertised more extensive start-to-finish expeditions were, however, of the “Ultimate Explorer” variety. They touted the white water rafting their customers would be doing – the week-long campouts by the Essequibo River – the climb up the sheer face of Mt. Roraima. No, that wasn’t at all what I, the ultimate couch potato, had in mind.

 But finally, I did see one company, a Canadian company, that looked as if it would be more my speed. “Adventures Abroad” offered a tour that principally covered the main cities in Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad. Well, that perhaps sounded like a little too much of a “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” sort of smear across the landscape. But it was the best I could find. I thought that once I learned the ropes, I could always go back on my own sometime. So I signed on.

There was a little hitch. After I had sent my money in, the Adventures Abroad agent called and said interest in that tour had been very low. (Would the world’s indifference to Guyana never end?) They said if they didn’t get two more people to sign on, the trip would be cancelled. So I hung in nervous anticipation. But at the last minute, two more people did take the necessary leap of faith willing “to go where no man has gone before.” After more than four decades of holding a vision of gas lamps and anacondas - I was going to Guyana.

There was a daunting amount of preparation to be made. By sheer coincidence, just as I was swimming in indecision about where to start, I heard about the existence of “travel clinics.” I hadn’t known that there were such one-stop places that gave travelers all the necessary warning information about their destinations, that gave vaccinations, and that provided pills and accessories. I made an appointment at one near my home.

The place didn’t look auspicious at first glance. It was a small office up some dingy stairs on the second floor of an old office building. Since I arrived a little early, I had to wait out in the hall. The Doctor on duty set up a folding chair there so I could sit while I waited.

Once inside though, everything was a model of solicitude and efficiency. The Doctor looked up “Guyana” in her charts to see what kinds of precautions were necessary or recommended. I ended up getting hepatitis and yellow fever shots (the latter being mandatory for entry). We decided a typhoid shot probably wouldn’t be necessary this time around. She provided me with a regimen of anti-malaria pills. Then we went to work on the insect repellents she felt I’d need. A 24-ounce bottle of Permethrin was the centerpiece of this precaution. She told me how I should thoroughly spray every piece of apparel I might wear with the chemical before I left.

This last requirement led to my getting a reputation as a “The Mad Woman” of my neighborhood. I was scheduled to leave at the end of February, so mid-month, it was time to spray. The instructions on the Permethrin bottle said that clothes should be sprayed “OUTSIDE.” And indeed, I didn’t want to coat the inside of my house with insecticide, especially since I have pets who like to lap up everything in sight.

But this presented a problem. There’d been a big snowstorm in Chicago that had left several feet of drifts in my back yard, drifts that I hadn’t felt like shoveling away. I had shoveled my front sidewalk down to the bare concrete though. So that had to be my theater of operations.

Late one night, when foot traffic in front of my house should have been at a minimum, I spread old bedsheets on the sidewalk. Then I spread my entire planned vacation wardrobe out on the sheets. I set to work spraying my blouses with their outstretched arms seeming to embrace the sight of the wintry sky overhead. I sprayed the several pairs of culottes I was going to take as a compromise between shorts and full-length, heat-retaining pants. I was in the middle of spraying a dress I was going to take for the tour group’s formal farewell dinner – when a pedestrian approached. He cautiously veered away from my sheets and partially inclined himself up the piled snow by the street gutters. He paused midway along the course of this display. “What, what are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m spraying my clothes with insecticide,” I informed him. “You know, to repel tropical insects. I wouldn’t want to get bitten by a mosquito carrying malaria, or anything like that,” I sententiously explained. I’d forgotten to preface my little lecture with the fact that I was going to travel to a tropical country. So my concern about catching malaria in the dead of winter, in freezing Chicago, in the wake of a record-breaking snowstorm – struck the passerby as serious derangement. With eyes darting left and right to confirm that he had a quick escape route, he humored me, “No, no, you wouldn’t want malaria.” With that he beat a hasty retreat, scaling a particularly steep curbside bank of snow to put as much distance as possible between himself and my hallucinated swarm of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Then came the project of packing. It wasn’t until I started that final process that I realized how I had, once again, created a major problem for myself. I always make a resolution to pack light the next time I go anywhere. But I saw that was going to be impossible in this case. There are only two ways of getting to Guyana from Chicago. Since there are no passenger ships that dock there, the only way is to fly. You can fly out of New York, or you can fly out of Miami. Since I’d been to Miami before, I decided to fly out of New York. I’d never been there, so I arranged to stay a week in a cheap Times Square hotel and see the sights before leaving for Guyana.

What had I done? I had chosen to visit the two most climatically different places on one trip. That meant having to pack a heavy coat on the one hand – and three heavy bottles of insect repellent on the other hand. That meant two sets of clothing, two sets of tour books and itineraries. It meant snowshoes and sandals. I ended with a couple of elephantine pieces of luggage that I had to schlep. “My, you had a very difficult elephant.”

A Stopover in New York

I probably made my dilemma of cartage even worse by having chosen to go to New York by train rather than plane. I’d read that, for years, Amtrak management has been bitter about being required to continue long distance passenger service at the federally stipulated rates. It receives a mere pittance in government subsidies for carrying humans. Even taking the individual fares paid into account, it loses money on every person who opts to travel by Amtrak. That’s why, according to some accounts, a culture of antagonism to passengers permeates Amtrak service. I didn’t believe it could be very bad though, and “riding the rails” has always carried such romantic appeal for me. Unfortunately, the media’s assessment of the quality of Amtrak’s service to passengers proved to be all too accurate on this run to New York.

I set out on my big adventure from Chicago’s Union Station on a cold February day. All the train cars were packed. Not a single coach seat was available for anyone to sprawl. The overhead storage racks were correspondingly stuffed to overflowing. As a result, most of us had to continue to wear our coats during the whole 24-hour ride to New York. This might not have been too great a hardship, except, as we started to roll on through Indiana and points east, the temperature in the cars started to climb, climb, climb. It must have gotten to 95° by the time we were approaching Cincinnati. We were sweating; some of us were feeling faint; all of us were complaining. It was almost impossible to enjoy the scenery, which had been the whole point of taking the train.

Whenever the conductor came through our car, we moaned in unison - “Turn down the heat!! Pleeeeeease!!” Each time she ricocheted like a pinball down the aisle, she had a slightly different excuse for not being able to do so. Mostly though, her excuses centered around the alleged fact that, “The thermostat is underneath the car carriages. It can’t be reached until we stop.”

That seemed very odd. Odd and unlikely. But we couldn’t inspire her to make a more thorough search for the thermostats we felt sure must be at hand somewhere inside one or all of the cars. When we’d stop at a city, we always hoped that someone could crawl under the train and access that elusive thermostat. But city after city, town after town – there was always some reason why no one had been able to accomplish that feat. So on we rolled in a sauna.

Finally, as we left Charleston West Virginia, headed for Washington and the last lap into New York – that same conductor announced matter-of-factly that a thermostat had been located, apparently inside, on a wall near one of the washrooms. With an air of having done an extraordinary favor for us, a favor no doubt deserving of a large tip, she said, “I turned the thermostat down for you, so you can all be more comfortable.” The temperature didn’t go down much. But we travelled those last miles into New York in what was no longer a sweltering, but merely a balmy 85°.

What a relief it was to debouche into the cold, cavernous underground of Penn Station. I wasted no time. I had calculated my Times Square hotel was within walking distance from the Station, so I made directly for the staircase up and out. A bracing, but not frigid breeze from the great outdoors greeted me as I yanked my two balky, bulky suitcases after me, one jarring step at a time. Just as I reached the sidewalk and was standing, reveling at being in New York, New York – a young woman in running shoes approached me and commiserated, “Oh, you poor dear! That’s quite a load you’ve got there. Are you staying around here?”

Still disoriented from the heatstroke visited on me by Amtrak, I blurted out in what I hoped was a mildly dismissive, “Yes, yes I’m fine. I’m just down the street at the Econo Lodge. I’m fine.”

With that, the athletic young woman took charge. “Oh, I know where that is. Here let me help you. You poor dear,” she repeated. She then grabbed one of my suitcases with preemptory force and charged off down 8^th Avenue. Before I knew it, I’d lost sight of her in the crowd.

I stood there, stunned. I hadn’t been one second in New York and already I’d been robbed! Even worse – I’d been insulted. “Poor dear,” indeed! I fancied myself as cutting a rather vibrant, youthful figure. Where did my mugger come off calling me a “Poor dear?”

I didn’t know what to do. Call the police? But I didn’t yet have any hard evidence that the suitcase was gone for good. I decided I’d walk down to the hotel and call from there. It was a longer distance than I’d calculated, but not too bad, especially since I’d been relieved of half my burden.

As I yanked my now unmatched piece of luggage through the door of the Econo Lodge, something familiar caught my eye. There was my other suitcase standing, as bulging as ever, against the wall of the hotel lobby! A miracle on 47^th Street! The clerk behind the counter guessed my identity. “Is that yours?” she pointed. “It was just delivered.”

First impressions are lasting. And so I’ve been bound to always think kindly of New York, no matter what might ever happen to me there in the future. I went up to my assigned room. It was a dingy closet of a place. But the bed was clean, and it and all things New York were good.

The next morning, I signed on for a “Deluxe” tour of the city. It was one of those touristy sweeps that shows you everything and therefore nothing. But since I was booked for a week in the City, I thought I could go back and explore more in depth later, on my own. This all-points junket by land and by sea took in places as diverse as the front of the Dakota Apartment Building where John Lennon was shot, and the waters out past the Statue of Liberty. Our tour guide was an elderly man who took every opportunity to tell us all about the fascinating religious landmarks he’d seen on his recent trip to Israel. So we actually ended up hearing more about Jerusalem than New York.

But the fellow was conscientious when it came to giving us plenty of photo ops. As we stood catty-corner from the Empire State Building, he pulled a stuffed gorilla out of his knapsack. He wiggle-waggled it in the air so, if we angled our cameras just right, we could get a picture that looked as if the cuddle toy was climbing up the spire of that iconic structure.

The next days I spent walking around. I saw some notable “characters” of New York. I saw the naked cowboy in Times Square. Then I discovered a more truly remarkable character on the steps of the main library. I learned that Garrett Buhl Robinson sets up on the library steps between the two lions almost every day, rain or shine, and sells his self-published books of poetry. I was attracted to his paperback book entitled “Martha,” because that was my mother’s name, and I was feeling more poignantly orphaned than usual, roaming around on my own in the big city. Chatting with him, I learned that the “Martha” of the epic poem in his book was Martha Graham, the famous doyenne of American modern dance. It soon became apparent that Garrett was enamored with classical music and ballet. He was able to go into a transport of appreciation of the art forms.

Although I was delighted to have discovered this true free spirit of New York, and although I walked away happy with a signed copy of Martha tucked in my purse, my encounter with Garrett also left me feeling a bit melancholy – and envious. How far distant I was from any such capacity for real absorption and enthusiasm. I’d come closer when I was in my teens, but even then, I felt I’d only enjoyed the shiny surfaces of things. I’d never really been able to have a through-and-through “passion” for anything, as modern parlance seems to require. It’s likely that that’s true of most people. Most people are probably actually faking passion, or they’re convincing themselves of enthusiasms that they don’t really have. But it was plain that Garrett was a rare soul who felt the real thing.

I went on up the staircase where Garrett was posted, into the library itself. Whenever I’m in a foreign city, I make a point of visiting a library there if at all possible. I quickly learned a surprising thing about that big lion-guarded building. I learned that you can’t check out books there. Except for a small “popular library” alcove where you can perhaps grab a paperback for a lunchtime read - this is not a circulating library. So there were no floors and stacks of books I could browse through. Almost everything in the vast building is archived and is off-limits to everyone except serious scholars.

In any case though, I didn’t want to spend all my time in New York in the library. I bury myself sufficiently in books when I’m at home. So I did try to walk around a little and become part of New York’s unique vibe. But after my fourth day there, my throat began to feel scratchy. The day after that, I woke up in the pigeonhole of my hotel room with one of the worst flus of my life. And that was the end of my New York state of mind.

I couldn’t get out of bed for a day and a half. After that, I was only briefly able to make it down to the hotel lobby to get an orange juice and a hard-boiled egg, the main foods that the hotel had on offer for their standing room only “free breakfast.”

In another essay, I wrote how uniquely subject I am to these terrible attacks of the flu when I travel. I put this susceptibility down to the fact that I am mostly a homebody. I’m at home 90% of the time and then – I burst out on one of these overly ambitious peregrinations. I haven’t been out in the world enough to build up resistance to the common colds and flus that circulate around and that others get inoculated with in small doses. It’s what I’m afraid might happen to many people after everyone comes out of their Covid isolation this year.

I also blamed my disability this time on those long hours spent in the torture hotbox of the train car. Such exposure to heat has always lowered my resistance. But whatever the cause of my malady, I spent my remaining days in New York as a messy ooze of guacamole in the taco roll of my blankets. I was only dimly aware of my surroundings. I did take comfort in the banging reverberations of the garbage trucks that came at dawn every morning to upend the dumpsters on the side street below my window. That jarring noise that probably irritated other tourists, was a comfort to me. It let me know I was still in the land of the living. Other than that, it was all a hallucinatory swirl of lions and gorillas in the mist.

I rallied just enough to know when it was time for me to get up and catch a plane to Guyana. I got down into the lobby at 4:00 AM, this time having to jockey both weighty bags of insecticide and sweaters on my own. A cab was called to come take me to JFK and – something – something – something. Although I arrived over three hours early at the airport, I almost missed my plane. While my ticket read “Caribbean Airlines,” it turned out that I was actually flying under the aegis of American Airlines. I sat by the wrong counter until it was almost departure time. When no one had come to man that counter, I knew something was wrong. I made it over to check in with American Airlines just in time. I do remember that.

The flight itself is a blur. It was a small plane, completely full. I had been swilling Nyquil or something to keep from coughing and spreading germs en route, so I was barely conscious for the 5-hour flight.

All I remember is that I left New York on a cold, dreary morning – and when I snapped into some semblance of awareness again, I was in a warm, sunny wonderland. After decades of imagining anacondas and gaslights, I was here. I was in Guyana - at last.

What happened next is another story.

There's No Getting Away from Trump - Even in the Outer Hebrides

 

Before the Covid virus hit, I went on a cruise through the Hebrides Islands. Those wild northern shores of Scotland had long called to me. The swirl of birds above the rocky coasts; the distant skirl of bagpipes; the loneliness. I always thought it was in such a place that I could at last write some concentrate of poetic truth.

 Unfortunately, it seems likely it’s too late in life for me to pack up and relocate to a place so different from my accustomed Chicago. So I had to settle for an organized tour on board a cruise ship. Even though this was going to be such an abbreviation of my initial dream, I still looked forward to the trip. I especially looked forward to getting away from the endless drum beat of politics, of Trump, Trump, Trump, here in the States.

 It was no huge luxury liner that carried us. It was a smaller, more intimate ship wending its way through some of the Hebrides, through some of the Orkney Islands. I never do much research about the places I’m scheduled to visit on tour. I suppose I should, but I look on these trips as time away from research, as a respite from study, from getting my facts straight. When I tour, I prefer to just be surprised.

 I was indeed in for some surprises on this trip, as for example when I learned the northernmost of these islands were in fact close to the Arctic Circle. Despite that, we saw beautiful jellyfish floating, delicately fingering the waters around us, as if we were in the tropics. Their ability to survive here was likely due to the North Atlantic Ocean Current that threads its way to these farther shores. That current spreads a general warmth along the coastlines, perhaps incidentally enabling the famous “fairy gardens” of Scotland. These gardens are the remarkable, mysterious patches of lushness that some gardeners can wring out of the rocky substrate of this land and that they populate with all manner of gnomes and sprites.

 I was further surprised to learn how much Norwegian influence there was in these islands, especially in the Orkneys and Shetlands, some of which are almost within swimming distance of Bergen. (Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. They are over 200 miles apart, but still – surprisingly close.) Some enclaves of people in the Orkneys speak a dialect heavily influenced by the Norse language. Our group walked down “Hell-hole Road in Stromness on the Orkney Mainland Island. “Hell” is likely derived from the Norse word “Heilagr” meaning “holy.”

 We could all laugh that we’d been to Hell and back as we returned to the ship from that excursion ashore. There was in fact quite a bit of laughing and conviviality among our tour members. Because it was a smaller group, most of us got to know some of each other’s backstories – the parts that people cared to reveal – the parts that made amusing public fare. But, as is almost always the case, there was usually a sadness hiding behind the high joviality with which we all curtained the bulk of our lives.

 There was one particularly notable couple on board whose story everyone came to know due to the always slightly inebriated loquacity of the man. Joe circulated around telling how he and his partner, Lisa, had been dating for forty years. Then he whispered to each clutch of us in turn, “But things are going to change soon” and he winked. We wondered – what did it all mean? Was that wink intended to mean he was going to break up with her? Was he making jesting suggestions that he’d like to throw her overboard?

 But no. The wink was meant to signal the fact that he was finally going to pop the question. And pop it he did. He had forewarned the cooking staff on board and they baked an elaborate cake. He popped the question and presented a ring. Lisa accepted. They set a date. The cake was brought out on a silver platter, ablaze with candles, just like a birthday – the birth date of their new life together, finally as a committed couple. We all cheered and applauded. We all got a piece of the cake. I was glad to see my piece had an especially large chunk of pink frosting on it.

 Having accomplished that goal he’d set for the trip, the new fiancé felt able to chatter even more openly about the couple’s long dating history. He told how they had a ranch in Montana. Sipping on the margarita he’d ordered from the bar, he congratulated himself jokingly on how he managed to fob off most of the hard work of the place onto Lisa, while he “supervised.” Although he did concede that Lisa had good managerial skills and a good head for figures. She kept careful track of the finances of the ranch so that they showed a profit most years. They’d really raked in the money awhile back when it became apparent that their ranch was right in the prime path of the total solar eclipse. They’d rented out every room, every shed, every piece of ground where a tent could be staked on their property for top dollar.

 “Yes,” the man granted – “Lisa has a good head on her shoulders. But she’s such a flirt. Look at her. Look at how she’s working the room, as usual. Talking to all the men. She does the same at home. She does the same whenever we go ashore. If the salesclerk in the gift shop is a man, she’ll talk to him no end. But I’m not worried. At this stage of things, the men just don’t want to go there.”

 In all innocence, the older woman sitting next to me asked, “You mean they just don’t want to go to Montana?”

 All the rest of us laughed uproariously at her naivete. The man explained, in-between guffaws, “No, no. Lisa is, you know, over sixty now. Although it’s true, she doesn’t look it. But nevertheless – with a woman in her sixties, the average man just doesn’t want to go there.”

 My table companion caught on and blushed. We laughed again - at what had been her child-like obtuseness, and at the oxymoron of the man’s bawdy delicacy. However, news of the initial misunderstanding circulated amongst the select group of us who typically dined together, and it became our in-joke, our secret catchphrase. Whenever the topic of some failed Hollywood romance where the man had dumped the woman came up, we’d knowingly intone, “He just didn’t want to go to Montana anymore.” Soon we expanded the use of the phrase to indicate enthusiasm. Whenever we discussed a couple that seemed to be clicking, we’d lewdly predict, “Soon he’ll be going to Montana.”

 As it turned out, we in fact had occasion to use the phrase in that more positive sense quite a bit in the course of our trip. Our tour guide was a good-looking Scotsman in his late forties, a native of the Hebrides, which in many ways made him an ideal person for the cruise company to have hired to lead this tour. But in other ways, he turned out to be a little less diligent in his duties than he might have been.

 Most of the passengers were retirees, as is true of most cruises. But there was one young woman among us. She was a daughter who’d sort of been roped into the trip, dragged along under protest by an enthusiastic mother intent on seeing the Hebrides. This daughter was in her early thirties, statuesque, and quite attractive. She became the inevitable focus of our guide’s attentions. He gave the required narration of the landmarks and notable geographical features we passed along the way. He even demonstrated his resonant singing voice when he sang a hymn in Gaelic in the wayside Italian Chapel that had been built by WWII servicemen on one of the Orkney Islands.

 He did his duty. But it was plain his heart wasn’t in it. So then there were two people whose hearts weren’t in the trip. There was the pretty daughter who’d been more or less coerced into keeping her mother company, and there was the guide whose attention strayed to the pretty daughter keeping her mother company.

 The guide regaled us with a fair amount of his own biography. He’d been born in the Hebrides but had soon been sent to an orphanage in England. There was a whiff of Dickensian grimness in his upbringing as he told it. As soon as he’d come of age, he returned to the Hebrides where he felt he rightfully belonged. He’d started his own tour company. He’d accumulated his own flock of sheep and became a part-time sheep farmer. Through most of these dabbling endeavors, he’d had help from his “ex-girlfriend.” Whenever he mentioned her, he emphasized the “ex” part of her status, clearly wanting to signal his current availability to whomever on board might be interested – mentioning no names.

 Again, doing his duty, our guide circulated among us passengers, sitting at various tables in turn at mealtimes. Once when he made his requisite stop at the table where I and my two regular mealtime companions were sitting, he started to wax on again about the collaborations he had with his ex-girlfriend. They’d broken up as boyfriend/girlfriend fifteen years previous but remained on good terms. They lived near each other on one of the islands. So whenever our guide wasn’t away conducting tours, the two seemed to enjoy a certain abbreviated domesticity together. He said his ex-girlfriend would come over every morning and cook him breakfast. His ex-girlfriend would help see to the sheep. Yes, he and his ex-girlfriend…

 Finally, my table companion felt compelled to interrupt. She was the innocent who had initiated the Montana catchphrase. Now though she was showing just a trace of more worldly-wise irritation. She said softly, with a touch of sweet reproach, “After fifteen years, I think you could call her just ‘a friend.’”

 She clearly wanted to get the man off his jag of referring to the woman only in reference to himself. She wanted to strike a blow for feminism, for women being able to claim their own identities. After fifteen years of being old post-graduate chums, a man would hardly keep on referring to another man as “my ex-college roommate.” Similarly, a woman should have graduated to the independence of being simply “a friend” by that time.

 Our guide didn’t catch on though. He nodded and repeated, “Yes, my ex-girlfriend” and went on with his account of how she’d make the best pasties sometimes for his meals. Had we ever tried those?

 Ah, there are still wild and remote plains where the sheep graze free and where there never is heard a discouraging word – from the likes of Gloria Steinem.

 I hated to distract the guide from himself, but I had a question. Before coming on this trip, I’d happened to read Adam Nicolson’s book, A Sea Room: Island Life in the Hebrides. Nicolson told about his private ownership of a triad of tiny islands, The Shiants, in the stormy waters of the Minch Strait in the North Sea. The islands are beautiful, but problematic. They are overrun with rats. Sheep sometimes fall off one of their sheer shoreline cliffs and are killed even before they’ve had a chance to be taken by boat to the mainland to be slaughtered. The Islands are dotted with old cairns and the forlorn remains of croft houses that residents were forcibly expelled from in centuries past during one or the other of the King’s ordered evacuations.

 But Nicolson had found the remote inhospitality of the place just what he needed to concentrate on his own writing and to think his own thoughts. He looked forward to passing the Islands on to his son as the kind of retreat from the modern world that the boy would no doubt also need. I asked our guide if he knew of the Shiants and of Nicolson’s residency there.

 “Oh yes! I know Nicolson very well,” our guide flashed. My question triggered a spark of real fierceness in what had otherwise been his generally non-committal demeanor. It turned out that he intensely disliked Nicolson, almost to the point of having an on-going bloody feud with him. He disapproved of snooty, high-born Englishmen, or of anyone, gaining private ownership of any of the islands. What’s more, he vigorously opposed Nicolson’s philosophy of stewardship of the islands. Apparently regular meetings are held among the inhabitants of different groups of the Hebrides, and topics such as the introduction of new pig farms are hotly debated. Whatever side Nicolson was on in these matters – our guide was decidedly on the other side.

 But he said we’d be passing the Shiants. He said he might even arrange for us to land there briefly, if I was really interested. As it turned out, he did point out the Islands in the distance as we sailed by – and he pointed to the departure of a puffin from one of their rocky cliffs. I saw the bird only as a distant black dot in the sky, just about the only wildlife I spotted on the trip. But there was no thought of landing there. In his book, Nicolson had made it clear how difficult landings were with small, well-crafted canoes in even the best weather. It would have been a major project for a cruise ship to have off-loaded a handful of us onto a tender boat to go ashore. I don’t know why our guide had even suggested the possibility in the first place.

 So we cruised on. And the romance between the guide and the otherwise bored daughter progressed apace. Soon enough though, it became clear that their relationship was not going to be clear sailing. The young woman’s mother did NOT approve. Well, I did think it would be rather against Company policy for tour guides to “affiliate” with passengers. But the young woman’s mother took an especially Victorian form of offense to developments. When she joined us at our table one time, she made it known that she was going to write a searing letter of protest to the Company as soon as the trip was over. She was going to accuse our tour director of “moral turpitude” and insist that he be fired – forthwith! She was going to make it plain that he had launched on a campaign of seduction, corrupting her daughter – a married woman – with two children no less!

 These were all phrases that indeed haven’t been heard much since the Victorian era. “Moral turpitude, seduction, corruption of virtue” – the mother’s outrage was in full spate. All her anger seemed to do though was to drive the couple farther underground in their shipboard romance. Our guide became more discreet about his attentions. I think he bought the young woman a bracelet of Skye marble from a giftshop while her mother had let her guard down, lagging behind to look at some archeological digs. Then one of our more advantageously positioned cruise mates reported sotto voce that he had seen the young woman slip out of the guide’s cabin at 2:00 A.M. We concluded that some “going to Montana” had taken place.

 Even though the guide must surely have gotten an earful personally from the mother, he wasn’t much deterred. Making a second round fulfilling his duty of talking to all the passengers in turn, he again came to perch briefly at the table where I was sitting with the two women who’d become my regular companions. I was determined not to detain the man with any questions about Nicolson or anything else this time. But the Montana woman urged me to tell him the side-splitting story I’d just told the rest of the table about how the cows in Cuba had become so prone to committing suicide. (See my Blog “The Suicidal Cows of Cuba.”)

 Oh, I wished she hadn’t mentioned this. The guide clearly wanted to be up and away from us as quickly as possible. But there was nothing for it. I had to launch into a repeat of my story. I tried to cut it as short as possible. I told how all the cattle in Cuba were considered to be government property. Castro had issued a strict prohibition against the killing and eating of any cow consigned to a farmer for caretaking. As a result, cows started to “commit suicide” en masse, throwing themselves on upturned pitchforks, drowning themselves, etc. Any farmer who’d been assigned to tend one of these depressed bovines claimed he’d been forced to carve up the animal and eat the meat to avoid its rotting and going to waste in the field. Of course, Castro soon caught onto this ploy and added a severe threat of a coda to his earlier prohibition. He made it clear that the deaths of ALL cattle, whether the result of suicide or of intentional butchering, must be immediately reported so that the meat could be claimed by government officials.

 That was supposed to be the whole story. But as I started to tell it, a sort of rictus of a smile stretched across our guide’s face, indicating that he was straining himself to make a show of listening and being amused by my tale. Then, as I was right in the middle of my pitchfork sentence, our guide caught sight of the daughter, making some signaling gesture behind her mother’s back. The man made an excuse and hastily departed, going off into the wings of the dining room.

 The two retirees and I laughed, knowing only too well that suicidal cows couldn’t compete with the travel adventures he felt were in store for him. We laughed - but also, I inwardly cried. I sharply realized how now, and for the rest of my life, I was in the same boat as Lisa who would become a bride after forty years of dating, presumably having no prospects other than her rather less than gallant, long-time ranch-hand of a partner. Lisa, and me, and all women “of a certain age,” are unlikely to ever again have anyone eager to go to Montana with us. There’s nothing left to us but passive sight-seeing. And sight-see we did.

 We were ushered into one of the famous “black houses” that are preserved on the Islands as tourist attractions. That’s a house with a thatched roof that’s often been packed around with earth as protection against the sweeping cold sea winds. Some think they got the name “black houses” because their interiors became sooty as the result of having no chimneys. Smoke was allowed to just filter up from the fireplaces through the permeable wood-and-straw roofs. This style of building houses partially underground is getting to be popular again with our new energy-saving, environmental awareness. But on the Hebrides, the remaining restored black houses are symbols of a bygone era.

 The local tour guide who spoke to us in one of these houses tearfully reminisced about her own childhood in just such a hutch of a place. But really, I was hard-pressed to see how the inside accommodations were so very different from my current house in Chicago. My own home hasn’t been re-decorated since the 1950’s. I have a dining table covered with the same kind of checkered dime store oilcloth that I saw here. I too have a curtain walling off one corner of a room, to make the space serve as a closet. The only thing I lack in Chicago is the cozy, peat-burning fireplace that was in one wall of this house. I wondered if I could turn my Chicago home into a tourist attraction – a time capsule of the 1950’s.

 We drove away, past expanses of peat bogs. We were told almost no one burns peat anymore for warmth. Everyone has central heating in these modern-day Hebrides. But then we did see one couple, bent over in gnarled labor, wearing knit shawls, digging up some peat. They reminded me of some famous painting, maybe one of Van Gogh’s paintings of peasants digging in the soil or maybe Millet’s “The Gleaners.” We were told that peat is actually an ideal fuel source because it grows back so quickly. That surprised me. I had read that another tragedy suffered by Ireland has been the decimation of its ancient peat bogs. The bogs had been over-culled there, and so permanently destroyed. I’d read that it takes centuries, nay eons, for such accumulations of vegetable matter to grow back. So they are gone forever, irreplaceable in Ireland. Why were they considered such an easily renewable resource in the Hebrides? When I later mentioned this to friends, we speculated that maybe “They have a different kind of peat there.”

 We went on to another island where I was chilled to see the locals in the midst of building a big effigy made of wicker, wood, and other combustibles. A young resident bounced up to us and told us they were preparing for a Wickerman Festival.

 Could it be true? I thought The Wicker Man, one of my favorite horror movies, was purely fictional. The original movie starring Edward Woodward features him as an English policeman sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He gets caught up in the terrifying sacrificial rites that are an ancient custom on the island. Now here I was faced with a scaled-down replica of the movie’s towering cage of a figure, which I was assured would be ignited that very night. “What? Does that really happen?” I gasped.

 When the young man saw that I was genuinely frightened, he reassured me. “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry. We don’t really sacrifice anyone. We just decided to do it this year - you know, to capitalize on the movie. Some news crews are coming. We’ll have this big bonfire and pretend.”

 But there was something a little too ready and rehearsed about the young man’s reassurances. And there was something a little too menacing in the gleam of eagerness on his face when he described the imminent burning of the straw man. So I had my doubts that this was “all pretend.” I was glad our group was going to set sail and be well away from the island before nightfall.

 The following day brought us to a highlight of our cruise, a tour of Lewis Island, one of the larger islands in the Hebrides. We landed at its port capital of Stornoway and promptly got channeled into a gift shop. But from there we were taken farther inland to see something more authentic, the famous “Stones of Callanish.” These are a set of monumental stones made of local gneiss set upright in a roughly cruciform pattern stretching across the landscape. It’s a somewhat smaller version of Stonehenge, but this construction is two thousand or more years older than Stonehenge. Scientists haven’t been able to fathom its purpose. The stones may have framed some recurring astronomical event, but that possibility is not as clear as it is with Stonehenge. Some guess that the stones were a Viking, rather than a Celtic, devotional – perhaps placed in acknowledgment of the Jötunn, the Titan Norse Gods of mythology. The ancient residents perhaps wanted to greet those Gods with something that was on the Gods’ own scale – a massive offering made to massive power.

 The Callanish stones are said to have the same mystic, vivifying effect as Stonehenge. But not nearly as many hippie worshippers make their way out to this more difficult, distant spot. Our group saw a few though, quiet and awe-struck – seeking to absorb the healing vibes of these monuments.

 After we spent a little time ourselves trying to bask in the stones’ aura, we were let off to just explore the island on foot on our own for a while, with an agreement that we’d all meet up outside Stornoway in a few hours to go back to our ship. So I set off, over hill, over dale, in the place I’d dreamt of being since I was a child. I wasn’t here to settle into that brilliant writing career I’d imagined. I was just a common tourist being hurried from one gift shop to another as fast as feasible. But still, I was here. I was away from my Chicago routine, from all the clutter of my 1950’s house. Most important, I was away from the clatter of the daily news – with Donald Trump’s endless, inane tweets and the opposition’s endless enforcement of new rules of political correctness.

 I walked on along the road, with the sweep down to the sea on one side of me, and a clutch of black-faced sheep grazing placidly on the other side. This truly was “free-range” country. And I was ranging freely. It was a bittersweet sense of freedom I experienced though. I’d learned once and for all on this trip that I was too old now to get invitations to Montana. I was too old to ever hold the interest of a handsome Scotsman - even if I had a hilarious tale about the cows of Cuba to tell. But I comforted myself with the thought that age brings a new sort of freedom. I let the bracing sea breeze blow all the bickering political battles of present-day America and all the let-downs of my own private life out of my mind. I was free of all that, temporarily. I was here and away.

 Soon the road led into the outskirts of a hamlet. There were houses spaced far apart on each side of the road. Lewis Island is studded with hamlets. You walk across what seems like an endless grassy expanse, but then you go up and over the next rise, and there’s a cozy little village. I walked toward the town that our maps designated as “Tong.” An odd name for a Scottish town, I thought. But how removed from everything intrusive in my daily life, I thought. I paused in front of one of the town’s stone houses, set back behind a low stone wall. This house had, not quite a bay window – it had something that looked more intentionally utilitarian on its facade. It was a rectangular enclosure of windows, like a conservatory or solarium reaching out into the sun. I craned over the low wall, trying to make out if there were any plants growing in that sun-catcher extension.

 Just then, another passenger from the ship caught up with me. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I see you’ve found the house.” When I looked baffled, he said, “Don’t you know? That’s Donald Trump’s house. Well, it was his mother’s – his mother’s birthplace. Trump’s cousins live there now. But I don’t advise that you go up and try to talk to anyone. They really don’t like tourists pestering them all the time. Actually, I hear they find Trump to be sort of an embarrassment. They don’t agree with his politics at all. I hear they think of him as the black sheep of the family.”

 

So I wasn’t so free and far from it all as I’d thought. Things always seem to catch up with you, no matter how determined your attempts at escape.

 After standing there a few more moments, trying to absorb the impact of this astonishing coincidence, my shipmate and I walked silently together out of the town. Just as we passed by one of the last houses that might have claimed being part of Tong - we saw a group of animals grazing. These weren’t black-faced sheep this time. This was a group of Highland cattle. We’d been told how the ancestors of this breed had been brought to the Hebrides in ancient times, in Neolithic days, perhaps near the time those Callanish stones were being set in place. Now it was rare to see any of these symbols of the Hebrides on the Islands. Here again, it had become too expensive and time-consuming to transport them to the mainland for slaughter. But there are still a few herds scattered around the Islands, and we were privileged to have found one.

 As we looked at this small herd, one of their number separated itself from the rest, turned, and stepped toward us a little way. It stood staring at us, with a look of baleful petulance. It seemed clearly put out that it had been banished in embarrassment to the fringes of the town. Its sweep of an orangish forelock threatened to drape down further to obscure its vision altogether at the first gust of wind. We recognized its mirroring of Tong’s most famous son. The resemblance was uncanny.

 

Covid Questions

 I’ve always been very much a stay-at-home person. I was largely home-schooled. I never had to commute to work because our family printing business was adjacent to our living quarters. I never had much ambition to go out shopping or to public events. So the Covid virus hasn’t made much difference in my life. But I think my perennial “shelter-in-place” approach did have negative repercussions for me in the past when it came to my susceptibility to the old run-of-the- mill germs.

 

When I would occasionally hurl myself out into the wide world, going on a “See America” trip or tours to other countries – I almost always would come down with some horrible illness. I’d usually arrange to arrive by myself at our target destination a few days early so I could explore on my own, off the beaten tourist track. But I almost always ended up wasting away those extra days in bed in my hotel room, in stuffed-up, fevered infirmity. I would have to use every ounce of will power I had to rally on the fourth day and join the newly-arrived tour group.

 

I’d always try to distance myself from fellow-travelers as much as possible and to take all precautions against spreading my disease to them. I would keep in touch with most of them for short periods after our trips, and as far as I know, I never once infected anyone else. It seems the germs that downed me were entities I was uniquely susceptible to, perhaps because of my general pattern of sequestration. I’d be at home, at home, at home – then suddenly abroad with a naïve immune system that hadn’t been exposed to low doses of whatever microbes were floating around. My system was therefore as unprepared as the systems of the Native Americans facing the European invaders.

 

Before Covid, we had just been getting to the point of recognizing that early exposure to a potpourri of germs might be a good thing, that it might be good to get out there occasionally and mix it up with the world so that our immune systems could gain some familiarity with whatever might later attack in earnest. Parents who were too fastidious about keeping a germ-free environment were being encouraged to loosen up a little. A friend and I joked that the ideal mother would be one who urged her toddler, “Why don’t you go out and play in that open sewer, honey?” Ma and Pa Kettle might make better parents than the spotless suburban housewife of 1950’s laundry detergent commercials.

 

Some doctors were suggesting that the toughening that would result from some exposure might even extend to making people less subject to allergies. A child who’d been exposed to EVERYTHING - to all sorts of germs, all sorts of unprocessed foods, all sorts of mess, in moderation - would not only be better able to fight off a variety of diseases along the way, but might be less likely to suffer from the likes of peanut or pollen allergies. Some have even suggested that broad exposure to low levels of pathogens might better enable an individual to tamp down rogue cancer cells as they spring up – all as the result of having developed a toughened up, street-wise immune system.

 

►So my first question is:

Are we setting ourselves up for contracting all sorts of illnesses when we finally do emerge from quarantine from the Covid virus? Will we be especially vulnerable to the remaining Covid germs floating around, as well as to all the usual garden-variety cold and flu germs? Just as many of my vacations were partially ruined, possibly because I had spent too much time out of life’s fray, will our first months and years back out in the world be fraught with hacking coughs, fevers, runny noses, and perhaps even more serious ailments?

 

I’m not encouraging people to go out and foregather in crowds now without masks or distancing. I am responsibly adhering to all health officials’ directions. But I’m just wondering…

---------

 

Then just before Covid hit, scientists had been starting to caution us against washing too often, especially with anti-bacterial soap. They pointed out how the widespread use of this soap was helping to give rise to superbugs, germs that have evolved resistance to the anti-bacterial agents we’ve been spreading through the environment. These soaps are also implicated in killing certain kinds of beneficial algal growth and at the same time in promoting other kinds of algal growth that are invasive or harmful in other ways.

 

All regular soaps will work to kill both bacteria and certain viruses, such as the Covid virus, that have a lipid outer shell. The surfactant action of ordinary soap rips apart that protective lipid shell. Anti-bacterial additives might give an additional kick-in-the-shins to bacteria, but they do nothing to help kill viruses.

 

So my next question is:

►Why aren’t health officials making it clear to the public that they should continue to avoid the use of anti-bacterial soaps?

---------

 

Then I wonder how much good wipe-downs really do. As restaurants, bars, and other venues are being allowed to open up again if they take certain precautions, I see staff members swiping over tabletops with presumably antiseptic pads. But is such treatment effective? Again, it seems possible that such cursory swiping might actually be helping superbugs evolve.

 

Hospitals have long tried to be conscientious about sterilizing their premises. But the necessarily incomplete job that’s done of killing germs has helped give rise to especially lethal infections such as MRSA. I remember when I volunteered in a hospital, a head nurse showed us the results of a little research she had done on her own. After a housekeeper had gone through her usual routine of cleaning rooms, the nurse randomly swiped some surfaces, rubbed off what her swab had picked up into a petri dish, and then waited a few days. She held up the resultant petri dish for us to see. Horrors! It was abloom with an effulgence of different-colored germs and fungi!

 

We have been so concentrated on the dangers of the Covid virus we have almost completely forgotten about the approximately 400,000 people that die every year in the U.S. as a result of medical mishap in hospitals. Many of these “mishaps” are infections contracted in the hospitals.

 

Yes, that figure is 400,000 deaths a year, every year! That number has been debated somewhat. Early reports on this largely ignored health hazard started by citing a figure closer to 100,000 deaths a year. But further assessments found that early cited total of needless hospital deaths to be too conservative. The definition of “medical error” was expanded somewhat and so the 400,000 number was reached. Perhaps that overestimates the problem as much as the earlier figure underestimated it. But either way, that figure only takes hospital deaths into account and doesn’t include the many thousands of people who likely die annually as a result of mistakes and misdiagnoses that take place in doctors’ offices and as the result of pharmaceutical errors outside hospitals.

 

Since such a large percentage of whatever shocking number of needless deaths are occurring are indeed due to infections that are contracted in the hospital, it seems likely that standard sterilizing and wash-down techniques don’t reliably work. Those blooms of germs that the head nurse found could likely be found in every hospital today. Hospitals are notorious hothouses for the growth of standard forms of old germs as well as for the cultivation of dangerous new hybrids and evolved forms of infectious agents.

 

So the question is:

►What kind of testing has been done to determine whether casual wipe-downs accomplish anything? How vigorous and prolonged should the antiseptic cleaning be in order to rid surfaces of a sufficient number of germs? How powerful do those currently advertised sanitizing UV lights have to be in order to do the job and how long do they have to be held over a surface in order to be effective?

----------

 

Finally, as a corollary of my above concern, I wonder about the extensive use of ventilators and the attendant intubation that Covid has occasioned. Our government officials were criticized for not having enough ventilators on hand when this pandemic hit. But any treatment involving intubation should be used only as a last resort.

 

My mother was subjected to weeks of intubation in the late 1980’s and no medieval torture could have been worse. Nothing could have wracked the body so thoroughly - all to no avail. People have suggested that current intubation practices carry less risk of infection and injury than they did in the 80’s. But I’m not sure that’s true. The intubation process itself and the need for suctioning introduces myriad opportunities for infections such as pneumonia to be introduced into a patient. The likelihood of lung, tracheal, and other tissue damage is also considerable.

 

It seems that doctors felt pressured to DO SOMETHING when patients presented at a hospital with the Covid virus. They were eager to demonstrate that they were being pro-active, and so they automatically put patients on ventilators and intubated them. But I doubt that was necessary or helpful in a large percentage of cases.

 

I’d like to ask:

►Have follow-up studies been done to determine how effective ventilators and intubation have been or can be in treating people with viral congestion? Has the use of this treatment been declining as the Covid virus persists and as evidence of some of its counterproductive effects has accumulated?

----------

 

There are any number of additional questions that could be asked. Have epidemiologists sequenced the DNA of the virus? If so, have they tracked the path it has taken through countries and host creatures? Is it as prone to mutating as the HIV and common cold viruses are?

 

The politicians and doctors who break into regular TV programming to give Covid up-dates hardly ever address any of these more interesting issues. These individuals, such as Dr. Fauci, have generally been immunologists, dealing with the effects of the virus on individuals. Perhaps epidemiologists who deal with the broader demographics of a disease could add some insights to the news updates, although so much of the research done by these big-picture scientists is retrospective – a charting of information after-the-act. But it seems there is so much more that both kinds of scientists could be telling us besides repeating the need to wash and distance. I want to get to know the virus in a much more precise, scientific way.

 

Every virus has a unique personality and profile and causes unique kinds of damage to its victims and to society at large. The pandemic of 1918 that killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide had devastating consequences even beyond that immediate death toll. It is often called the “orphan-maker virus” because it primarily killed people in their prime, people who were new parents between the ages of 20 and 35. That influenza germ didn’t kill its victims directly. But it had the power to provoke such a strong immune response that people died from their bodies’ own reaction. In that way, it was like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and other autoimmune diseases. You died of the cure as your body attacked good cells as well as germ cells. So that earlier pandemic tended to selectively kill people whose immune systems were the most robust.

 

A friend of mine told me that his father was an orphan of that earlier disease storm. His father was born in Russia which was hit particularly hard by the epidemic. When both of his father’s parents died of that “Spanish flu,” he became one of thousands of orphans who were adopted out to families in the U.S. and Canada. That was before the day of background checks. Children were automatically sent to almost every family offering to adopt.

 

As a forlorn 6-year-old, my friend’s father was put on a boat and traveled to Canada in steerage. It was a particularly rough crossing. The main things the little boy remembered about the trip were the heaving waves and the fact that almost all the passengers were sick most of the way. After landing in Canada, the boy was sent by train to the plains of Saskatchewan where a Mennonite farm family took possession of him. As with many children adopted under these circumstances, he had been sought primarily as an extra pair of hands to help with farm work. He’d been brought over not for love but for labor. He ran away as soon as he got old enough to make his own way in the world.

 

Many, many orphans experienced that kind of Dickensian childhood as a result of the 1918 pandemic. The people who live through this pandemic will undoubtedly have their own, different stories to tell.