Social Distance

Long Beach Peninsula is nearly deserted. Biting cold and windy. Wide empty beaches. Long stretches of road with no traffic on it. We haven’t seen another person closer than 50 feet away, and that only at the motel. We’ve been reading, sometimes silently and sometimes aloud to each other, Sue has been painting, and we take walks—shorter than we planned because it’s so cold, even with 2 layers of long underwear and two jackets. In the afternoon we drove through a beautiful little town called Oysterville, established in 1852, the whole town a national monument with a row of still-occupied Victorian houses, some with topiary and wind-blown, frost-bitten gardens, all with white picket fences. 

What has moved us most, in all our reading, is the work of Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for her books of oral history, documenting war, the decline of the USSR, and the aftermath of Chernobyl. Her Nobel Lecture is powerful and includes this observation made in Chernobyl: “You couldn’t see the radiation, or touch it, or smell it … The world around was both familiar and unfamiliar. When I traveled to the zone, I was told right away: don’t pick the flowers, don’t sit on the grass, don’t drink water from a well … Death hid everywhere, but now it was a different sort of death. Wearing a new mask. In an unfamiliar guise. Old people who had lived through the war were being evacuated again. They looked at the sky: “The sun is shining … There’s no smoke, no gas. No one’s shooting. How can this be war? But we have to become refugees.” It sounds eerily like this moment.