Catastrophes in Pandemic

My Amazon app indicates that my collagen powder had been delivered. “Left in mailbox.” I turn on the flashlight on my phone and swing open the front door to find it.

The night here is as dark as night can be. The sky is starless, there are no street lamps, no lit-up neighbors’ homes, no headlights on the highway. The light on my phone isn’t bright enough, so I come back inside and grab a flashlight. The dogs follow me halfway down the driveway, and when I swing the light back towards them, their eyes glow.

I’m dog sitting eight miles outside of the town of Nehalem, near the Oregon coast. A 2019 New Yorker article called the area just a few miles west “one of the riskiest places on earth.” It lies in what’s called a tsunami induction zone. One day, any day, really, a giant earthquake will strike and the people who lie within that 3 mile-wide and seven hundred mile-long swath of earth, from Canada to California, will have 10 to 30 minutes to get the fuck out of the way before a tsunami will obliterate everything.

A tsunami doesn’t leave many injuries in its wake, the article says. Everyone just dies.

I’m here for only two weeks, but if there is an earthquake, I decide, I will give myself one minute to grab the necessities: the two dogs, my phone and laptop, my retainer, and a gallon of water. And then we’ll peel out of the driveway, north on 53 until we hit highway 26 and head east.

There is something about catastrophes, or rather, impeding catastrophes, that I am embarrassed to admit that I crave. Early in Trump’s term, when he was antagonizing Kim Jong Un and people were whispering nervously about a nuclear missile, I bought mega dose iodide online, split them up between me and my then-boyfriend. Apparently, they fill up all the receptors in your thyroid so that radiation can’t lodge there. (That does not sound scientific, I know, but I did research). What would we do, we said to each other, and our plan if we couldn’t get a hold of each other, was to just drive north.

When the fires hit northern California last summer and the one before that (and before that), I busied myself with air purifiers and face masks. And when the pandemic struck in March, I spent all day for a week curled up in an overstuffed chair, refreshing my Twitter feed, refreshing the COVID death counts. Ten thousand. Twenty-five thousand. Shock.

And now the latest catastrophe, or perhaps distraction is a better word, has been the election, but the news of the President’s COVID diagnosis is all-consuming. Something new is coming out every hour, a drama, a new diagnosis, a conspiracy theory, speculation and excitement.

And it isn’t that I love any of these, but each catastrophe, every spell-binding distraction brings with it a sense of relief. “How could I possibly be expected to confront the discomfort of anything happening in my own life when there is THIS happening in the world?”

My two dogs for this stay are hunting dogs and they have impeccable manners. Every day, we pile into my car and drive up to a trailhead and hike for an hour, hour and a half. All night, they sleep tucked next to me or, if they can manage, partly on top of me. And during the day, when I’m eating or on the phone or on my computer at the counter, the younger one will sit across the room and cry.

For a while, I didn’t know what he wanted. If he wanted to play, if he was hungry, if he was anxious. But now, when he starts whining and I sit down on the couch, pat the cushion next to me and say, “Ok!” he jumps up and snuggles as close as he can, drapes his big ol’ puppy legs over me and it is the closest thing to a hug I’ve had in seven months, and in these moments, without the noise of the world, I realize how very, very lonely I have been for months and maybe years.