Almanac: Waldhurst in September

 THAT TERRIBLE GRINDING NOISE you are hearing is the sound of mental gears being stripped across the country. A few months back, all of this pandemic stuff was supposed to be over and it even seemed possible the nation might be falling in love with a Democratic president. We took off our masks and started making plans for the summer and for the future of our society.

Then, the delta variant reared its head and Kabul fell and everything went to shit.

The two things will forever be connected in my mind. About a year ago, an old friend of mine, displaced by the pandemic from his assistant-dean-of-something-or-other position at a stateside university, took a job at the American University of Afghanistan. (Unsurprisingly, just about no stateside universities were expanding their work forces during the pandemic. The few that were probably had hundreds if not thousands of qualified candidates to choose from. This does not seem to have been the case in Kabul.)

Taking this new job seemed like a dangerous move even a year ago. For a quick gut check about how far south things have gone in that poor country, first try to recall what you would have thought of a friend’s decision to move to Kabul in the fall of 2020. Next, consider how desperately anyone in Afghanistan not currently wearing a beard would probably give to return to those comparably halcyon days now.

I dropped my friend a line via Facebook Messenger in June, back when the pandemic felt over and I couldn’t have told you where my mask was.

“How you making it?” I asked. Vaguely aware that the Taliban was notching victories and expanding control, even as the U.S. departure date drew nearer, I was thinking more about explosions and gunfire than microbes.

“7 days in hospital w[ith] Delta variant and pneumonia,” came his reply. “Had better days.”

Ten out of the university’s 13 international staff members were sick with COVID-19, he told me. He was one of four who had ended up in the hospital with it.

My initial reaction was skepticism. Surely this simply meant he and the others hadn’t been vaccinated yet? It wouldn’t have astounded me to learn that the vaccine rollout in Kabul had been limited.

“There are 27 COVID patients [in this hospital],” he typed. “All vaccinated and all w[ith] pneumonia.”

This was the moment when I first began to understand that the delta variant might pose a real problem.

My friend spent 14 days in the hospital—he sent me pictures of an unfriendly cat on its daily rounds, squat toilets, armed soldiers, and windowless safe rooms—before finally testing negative and flying out of the country for some rest and relaxation.

Then he went back to Kabul.

“Tell me you are out of there,” I messaged him on August 16, the day after the city fell.

“I got out my friend,” he wrote back. “…completely [b]roken seeing all we left behind. Completely broken.”

IT USED TO BE THAT, after summer break ended, you could simply say your kids were back in school. Now you have to specify. Are they actually walking/riding the bus to the actual brick-and-mortar building? Or are they just putting on a non-pajama shirt and logging onto Google Classroom in the living room?

So to be clear: Here in Waldhurst, the county schools opened for “in-person instruction” about two weeks ago, and the delta variant be damned. After a year of home/virtual schooling, Axl was starting middle school, Belle was entering fourth grade, and Petra and I couldn’t wait to see them go, vaccinations or no.

The state education department does still offer the virtual school that Axl and Belle “attended” last spring, after our county school board abruptly terminated its local remote-schooling option in January. A friend recently asked if they would be continuing in the state program this fall.

I explained the risk/benefit analysis we’d performed.

On one hand, the risk from attending in-person instruction seems to be of approximately the same order of magnitude as riding in cars, which of course we make our kids do all the time without any real concern. (Am I calculating that wrong? The CDC says that, in 2018, about 600 kids died in car accidents; meanwhile, NPR reports that, from the beginning of the pandemic through July, only 358 “children” have died from COVID, although apparently our 50 states are not all using the same definition of “child.”) 

On the other hand, another year of virtual schooling would likely have led to the murder/suicide destruction of our entire family, or at least my final descent into alcoholism. (There's the punchline, if that's what you were looking for.)

Out of our deep and abiding love for our children, then, we sent them off to school.

AT LEAST OUR COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD had imposed a 100-percent masking requirement for students and staff. There are no statewide mask mandates here, our governor having dusted off that occasional Republican talking-point-of-convenience about the superiority of local control and decision making. We’d just be tearing each other apart if I imposed a mask order statewide, he said. (Instead, we are now the state where the infection rate is growing fastest.)

So, every morning, a long line of masked children waits to get on the bus on the next street over. By some critics’ reckoning, this should be ravaging both their physical and mental health, but they seem to me like the same old bunch of happy-go-lucky hooligans as ever.

As vitriolic as the issue of mask-wearing is in so many places around the country, there didn’t seem to be much kerfuffle about the school board’s decision to mandate masks. If armed activists mobbed the board meeting or made death threats to the members, I haven’t heard about it.

There was at least one protest against the policy, led by a teacher from the more rural of the county’s two high schools. This teacher has, let us say, something of a history. He has run for governor several times on the ticket of the Constitution Party and also for sheriff—“constitutional sheriff,” naturally. A few years back, he was giving reporters defensive, even admiring comments about a “sovereign citizen” friend of his arrested in 2015 over an ahead-of-its-time plan to overthrow the state government. From time to time, he drives his loudspeaker-equipped car through the streets, monologizing about the Bible (he’s for it) and the state of religious freedom in this great nation (he is concerned but also apparently unable to detect irony).

MANY OF US VACCINATED PEOPLE feel uncertain how much good we are doing or need to be doing with our masks. The one I wear most often, because it’s comfortable, is clearly not doing much for me or anyone else. Because it’s comfortable. I can’t summon up much worry, however. Despite my friend’s experience in Kabul, my read of the current evidence is that, statistically speaking, I have only the most vanishingly small chance of getting noticeably sick or causing anyone else to become so. When I wear my comfortable mask, it is mainly to support local health authorities in trying to convince the unvaccinated to do so, not to mention my desire to avoid starring in some local crank’s meme about local government employees who don’t follow official advice.

My mask wearing serves more to send a message than anything else, in other words, but that message is only an implicit one. By contrast, there are some people who see wearing a mandatory square of fabric on their faces as yet another opportunity—in addition to their bumper stickers, flags, ball caps, and t-shirts—to broadcast the opinions they worry the rest of us are disadvantaged by not hearing.

In the early days of the pandemic, the message masks I spotted on the streets or Instagram were what you might call pro-precaution, e.g., Back that ass up—6 feet, that is, etc. As lockdowns and mandates began to chafe more and more, however, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to separate anti-but-still-mandated-maskers from their money, too.

On the first day of school, Axl spotted one of these on a fellow student. This mask is as useless as Joe Biden, read the message emblazoned on the kid’s mask. On the second day, he’d switched to Worn by force, not by fear. (As citizens of the most fear-struck nation ever to be mistaken for a superpower, many Americans seem obsessed with denying how afraid they constantly feel, but—if I had to guess—my money would be on the position that this kid's parents' probably break into a cold sweat even thinking about driving into Pittsburgh for a day trip to the Carnegie Science Museum.)

The next week, though, Axl said the boy seemed to have switched to disposable masks. I hope this doesn’t mean the school has told him that his mask messages are “disruptive” and ordered him to stop. I wouldn’t want this student and his parents to have the pleasure of seeing their fever fantasy of being unconstitutionally oppressed proved true.

BELLE'S ELEMENTARY SCHOOL made it through four days of in-person instruction, then switched to remote for the next four days after too many staff members ended up on quarantine. This went surprisingly smoothly, but only because my mother reopened the one-room schoolhouse she operated most of last year to help me and Petra manage. It also went smoothly because (1) all the kids have county-issued Chromebooks this year and (2) both teachers and students gained experience with Google Classroom last year.

Axl’s school is still open, for now. We’ll see how long that lasts.