A perfect place to play hooky
Keith Weiss Park offers an escape from the ‘new normal’
Everywhere in Keith Weiss Park, you spot people playing hooky from their ordinary lives. Right off of Aldine Westfield Road, it feels like one of those places you go if you want to be unreachable for a while. Everyone seems to be taking brief reprieve from the breakneck pace of “back to normal” in the so-called “post-pandemic” world, the rhythm of which compels us onward despite the time and people we’ve lost — their absence anything but normal.
To get to the park you’ll pass a U-Do washateria, scrap metal recycling plants, alignment shops and tire joints. The endless procession of tractor trailers and cement trucks provide a diesel purr that travels far into the park. But not long after you enter it — past the first bridge toward the secret pond — most of that noise disappears. Only to be replaced by the call-and-response of cardinals, the racket of insects, the tinny sound of an old-time bolero playing softly from someone’s phone in the woods.
The car
Early in the pandemic, I noticed mostly high-schoolers there — burnt out from online learning, hungry for social interaction. But early on a recent Tuesday morning, I see a good cross-section of society. A transmission repairman in a blue jumpsuit wielding a walking stick. A middle-aged professional getting his heart rate up in a pair of slacks. A house cleaner still donning her smock setting out for a hike with a friend in a soccer jersey who brought lunch. Everyone disappearing into the woods, which close tight around the trail before opening up to a basin of twin ponds, herons gliding over them.
As far as Houston parks go, Keith Weiss is not the most beautiful park but someone has to love it. While I’ve come here throughout the pandemic, now I come to work remotely al fresco. I tested positive for COVID, and there are few places one can ethically go outside of the home. These new variants are about as contagious as the measles. In any case, it’s easy to socially distance in Keith Weiss. Pick a trail (there are plenty of secret ones) and wander off along Halls Bayou. On one bend in the water, you can peer in to see a
half-submerged bullet-riddled car with small trees sprouting from the windows. Or you can amble down the rumor of a footpath to find myriad secret enclaves in the woods which dot the entire park. Everything has the feeling of a slowdown, of something nearing a coda.
As one might imagine, I’ve got thoughts about the “postpandemic” as I convalesce in my makeshift office in the woods overlooking the aforementioned car. It was exactly this societal push for a “return to normal” that got me exposed and infected with COVID in the first place after more than two years of successfully avoiding the virus. How many times in recent weeks had I been surrounded by unmasked people at work obligations and auditoriums? How many more times had I been told by likely well-meaning people throughout the past two years that the pandemic was nearing an end? Even as case numbers surged time and time again. Worse still, unmasked strangers have felt compelled to approach to inform me that masks were no longer required, something that happened to me recently at a Buc-ee’s in Katy.
The snake
The other day I spotted a snake at the edge of the water, bigger around than my arm. A group of high school girls offered to pelt the creature away with stones. They called out to an older lady who was walking a dog. Some toy breed type that was too close to the ground. From the opposite side of the footpath a kid, probably mid-20s, suggested that if it were awake then it might feel our foot vibrations and slither off. The highschoolers jumped up and down. I stomped along with them. We proceeded like this for a while until the kid approached us from the opposite side of the footpath with a stick, which I thought he was going to use. Instead he stuck his foot under the snake and rolled it out of the water. Only
then did we realize it was missing a head. The body lay bloody and shorn.
As of this writing, 1 million Americans have died from COVID. In the greater Houston area, required masking has been eased — referred to as “the great unmasking” — even as the first week of May saw an effective virus reproduction rate of 1.26, up from 0.97 the week prior, meaning the community spread is increasing. For many there’s wishful thinking that the pandemic is behind us — including the Texas Medical Center which all but proclaimed “mission accomplished” when it shut down its weekly COVID-19 dashboard as of May 9.
I’ll concede we have come very far since March 2020 when so much was still unknown about the virus. Shuttered parks have since reopened. And most obviously now, we have vaccinations and the knowledge that masks work. Nearly 80 percent of eligible Harris County residents have received at least one vaccine dose. COVID deaths have decreased dramatically. In short, we know what works. We know how to mitigate COVID’s spread. That said, we’re now headed into the summer — when people often travel on vacation — with new variants circulating and few effective treatments for long COVID patients, which early studies estimate affect roughly one-third of unvaccinated COVID survivors. As of this writing, children under 5 years old are still ineligible for COVID vaccines of any kind.
Marketwise, you hear the usual arguments (many of them good) for a return to normalcy: supply chain woes, jobs numbers, educational equilibrium, etc. For what it’s worth, I think no one is arguing for a return to the darkest days of the pandemic in terms of lockdowns and closing schools. Yet I wonder if there’s a psychological toll from returning to “normal” life too fast, without proper vigilance or consideration for others’ health, and without fully reckoning with what we’ve lost. There is something undeniably tragic about the societal attempt to recreate a world before the pandemic that will actually never be again. Or, as one friend put it recently, our attempt to recreate a time before we had to reckon with our dead.
In lieu of doing the hard work of rebuilding society in a constructive manner that acknowledges and learns from that fallout of the pandemic, we’ve chosen busyness. In lieu of mourning our dead, we’ve been browbeaten to forget and move on. Governors, employers, educational leadership everywhere urge us: Don’t pause. Don’t look those losses too hard in the eye. Don’t consider the tiny revolutions inside of yourselves and what they might reveal. Move on, move forward.
But as much as we might crave normalcy (whatever that means anymore), it’s a fact that there are people missing. Classroom chairs are empty. Office cubicles are vacant. Entire half-sides of the bed are hollow each night. And, of course, this is no truer than for the Black and brown communities of Houston who have fared the worst during the pandemic.
Tiny revolutions
It’s heartening to see the tiny revolutions of the heart inside Keith Weiss most days. These small acts of resistance, of reclaiming the fabric of one’s life, fly directly in the face of this urge to return to normal. What if escapism from the perverted instinct to gloss over that massive amount of loss we just encountered is our best path forward? What if making space and time for our own reckonings, both personal and societal, was the key to helping us see ourselves as part of the community and biosphere we inhabit? What if in the end that’s all it took to help us understand what it means to be accountable for one another? Time and reflection. A coda to make space for the lost and living.
Like most everything in Keith Weiss, its role as a place to escape normalcy feels completely unexpected yet inevitable.
“Looks like an alligator got it,” the kid in his mid-20s said of the mauled snake.
Even headless, shorn off as it was, the snake was well over 4 feet long. And then there was the matter of what happened to its head. Which might seem like a trivial question but for the fact that it was the business end of the snake, after all. The venom, the threat. Where did its head go? That question took up, what seemed to be, the entire morning. The lady with the dog kicked around for it. The kid kept asking the question over and over again like we could ever find an answer. Like we had all of the time in the world to find it. And actually we did.
“As of this writing, 1 million Americans have died . ... In the greater Houston area, required masking has been eased.”
Daniel Peña