Our clipped wings
During this COVID-19 intermission, we’re redrawing our mental maps of the world on the fly, and everywhere there be dragons
SKULLS AND CROSBONES ARE PLASTERED OVER EARLIER MOREPLEASANT MEMORIES OF A FAMILY VACATION IN ROME, A HONEYMON IN THE GREEK ISLANDS, A LONG WEEKEND SPENT IN NEW YORK
Three months ago, if you’d offered me a bargain trip for three days in New York City, I’d have jumped at the chance. And if you’d given me an all- expenses-paid week in the rural Manitoban hamlet of my choice, my answer as a stuck-up Torontonian would have been: Thanks, but I’m good.
The opposite is now true. Manitoba is hardly a COVID-FREE paradise, but with just a handful of active cases, and only seven deaths since the pandemic began, it’s a haven compared to next- door neighbor Ontario, where the number of cases has been 100 times greater, and where more than 2,200 have died, over a third of those in Toronto. New cases in the most populous province continue to grow by hundreds each day.
In Winnipeg, you can, as of June 1, visit a restaurant, a swimming pool or a tattoo parlour, go to the zoo or a bowling alley, and gather indoors in groups of up to 25. Movie theatres remain closed, but imagine the thrill a Torontonian would feel if you told him he could get a haircut and then go out for a drink to celebrate the end of his mullet-hood.
But while Manitoba sounds like a kind of Eden past the top of Lake Superior, a trip in the opposite direction to New York City — even if the border were open, which is isn’t — wouldn’t be much fun. America’s first city has seen more than 16,000 deaths, twice the number in all of Canada combined, and part of a north-of-100,000 toll that puts America in the unenviable position of No. 1 in COVID-19 fatalities.
Prevailing wisdom is that the pandemic turned the world on its head, but the truth is far more complicated. As one location after another takes the dubious crown of “epicentre,” as one curve peaks while another flattens, as some jurisdictions remain solidly locked down as others tentatively re-open and a few are stubbornly unchanged, Canadians find themselves turning this way and that in spasms of sympathy, schadenfreude or sullenness. How did this country get off so easy? Why is that one opening its pubs already?
Often, we feel one wave of emotion followed by another in rapid succession. Just two months ago, Italy was witnessing almost 1,000 deaths a day, amid reports that the bodies couldn’t be buried fast enough. It was heartbreaking, but though no one knew it at the time, it was also the peak.
Since then, numbers in Italy have fallen, and while they’re not great — several hundred new cases daily as of last week, and 50 to 100 dead each day — the trend is ever downward. As of June 3, tourists from the EU and U.K. can visit without going into quarantine, a move the government calls a “calculated risk.” Bars, restaurants and museums have been slowly reopening since mid-may.
Each of us carries a map in our minds of the world at large, emotionally coded. Places I’ve been. Places I’d love to go. Places you couldn’t pay me to visit. Cheap vacation spots. Expensive ones. Take it or leave it. Here be dragons. And while a local catastrophe like an earthquake or a terror attack might briefly turn some territories no-go red, they’d soon shift back.
No longer. Putting aside the fear of going anywhere in a public vehicle such as an airplane, and the impossibility of crossing most borders, we now look out on the planet with a bizarre sense of unease that extends to the edge of the map. Skulls and crossbones are plastered over earlier more- pleasant memories of a family vacation in Rome, a honeymoon in the Greek islands, a long weekend spent in New York.
We abandon Yelp reviews in favour of the Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 map, in which the world is covered with overlapping red circles. It looks like a nuclear exchange has taken place. “Hot spots” takes on a new meaning. This is where death is.
It can be difficult to redraw those mental maps on the fly. When I was forced to stay home from Cannes last month after the cancellation of the film festival, part of my brain imagined the event was somehow going on without me. So I tracked down a webcam live- streaming from the top of the Palais des Festivals, where I could check in daily on what would in most years be the bustling international pavilion, now looking like an empty parking lot, a few brave flâneurs passing through.
And the apparent randomness, both of the virus and of our governments’ reactions to it, can rankle, or at least puzzle. This week a single page in the National Post carried news that there were no new deaths over 24 hours in hard- hit Spain; lockdowns lifting in Moscow and Mumbai, in spite of surging numbers and predictions of more; and, just for epidemiological variety, an Ebola outbreak in Congo.
COVID-19 has touched almost every region and territory, though there are a few exceptions. Tiny island nations Tuvalu and Micronesia have no cases; neither does North Korea, if you can believe that. And the 5,000 or so residents of Antarctica remain virus-free, as do the five astronauts aboard the International Space Station. None are easy destinations for tourists at the best of times. And these are the worst.
Normalcy will come back, sooner or later. Like polio, the Spanish flu, SARS, swine flu and any number more you’d care to mention, the tide of COVID-19 will recede, conquered or just exhausted, although inevitably a different wave will one day wash over us.
In the meantime, we shelter in place, looking out at a world remade in the image of a sub- microscopic pseudo-lifeform. Once we felt free to pick a location and set out for it, or at least dream of doing so. Now our tourism fantasies involve travel in time as well as space. I want to visit the New York City of 2019. Or just maybe the New York of 2021. Just not the one we have today.