It’s three days until the 5 year anniversary of lockdown for my hometown. On March 16, 2020, the San Francisco Bay Area was one of the first to close everything. I remember the weirdness viscerally. One luxury remained. Since I live at the beach, I was allowed to walk to the beach. All city dwellers were banned from the beach areas, so the beaches were empty, which felt profoundly unfair. But it was kind of wonderful to have the beach empty except for my local neighbors.
Part of the weirdness was that every day, there was something new and dead at the beach. It made me kind of paranoid. One day, the beach was littered with tiny blue jellyfish corpses. The next day, a perfectly preserved dead bobcat was on the beach. The next day, a whale carcass. The next, black birds, all dead, littered the shore. The next, three dead seals.
I’ve been walking the beach on a daily basis for 17 years. I’d never seen anything like it before or since, so it felt apocalyptic. It was very scary when we thought the air could kill us, before we really understood what we were dealing with.
My housemate April was disinfecting our mail. We were wild harvesting food, since it was spring and there are many edible wild plants where I live. Between what was frozen in our freezers and what we could harvest outdoors, we didn’t have to go to the stores. That felt safer at the time.
One of my close friends had been abandoned by his fiance in the middle of the night. He woke up days into lock down to find her disappeared. It took a good week before he realized she had willfully abandoned him, taking her stuff with her in the dark shadows of moonlight. We moved him into our house because he was so depressed, we were afraid he was going to die. He’s an elder. He was frail already. So after moving him in, we had to keep his vulnerability in mind every time we made a decision about what to bring into our Covid bubble. We sacrificed a lot of freedom in order to take him in. But it felt like the least we could do.
A writing teacher friend told me to write down everything, that one day, the writers among us would begin to piece together what had happened. Here are some snippets of what I wrote.
I think the jetty of rocks in Bolinas is just that- rocks. But a part of me sees ships coming from desperate places to infect our shores. Nobody in Bolinas has Covid. One of the rich residents paid for everyone to get tested, even though Covid tests are scarce and I can’t find a single one to keep at home. I wonder if the entitled people from big cities will try to sneak their way to Bolinas to try to stay safe. I wonder if they’ll get the old hippies who hide out there sick.
Because of lockdown, the ten years of construction noise that has been happening next door has finally ceased. The air that could kill us is still and silent, a combination of danger and utter peace. I feel guilty that parts of me are enjoying this, knowing that it’s my extreme privilege to live right next to a national park, when so many are trapped in tenement housing, breathing the same air.
My neighbors all gather, social distancing, to watch the sunset. It’s become a nightly party, a pagan ritual that touches upon the vulnerability we all feel. We are celebrating surviving another day. It brings me nearly to tears every night, seeing my sweet neighbors. They bring homemade kombucha and bags of vegetables harvested from their gardens. We are afraid to touch things from each other’s gardens or houses, but we risk doing so anyway. It’s like a free farmer’s market, everyone sharing our bounty. A part of me wishes this wouldn’t end. It’s so nice to have all the tourists gone, leaving only my friends. But still, I feel survivor’s guilt as I watch the news and see that the people dying the most are the ones with the fewest privileges. I did not earn my survival. They did not earn their death. It feels profoundly unfair.
Today, I hiked an empty trail to a tree where a wooden swing hangs. Someone had carved into it “We’re all gonna die.” I felt scared to touch the swing. Someone else who could be sick had clearly touched it before me. But I wanted to swing on that swing, to feel my legs kicking and see the ocean on the horizon, more than I wanted to avoid touching a potentially infected surface. So I swang.
My daughter looks like a ghost, sitting in front of that Zoom screen with the whites flickering on her face after 12 years of Waldorf no-screens. No media. No TV. No movies. No phones. No computers for 12 years. And now, all of the sudden, it’s all screens, all the time. She is checked out. I can tell. Our puppy is the only thing keeping her in her body, as she wraps herself around that dog like a security blanket.
We are becoming a blue zone. If this pandemic lasted indefinitely, we would become even more so, I suspect. Our community has set up an anonymous fund to help anyone who isn’t doing okay. The young people are going to the stores for the old people. People have become hostile to outsiders, since so many people here are quite elderly and fragile. We are protecting them, but it feels wrong to turn away those who don’t live here, when it’s such a safe haven. Today, I was swimming at the beach with Moose. It was sunrise and the water was freezing, but I needed to remember that I’m alive, so the bracing water was invigorating. We swam way out of the cove, and as I looked back to shore, I saw a beautiful naked Black man, sculpted like a Michelangelo. He put his hands up in the air like he was Rocky and howled. He didn’t see me or Moose, so I’m sure he thought he was alone. When I swam back to shore and he saw me, he froze, eyes white, terror washing over his joyful face. He started fawning apologies, explaining that he was the fire chief from another town, that he knew he wasn’t supposed to be at the beach. He must be so scared of white women, frightened that I would turn him in, frightened that I might scream “Rape” and land him in jail, frightened that our society would believe my story over his. I told him it was okay, that he could park his car in my driveway if he ever needed to walk down to the beach without getting detected. I thanked him for his service. My neighbors would not be happy I did this, but it felt like one small thing I could do to rectify the injustice. His face relaxed when I told him that, as a doctor, I didn’t agree with cutting people off from the beaches. If there’s one place we should be relatively safe, if there’s one place good for our mental health, if there’s one place with so much breeze it could blow Covid away, it’s at the beach.
The photos of Times Square- utterly empty- give me the chills. It’s hard to imagine what our world will be like five years from now. Will our kids be okay? Will we all go bankrupt? Will this lead to war or be a gateway to peace? Will we wake up to what we’re doing to our environment and finally do something about climate crisis? Will we ostrich ourselves even more? I don’t know…
The Empty Shore
No footprints but our own,
no voices but the wind’s—
West Marin stands untouched,
a secret kept by the tides.
The waves hum without witness,
the redwoods whisper their names,
the mountain lions move without fear
on trails now only theirs.
No tourists wander these wild places,
no city-weary feet kiss the sand.
We have the bounty to ourselves,
and oh, how heavy abundance can feel.
Guilt rises like the fog at dawn—
while others long for open air,
we breath deep,
unburdened by crowds, unshaken by haste.
Yet in the hush, gratitude swells,
as if the land has taken a breath, too.
For once, the world slowed enough
to hear the osprey call.
And now, when the roads are full again,
when the tide of hurry has returned,
sometimes, in the quiet spaces of my heart,
I still walk that empty shore.
Those are some of my memories. What are yours?
If you haven’t written about the pandemic, maybe now is the time. You’re welcome to find some inspiration for your writing in my online course that I taught with my writing teacher Nancy Aronie.
Learn more and sign up for Memoir As Medicine here.
