We face a new peril, and—as always with a new peril—the shape and size of this one is difficult to reckon. How much risk is there, really, and how can this be such a personal question to answer? It is one of the great mysteries that so many people can look at the same set of facts and draw such different conclusions.
I am writing, of course, about my eight-year-old daughter's new skateboard, which she purchased with her own money last week.
Of our two children, Belle is the thrifty one and also has the structural advantage of a birthday that falls just two months after Christmas. This year these two factors helped her accumulate more than $100 in her savings account by the end of February. Last fall, she had talked of saving for a $300 learn-to-code laptop I'd shown her in an issue of Wired, but over time this idea fell away in favor of a skateboard.
Petra and I weren't opposed, in principle. Perhaps some would have said it was a bad sign that the proximate cause of Belle's newfound interest in skateboarding seemed to be a television character—Max, in Stranger Things—but Belle has an athletic bent and this particular activity is not inconsistent with her already demonstrated interests in roller skating, ice skating, rollerblading, and snowboarding. Eventually Petra and I concluded that this was no passing fancy, and one night I clicked through the CCS company's website with Belle to help her place an order for the plain black "complete" board she decided would fit her aesthetic requirements.
A few days earlier, I had put out a Facebook plea for input concerning this purchase and beginning skateboarding more generally, but I neglected to tag anyone who might actually know anything about the subject and the comments were mostly from old people recommending pads and helmets. But I also received a direct message from the young high school teacher who lives across the street, who ended up lending us one of his old boards. Belle and I took it outside for the first time on a Saturday morning, and for the next three hours she experimented with coasting, ollies (while holding my hands), and kicking the board up into her hand with the requisite aplomb.
The teacher's board was old and showed its age. Its bearings were shot and so its wheels turned relatively slowly, although of course this was more of a feature than a bug under the circumstances. My children have now heard approximately 1,000 times the story of how sixth-grade Otto, basking in the afterglow of Back to the Future, broke his leg mere seconds into his first attempt to ride a skateboard. But that was one of those old-fashioned "toy" skateboards with the tiny decks and, to all intents and purposes, greased wheels, causing it to shoot out from under me as soon as I stepped on it like soap in a shower stall. The teacher's skateboard, in all its worn-out glory, therefore addressed my most urgent perceived risk concerning this sport quite nicely.
Meanwhile, as I watched Belle mess around on this board, I found myself feeling more than a little enthusiastic about the prospect of my daughter as a skateboarder. These days a parent sits up and takes notice whenever his kid shows interest in something that doesn't have a screen, not to mention when it also involves actual exercise, and as I thought about it it occurred to me that skateboarding has quite a bit to recommend it.
After my accident I never tried a skateboard again, but I had middle-school and high-school friends who skated and what I remember from hanging out with them while they practiced was that they were willing to spend hours and hours in repeated—and repeatedly failed—attempts at whatever trick they next wanted to master. I hate organized sports with a white-hot passion, so take this next thought with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that an accomplished skateboarder has had to cultivate considerably more grit and determination than an accomplished player of soccer, football, basketball, or any of the other traditional youth sports. It has never seemed to me that there is much that is worthwhile for children to learn from clocking in at daily practices and running drills and plays prescribed by some red-faced, screaming adult, and if you are concerned about some of skateboarding's stereotypical negative associations, don't get me started on the moral hazards of being an elite high school or college athlete. I'd rather raise a pot smoker than a rapist, in other words, but I know everyone has different hopes for their children.
So by noon on that first Saturday, I was sold on the thought of Belle learning to skate. Then I went inside and read the latest comment on my Facebook post, added that morning by the director of our county's emergency management office.
"I've worked EMS way too many years. My kids saved their money and bought skateboards with all the safety gear. Only 3 days after they got them, I ran on a call for a 9-year-old who flipped backwards on a skateboard and struck his head on the berm of the road. He died instantly. And yes he was wearing a helmet. I took my kids' skateboards away as soon as I got home."
In my ten-year-career as a parent, I have noticed a distinct pattern in my response to the expression of safety concerns about my children from anyone other than my wife. There is, first, the barely controllable urge to growl "fuck off," followed closely by the commencement of mental gymnastics in search of every possible justification for concluding that the said concerns are overstated and may summarily be disregarded. (In other words, if you care about my kids and notice they are doing something you think is dangerous, for God's sake never tell me about it.)
My reaction to the OEM director's comment was precisely to the usual form. Why, I wondered—given that the overwhelming number of cases she responded to while working EMS would have been car crashes—does she allow her children to ride in cars? For that matter, one of the most serious injuries experienced by anyone I know personally occurred while walking down a flight of stairs. Wouldn't the OEM director's logic concerning skateboards require moving my family into a one-floor bungalow and never allowing my children to enter multi-story buildings that lack elevators? And then a little quick Googling discovered this preeminently satisfying fact: Basketball sends kids to the emergency room at about twice the rate of skateboarding, and you don't generally see people freaking out when they hear a kid has taken up shooting hoops.
No matter how fond we humans are of pretending that we are the rational animal, in reality we are driven much more by instinct than some of us are comfortable admitting, and no more so than in the way we pick and choose our fears from the immense menu of things there are in the world that could conceivably do us harm. It should be no surprise that we over-estimate risk in many situations. Evolution naturally selected for humans who, on hearing a rustle in the savannah grass, over-estimated their risk of becoming a saber-tooth tiger's lunch. But why do we fixate on certain dangers even as we accept others, often in inverse relationship to their actuarial probabilities?
As a child, my father knew a boy or knew someone who knew a boy who lost sight in one eye as a result of injury caused by a carelessly tossed piece of bread, of all things; eventually, the story goes, the boy's other eye was overstrained and he lost sight in that one, as well.
My father will turn 90 this year. In the course of his long life, God only knows how many people he has gotten to know personally. Thousands, perhaps? But let's say it's only 1,000. That would already put the percentage of people he knows who were blinded by carelessly tossed objects at 0.1, and I think it's safe to say our denominator should be at least an order of magnitude larger. I think it's also safe to say that just about every single other person he has ever met, if not just about every single other person on earth, has been in the lifelong, semi-regular habit of casually tossing things to and receiving such tosses from other people, and that virtually every single one of these tosses has been executed without causing the slightest injury.
From statistics like that, some people might conclude that tossing things to other people is what you might call a low-risk activity, but my father holds the contrary position so firmly that he began drumming this story and its moral into my children from an early age. Today they can recite not only the details but even the young man's name. (In fact, unsure just now what the offending tossed object had actually been, I was able to consult with Axl and confirm that it was, in fact, the aforementioned piece of bread.)
I relate this story not to poke fun at my father but because it is a striking example of a universal truth about risk calculation: no matter how much we may preen about our rationality in some areas, the fact is that we often have no idea why certain fears loom large in our minds and whether they do so for any particularly good reason.
I would hate to have to try to tally up, for example, the amount of mental energy I have expended throughout my life in consideration of how I might avoid falling prey to a serial killer.
Many of us are behaving no more rationally than usual when it comes to calculating the risks posed by this damnable virus. The United States has been living with this virus as a front-and-center concern for about three months, although it's only been two months since the first case in this state. This already feels like a long time, and, as it sinks in on more and more of us that we are still much closer to the beginning than the end of whatever this is, people are coming to a variety of conclusions about how much risk they face and what to do about it.
Given the easy availability of support for just about any conclusion you want to draw, not to mention the disconcertingly rudderless federal response, it is hard to know where to draw certain lines and what constitutes an over-reaction, as opposed to simple prudence in uncertain circumstances. For example, how do we balance the benefits of continued isolation against the psychological risks of never seeing anyone again ever?
Last weekend, Petra joined some women from her book club for a backpacking trip. Because we live in an outdoors paradise, a suitable destination lay less than hour's drive away, and certainly the idea of driving from higher to lower population density along a short enough route to require no stops along the way seemed relatively safe in the abstract. The devil would be in the details, of course. Everyone brought her own tent, which seemed like a safe idea, but a couple of women carpooled, which seemed iffier. As I watched the caravan of vehicles pulling out of the neighborhood, I saw one containing not only a driver but another woman riding as passenger in the rear seat. As a precaution, all the windows were down, but the passenger's husband—who was standing next to me—observed that the plan for both women to wear masks seemed already to have been abandoned.
After Petra returned two days later, we engaged in one of the after-action risk reviews that are probably common in many families these days, although I suppose my thinking so may indicate just how relatively sheltered and safe our day-to-day activities feel compared to those of many other people. Petra had driven alone, and so her highest-risk moments had been when, occasionally, members of the group drifted closer than six feet together along a trail they were hiking and when they'd all stood together for however long it had taken to snap a couple of the usual group selfies. Given that there has been barely a single documented case of outdoors transmission, we felt like we could tentatively assign this adventure to the "probably safe" column.
What other kinds of travel might also feel safe? We know a family that is planning to keep a longstanding reservation for a stay two weeks from now at a sort of KOA campground near Harper's Ferry, "for a change of scene." Despite having three young children, including twin kindergartners, their hope is to be able to the make the three-or-so-hour drive without stopping, "sanitize the cabin" upon arrival, and then just keep to themselves for the weekend. This plan and the considerations it takes into account suggests that they and I are not on completely different wavelengths, and yet I would not feel comfortable traveling in the direction of higher population density and infection rates just yet.
Here in this state, of course, we are throwing wide the doors just in time for Memorial Day weekend, and the same concerns that would keep me from driving to, say, Virginia seem likely to inspire more than a few Virginians to set out in the opposite direction. Our comparatively much lower infection rate wouldn't be the only draw. If the Virginia state government's coronavirus FAQ web page is up to date, you still can't eat inside restaurants there; not only can you do that in this state, you can even drink in bars as of a couple of days ago. I note that it was just this week when Virginia saw its largest single-day rise in newly detected infections. It will be interesting to see what our numbers start to do in about ten days.
What do the rest of our own household risk assessments look like? Well, Petra goes out into the world on a fairly regular basis, but her job as an environmental inspector of military facilities takes place mostly outside and doesn't put her in contact with many people; fortunately, all of the people she does have to interact with seem to accept the importance of least keeping their distance. And because we aren't yet willing to order frozen mice 50 at a time through Amazon, Petra does drop by a pet store every now and then to get food for Axl's corn snake. Last week, for a change, the pet-store employees were wearing masks.
I handle getting the groceries for the rest of the household, and I've managed to do so since March without once setting foot in a grocery store. If I found that I absolutely had to do so, I could reconcile myself to the prospect, but only in a mask and at an uncrowded time of day. My Tito's supply is getting low, and last night I found my mind beginning to open to the possibility of visiting a liquor store sometime in the next few weeks, using the same precautions as I would for a grocery store. But I'll certainly check out my online ordering options, first.
I don't feel the slightest temptation to enter any other sort of business. I could maybe see eating in a restaurant's outdoor dining section, assuming ten or so feet of distance between my table and the others and depending on wind direction. But I can't see myself dining inside a restaurant anytime soon, given that, as an inherent side effect of the whole point of being there, none of my fellow customers would be masked. From my reading, it seems that 50 minutes is about as long as you'd want to risk spending in an enclosed space with unmasked people, and that's assuming not a single cough or sneeze, raucous burst of laughter, or snatch of song.
We won't be sending the children to any kind of day care or camp this summer. As for the fall, who knows how we will feel about school under whatever conditions exist by that time. Our county-level school administration team isn't full of people you'd be quick to accuse of bravery or creative thinking, so I can't say I'm confident about what their plans for reopening would look like. I'll admit I've glanced at the web page listing the state's requirements and procedures for home schooling.
Talking about all of this feels awkward, sort of like discussing salaries or maybe, more accurately, sharing a sexual fantasy. What if I'm the only one who feels this way, and everyone finds out I'm a weirdo? Our governor never tires of pointing out what he calls the "miracle" of this state's current low level of outbreak (although, in my opinion, he gives too much credit to the actions of state residents, as opposed to geography and long ingrained cultural patterns). But it's true: we are toward the very low end of the nation in terms of infection and death rates. If New York City were somehow able to move from its currently still awful situation to one resembling ours, a vast number of New Yorkers would probably feel as though the emergency were basically over and things really could go back to just about normal.
In other words, given how many other states "would kill" (the governor's words, again) to have numbers like ours, sometimes I wonder: Am I a snowflake for insisting on continuing to take relatively strenuous precautions? Am I inflating our risk the way the OEM director inflated the risk of skateboarding?
Then I remember some of the things that differentiate this virus from most of the many other risk factors to which I've accommodated myself over the years: its exponential growth potential; its still barely understood long-term effects; and the fact that, although our local hospital and other components of our healthcare infrastructure appear competent and express confidence in their ability to handle an outbreak, as far as I know they have yet to treat a single inpatient virus infection and so haven't been put to the slightest test.
So we'll bide our time for a bit longer, I think, and Belle will be riding her skateboard as we do.
