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.
Back in Boise
by Anton Zuiker on March 2, 2020
Anna and I are in Boise, Idaho, visiting Katherine and Tom and their children. It’s my first time back in this state since I left with my family in 1983; we lived in nearby Caldwell for five years, and moved to St. Croix that March. Tomorrow Anna and I will visit the street where I lived, walk along the downtown shops, then meet a couple who also served with Peace Corps Vanuatu and who now live in Nampa.
Today we shopped the Boise shops, then toured the studio of Boise State Public Radio, where Tom is general manager. In the afternoon we took a drive to Horseshoe Bend and the Payette River.
Anna is on her spring break, and we came here so she could ski for the first time. Yesterday Tom and Katie drove us up the mountain to Bogus Basin, a nonprofit recreation area within the Boise National Forest, where it was just around freezing and in full sun. We had a blast on the beginner slope, and thoroughly enjoyed the day. I want to bring Oliver and Malia and Erin here next winter.
We arrived in Boise Saturday afternoon, stopped by Hops and Bottles to catch the end of the Olympic marathon trials—a couple of Boise women ran in the lead pack but missed qualifying—then went next door for a leisurely lunch. Katherine showed us to her art studio, and the Boise River and the green belt path directly behind.
That night, I accompanied T&K to dinner with musician Phil Roy, who had decided to revive his tradition of inviting strangers to the table for a meal and conversation (back east he would also play and sing). This reminded me of my Long Table dinner, and the evening in Paris with Jim Haynes. In Boise we ate food prepared by a woman originally from Kenya, and we talked with filmmaker (Return to Mount Kennedy), a nurse who works with refugees at St. Alphonsus health system, a Québécois therapist, and a former reporter who now advocates for immigration policy and who maybe knew about the Idaho law that my father had pushed to make farmers provide portajohns for their workers.
So far, an enjoyable visit.
An accounting
by Anton Zuiker on February 7, 2020
I spent much of the last year reflecting on my place in this world, struggling to find my meaning and purpose, and wondering how to remake myself and my blog in 2020, during which I will have been in my job at the Duke Department of Medicine for 10 years, I will have been a blogger for 20 years, and I will have lived for 50 years. It feels like the year ahead is one to chronicle.
Dave Winer recently advised his readers to “always think of your blog as if you were starting it now, not in the past. The world is different.”
My personal about page, at antonzuiker.com, has long described my origins as a blogger, how I’ve used this medium to connect my far-flung family members and honor my dying grandfather, and what drove me to organize online communities and face-to-face gatherings. I wrote a lot about my childhood, about my experiences as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Vanuatu, about my being a loving husband and father and son and brother, about my decade of narrative, about my work at Duke.
In 2014, my blogging changed, first through silence as I contemplated the lessons of my projects and successes and failures, then through a return to the Zuiker Chronicles with an attempt at slow blogging, then again through a strategy to write short and talk more. I’m still not writing as often or as much or as observant as I want to be, in good part because I seem to have lost sight of what I’m for. Though who I am for is clear to me: I am trying to be a part of a better world for my family, my friends, my community, and you. I recognize that there are important global emergencies, political issues, and societal inequities all around me. I can’t give up or give in.
I went to the dictionary on my bookshelf (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) to check the definition of chronicles—“a record, register, narrative, account”—and of chronicle—” to put on record, to register”—and was reminded that this blog still has a good name. Zuiker Chronicles can continue to honor my forefathers, and can travel with me in the months ahead, to New Orleans and Frederiksted, to Saxapahaw and Alaska’s inner passage, to Alabama where we’ll visit the Equal Justice Initiative.
I recently read Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by EJI founder Bryan Stevenson. Early in the book, Stevenson quotes his grandmother’s advice to him: “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.”
This week my ophthalmologist adjusted my prescription so I can see close better. Perhaps that will help me in blogging in details, chronicling these days, noticing people. Perhaps this should be a year of close blogging. Perhaps this will remind me of the important things, and give me purpose.