Rain day, May day
by Anton Zuiker on May 29, 2020
It is the last Friday in May, and it came in and stayed with torrents of rain. From my desk in the library here at the house, I worked from before 7 a.m. all the way through to 6 p.m. Now it is the weekend, and I must rest.
But rest does not come easily. The world is in turmoil still with COVID-19, and the United States is torn apart again with tension and corruption. We cannot pause in the march to freedom and justice.
Let June arrive with sunshine and hope.
Fifty
by Anton Zuiker on April 2, 2020
I thought about writing a failure resume for today, my birthday. There’s certainly plenty for me to look back on—five decades of projects and teams and conferences and communities and jobs and personal goals, fifty years of announcing my ambitions and grand ideas and promises, a long list of ways I tried, succeeded or failed, let people down or built them up, how I wised up and what I learned.
But I woke up this morning knowing it was to be a day off of work and a sliver of a moment to put these pandemic anxieties aside (I’ve been sheltering in place for two weeks now, and following global and national news carefully, and working 12 hours a day to do my part for the Duke Department of Medicine). Erin was beside me, wishing me a special day, and I felt nothing but fortunate.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
“I want to run, blog, read, and garden,” I said.
So off I went for a run in the cool, sunny morning, and as I made my way west down the gravel road, my long shadow ran in front of me. It seemed to be telling me something about that failure resume.
“You’ve already been blogging for nearly 20 years, and you’ve chronicled your life and your learning. You’re right where you need to be, in the moment, the road and the rest of your life ahead. Yol bolsun!”
I was supposed to be in New Orleans for a conference, speaking on a panel and receiving an honorable mention award for Voices of Duke Health, then flying to St. Croix to meet the family for spring break. But all that’s changed, and here I was staying home in Chapel Hill.
I ran on, onto the trail near the lake, in the moment, up and down, and back to the house, where I sat with Oliver at the table, listening to his presentations about Atlantic salmon and Shanghai skyscrapers, then reading more of Apeirogon by Colum McCann.
Now, it’s time to plant wildflowers.
A night out back
by Anton Zuiker on March 29, 2020
Our campsite in the woods.
Yesterday, a Saturday, was hot—in the high 80s—and so I spent the afternoon outside, raking more topsoil into the front yard, retrieving eggs from the chicken coop, and tending to the fruit trees around the house.
Later, I walked a hundred yards into the woods to the stone fire ring we gathered last year. I raked away a blanket of leaves, gathered up some kindling and firewood, and strung up two hammock tents that I purchased last year from a Kammok Kickstarter. Oliver eventually joined me and climbed into the blue tent. “This is so cool,” he said from inside.
After dinner, we returned to the campsite with Erin and Anna, talked around the fire, and when Erin and Anna returned to the house (they later texted that they were with Malia watching Outbreak), Oliver and I settled into the hammocks to sleep. An owl hooted twice, and once the neighbors stopped exploding fireworks, the woods settled into tranquility.
We woke with the morning bird chorus and walked to the house for breakfast.
Travel on, Alexander
by Anton Zuiker on March 22, 2020
Needing a break from the continuing tsunami of coronavirus news, I drove the truck (Ford Ranger, with license plate PAAMA) to Brockwell’s for a load of topsoil and, once home, went out back to prepare a patch of the yard for summer wildflowers. Digging and raking and running my hands through the dirt was therapeutic and yet I kept thinking about this pandemic and its impact on life around the world, from China to Italy to Chapel Hill and Durham. Shockingly, all Peace Corps volunteers were recalled this week, and I found myself thinking about Vanuatu, and then I wondered how Alexander Frater was faring. Frater is the travel writer we met on Paama Island, where Erin and I were PCVs, and we’d visited him at his home in London in 1999, and I\‘d seen him again briefly in 2011. Frater wrote about us in Tales from the Torrid Zone, his memoir about Vanuatu and Fiji.
Inside, after dinner, I searched the web, and learned that Frater died on January first of this year. He was two days short of his 83rd birthday, according to the obituary in the Guardian. Steven Fowler wrote this more personal tribute to Alex.
I paused for a moment of silence to honor Alex. Then I searched my blog archives, and found a 2003 post, Immunizations are good, in which I quoted a passage from Chasing the Monsoon about previous epidemics of infectious diseases and their toll: “A flu epidemic followed the measles; another measles epidemic followed that.”
When I was in the yard today, thinking about coronavirus, I wondered about my role in this global fight for life. Staying healthy is primary, I thought.
Now that it’s the end of the night, and I’ve confronted the death of a man I admired, I think writing must also be my response. Alex chronicled his travels and conversations and his observations about the world. He’d inscribed Chasing the Monsoon to us: “For Anton and Erin—Well-met on Paama! With all good wishes—Alexander Frater.”
Seeing that signature has inspired me anew to face this deluge upon us.
Return to Caldwell
by Anton Zuiker on March 14, 2020
I’ve been back in North Carolina for 10 days, and when I would have been blogging about the nostalgic second part of the Idaho trip, including the drive to Caldwell to see my childhood home, and the baseball field where I played catcher and second base, and the city swimming pool where I earned race ribbons, and the dinner and storian in Nampa with Peace Corps Vanuatu friends Doug Clegg and Pat Duncan, and the hike with Katherine and Anna in the Boise foothills, I’ve instead been at work, focused—like all humanity—on the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are extraordinary times. Nations are on lockdown, U.S. schools are closed and most large entertainment and business gatherings are canceled, and Duke has restricted travel, for a few weeks but also the foreseeable future. That means I won’t be attending the AAMC communicators conference or celebrating my fiftieth birthday in New Orleans, our family spring break on St. Croix is up in the air, and a summer cruise to Alaska canceled.
Now is a time to stay calm, stay healthy, and stay put.
In January, when I first read about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, I thought back to my graduate studies. In the spring of 2003, I was taking Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases with Ralph Baric. One morning, he talked about the SARS illness that was in the headlines, and a phone call he’d just gotten asking him to get involved. He was, it turns out, one of the experts on coronaviridae. I wrote about his research soon after in an article titled Stalking SARS.
I keep thinking about this novel I read a few years ago. In a Perfect World, by Laura Kasischke, is about a family struggling to survive as the ‘Phoenix flu’ leads to the world falling apart. I found it on the bookshelf and handed it to Erin.
— You should read this, Erin. It’s a story about a woman trying to keep a group alive as society falls apart.
— Is it hopeful?
— Not really.
She tossed it back.
As I returned the book to the shelf, I paused to remember how the family in that story faced the hunger that eventually arrived.
The next day, I prepared two flats of seeds for the garden. My father taught me to garden in the backyard of that house in Caldwell.