WHEN THE PANDEMIC ENDS, WILL NEW PEACE AND QUIET GO WITH IT?
Safety measures brought on by COVID-19 give us an idea of what our cities could be
Things I will miss about the pandemic, when and if it ever ends:
1 Fathers
Last week, while strolling down my street, I passed by a father and son walking in the opposite direction, and I was struck by the fact they were wearing identical plaid shirts. The boy looked to be in his late teens, and he and his father were talking earnestly, but happily, it seemed to me, and as I watched them recede down the street, the father threw his arm around the boy’s shoulders and drew his son to him. The love in that gesture stopped me in my tracks.
Before COVID-19, it was the daily experience in my neighbourhood to see young mothers herding their children down our little streets — in the mornings on their way to the local elementary school, and in the afternoons or the evenings on the way to the beach or playground.
Perhaps feminism failed to penetrate as deeply in the suburbs as in the city, but the preponderance of women handling these weekday duties with their children was striking.
The lockdown changed all that. Fathers began to appear on the street. It was a little jarring at first to see them, the men I had never seen or suspected of living nearby, dressed down in T-shirts and flip-flops and sweatpants, leading a parade of their kids in tow. I expect it was more than a little jarring for them, too, unaccustomed as they were to be going for a walk at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, with no workplace to flee to, at odds with themselves and the new world.
The children, however, seemed to love this, seemed happier for it, excited as they were by the novelty of Everyday Dad. I would watch packs of them parade by the front of my place, yammering away, circling their fathers like maypole dancers. The fathers were caught in their children’s orbit, the new centre of their attention, and sometimes, bringing up the rear of the parade, the mothers would trail behind, smiling slightly, happy for a little relief from their duties maybe, and happy, too, I hoped, that despite all the new privations and worry the pandemic brought, their husbands and children had been joined together by those privations and found some joy in it. And I hoped, too, that the fathers took something good out of it, that they basked in their children’s love and adoration, because when time isn’t stopped as it is now, it hurtles by us, and so, too, do our children and our memories of our time with them.
2 Nature
My son, who works at Vandusen Botanical Garden, reports that the once-shy coyotes who used to skulk around the place came out into the open once the virus drove off the crowds. They had taken to sunning themselves on the great lawn, he said, unconcerned with the occasional gardener who passed by. At moments like that, my son said, the coyotes would look at him dismissively — aware, I like to think, of the new reality. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the coyotes were moving into the vacuum the virus had caused at Vandusen.
Of this seemingly unnatural contact with the natural world, environmentalists see a metaphor.
Nature, long ignored, is re-establishing its dominance and exacting its revenge for our depravities against it.
I can’t speak for Nature, but if the virus has done anything, it has blasted to smithereens the biblical shibboleth of Man’s dominion over the Earth. The author of Genesis clearly knew nothing about viruses. Nature’s smallest agent has brought all of Man’s world to its knees. We know now who’s boss.
And Nature, emboldened, has flourished, at least in my neighbourhood.
Suddenly, birds are everywhere. They have found their voices now that they aren’t being drowned out by the roar of traffic. Swallows, whose numbers have been in decline for years, returned in force this year, or so it seemed to us now that we have the time to watch for them. The shore birds and waterfowl in the bay near our house have it to themselves most days, and luxuriate there undisturbed. Neighbours report sightings of bats after years of their absence. And the sky. Oh my. The green bilious haze that used to hang over Vancouver has disappeared. The long scars of jet contrails are gone, and the roar of jets with them. In their place is a gloriously empty sky, now a deep cornflower blue, rejuvenated, as blue as the skies of a remembered childhood.
3 The Street
Some mornings when the sun is shining, I will stand out on the street in front of my house and hear ... quiet. The neighbours’ cars clearing their throats before the day’s commute, the whine of express buses, all that pre-pandemic weekday commotion is gone, and in its absence the early walkers emerge. There are dozens of them, more than I have ever seen in my neighbourhood, neighbours that I never knew I had. They do not walk down the empty streets so much as march down them, infused with purpose, shaking off the isolation and the added pounds. The joggers pitter-pat by in the mornings, too — most of them, by the looks of their ragged breathing and padded waistlines, new to it. And the dog walkers go dawdling by as they wait while their dogs inspect the premises. The bike riders in all their variety come later in the day — teens happy to roam the streets in packs, families with the youngest ones on training wheels, the spandex-clad squads of road racers furiously zipping by on their whippet-thin bikes.
It’s a heartening sight to see all these people taking over the streets, walking, running, riding, talking, socializing at distance, making the best of it, as numerous on the roads as the cars used to be. Their numbers are instructive, I like to think, of what our cities could be, what we could be if our lives were different, if our relationship with Nature was different, if we heeded not just what the pandemic forces us away from but what it forces us toward. I know that some things will never change, that we must work, we must feed our families, we must be able to touch each other again. But there are, I believe, lessons to be learned here.
In our rush to get back to the old normal and leave this all behind us, I worry that we may forget that it was the old normal that got us where we are.
Nature, long ignored, is re-establishing its dominance and exacting its revenge for our depravities against it.