In quarantine since March in my childhood home, my parents and I have watched people starve on purpose while we eat healthy, home-cooked meals. Maybe it’s to reinforce how thankful we are, while simultaneously missing our friends, restaurants, concerts, bookstores, the gym, and any other activity that doesn’t involve wearing a mask to leave the house. Watching people joyous over shooting an unsuspecting squirrel with a bow and arrow has become entertainment to help us forget the nightly social distancing dreams, like the one in which I’m working in the same crowded bar I worked in during the late ‘90s that no longer exists. In this dream, I discover my sister has COVID while I’m schlepping full plates of comfort food to Orange County Covidiots who are either too entitled or too in denial to care about the well-being of themselves, their families, and the rest of the planet. In this dream, I realize I’m not wearing a mask, so I cover my nose and mouth with a hoodie while I weave in and out of the crowd to find my manager to tell him I have to quarantine because I’ve been exposed. I loathe these dreams, but they are part of my “new normal.”
Alone on the History Channel is a show we discovered in these “uncertain times.” We’ve burned through nearly seven seasons. The premise is 10 survivalists dropped off separately in remote locations such as the far side of Vancouver Island, Patagonia, Mongolia, or 70 miles south of the Arctic tree line. They can only bring 10 survival items and a boatload of camera equipment they must lug around themselves. A helicopter lands, pushes them out the door into a forest next to a lake, their only neighbors now foxes, bears, bunnies, squirrels, fish, moose, mosquitoes, and sometimes wolverines. They have no food, no shelter, no bed, no Internet, no way to shower, and no company—except that one season when couples argued while suctioning limpets off rocks in the middle of the night; it didn’t go well. The survivalists are stoked to be left in the wilderness to exist alone for as long as possible—more than two months if they’re “lucky.” The last person to “tap out” wins $500,000—or, in the case of season seven, $1 million for 100 days.
Meanwhile, our version of Alone is in a cozy house my parents bought in 1978 when I was five. It’s newly painted, with a gorgeous backyard, including a gas fire table and an herb garden. And despite my ongoing terror when I trek to the grocery store, where I have low-key panic attacks behind my claustrophobic mask, I don’t have to set traps to catch rodents to cook over a spit inside a green-tarped hut I built in nine-degree weather. Alone is the ultimate quarantine. We watch as the contestants turn bull kelp into a whole meal, while we eat grilled salmon and artichokes; turkey tacos and BBQ corn; and meat we don’t have to butcher and hide from bears in makeshift treehouses, while the survivors forage for wild mushrooms, berries, and edible tree bark, daydreaming about protein and carbs. I am grateful, even though I have only seen one friend (on purpose) since February, and it was a distanced visit for a couple hours. The days overlap; anxiety is high; books are plentiful; and there is no shortage of Alone.
A woman stirs a pot of squirrel blueberry soup; a man drinks “tea” he made from fish heads; another dude samples a charred slug and almost pukes; yet another survivalist chomps on charred crickets.
“They should have brought salt as one of their 10 items,” I say.
But that’s what a person who can’t survive in the wilderness thinks.
The difference between Alone and our quarantine, aside from the obvious comforts of home, is they have a choice, and we can’t “tap out,” unless we want to expose ourselves and others to illness, and there’s no half a million dollars waiting for us at the end of this pandemic, if there’s an end.
We can only watch Alone so often to fill the vast indoor time we now have, particularly on weekends when I’m not working. I joke with friends via Zoom and FaceTime, “During the week, I’m anxious; on the weekends, I’m depressed.”
“What are your big plans today?” my dad asks on Saturdays. I hold up the book I’m reading, and say, “You’re looking at it.”
Meanwhile, on days when I have to leave the house to retain my sanity, I hop in my car to go for a leisurely drive with no destination, something I haven’t done since high school, back when we could throw $2.53 into the gas tank and cruise the streets late into the night. My drive to nowhere often consists of sitting in traffic—on purpose—on PCH in Laguna Beach. While this drive is supposed to clear my head and provide some normalcy for an hour out of my empty days on house arrest, it’s not without stress because, in doing so, I observe in disbelief rows of overlapping umbrellas littering the crowded beach, people waiting in long lines to get brunch or “takeout mimosas,” and pedestrians passing each other on a busy street, masks dangling from their chins. Before California closed indoor dining a second time, I saw a full restaurant inside, where frantic servers wore masks, while entitled 20-somethings sipped champagne as if it were any other day in any other year. My stomach clenched in anger. I wanted to scream out the window, “You’re the reason I can never leave my house again!”
On a recent podcast, Sean Penn called this kind of behavior a “religion of selfishness.”
Yes, I thought. That’s exactly what it is.
Sometimes it seems as if my family and I are stranded on our own island, watching society implode. I can only imagine what it must be like for my conscientious friends who currently live alone. I could barely handle that before the pandemic.
Like the participants on Alone who create the best shelters out of stacked, precision-cut logs, the cracks stuffed with insulating moss, I feel temporarily safe inside my car while the COVID cloud swirls around me—now with the added ingredient of wildfire ashes.
At home, I felt doubly safe until one recent Monday when I sat at my computer working and received a text from my mom warning me a family friend was on her way over. My mom told her I was working, and we were still in quarantine. It didn’t dissuade her.
What? I thought. Right now?
The doorbell rang two minutes later. I panicked. I hadn’t seen this friend in over a year. She’s someone I care about whom I’ve known almost 20 years. In normal times, we are affectionate. When I lived in Seattle and felt more alone than ever, she was a small sliver of comradery. But an unscheduled visit from Northern California during a public health crisis is ill-advised.
I rushed downstairs to greet her, her husband, and her nine-year-old son, none of them wearing masks. When I opened the door, she moved in for our standard hug. I hadn’t hugged anyone outside my immediate family in six months. My brain barely had time to register what was happening, and I hate to be rude, so I hugged her back quickly, my head turned away, then shut the front door so I was outside with them, rather than invite them into our sanctuary. I half-ass explained in stilted fragments as I moved toward the lawn, “We’re still trying to be safe. We’ve been in quarantine this whole time. We aren’t seeing friends.”
We’re not fucking hugging people.
“It’s my 40th birthday today!” she said.
“Happy birthday!” I said, a little shaky. “It took you long enough.”
Her older husband laughed. Her son ran back to the car. Then I noticed there were other people in the car waiting for them. I couldn’t understand why I was the one who felt like the off-putting asshole.
They informed me they’d just spent the weekend in a rented house in Newport on the beach with several of their friends and their friends’ children.
A super-spreader event, I thought. Lovely.
“How was your flight down here?” I asked.
You were on a plane Friday, and you just hugged me, and I’m not planning to fly on a plane until there’s a viable vaccine, and even then, I will be apprehensive.
“It was fine,” she said. “It wasn’t crowded at all.”
My shoulders untensed a bit.
“That’s good.”
“But last weekend, when we flew to Vegas, it was a free-for-all!”
I wanted to cry. I quickly calculated the feet between us.
More than six, I thought.
I told her quarantine was almost starting to feel “normal,” but it was still weird.
Hint. Hint.
I asked her where they stayed in Vegas, a fake smile plastered on my gaslit face. She named a hotel I’d never heard of next to the Aria. At the pool, she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to wear a mask or not.
“I’ll follow the rules,” she said. “Just tell me what to do. You’re supposed to wear a mask. You’re not supposed to wear a mask. You’re supposed to wear a mask. You’re not supposed to wear a mask.”
So, you’ll do the minimum, and spend the rest of the time living your life as if it’s still 2019?
I nodded but had no words. I may have said, “Yeah.” I wanted to go back inside, lock the door, and crumple into a ball on the floor.
Am I being unreasonable?
I haven’t seen my best friend who lives 30 minutes away since January, and I live with at-risk loved ones, but you just hugged me after flying to Vegas? Cool, cool.
They had another plane to catch, so they left after about 15 minutes. As I made my way back in the house, I almost apologized for the quick outdoor visit because that’s what I do.
I made a mental note to start the two-week countdown again before I’d feel safe, just as I’d done the previous Sunday when the generous woman next door brought over a giant plate of food from her boyfriend’s new BBQ restaurant. I thanked her and took the plate inside. I don’t remember if I washed my hands. My parents immediately ate it. The next day my dad saw her leaving and waved. As she got in her car, she said, “I’m going to my boyfriend’s house to take care of him. He’s sick.”
I no longer feel safe in my own home.
Maybe in the next season of Alone, the show’s crew should helicopter 10 unwitting suburban conservatives with freshly manicured nails who are ignoring science to the edge of the Arctic and drop them off alone with a thick jacket, some waterproof boots, an axe, a flint, some fishing line, bear spray, and a decent knife, and wish them luck for the next month and a half.
Maybe that wouldn’t make any difference at all. I don’t know because I don’t understand what’s happening in the minds of carefree people who aren’t concerned right now. Yes, my family’s chances of getting sick are low; yes, the chances of any of us dying are even lower. But that’s not the point. Every time I hear someone on TV say, “We’re all in this together,” I want to yell, “No, we aren’t!” Half of us are in this together. The rest don’t register a correlation between 200,000 deaths and their own reckless behavior. I can’t comprehend it, just as I don’t grasp the intentions of the young couple standing outside my Costco with the “Honk for Trump” sign. It’s madness.
The election looms in less than two months. I’m not as hopeful as I was in 2016. If it’s a fair election and if citizens who didn’t vote last time vote, I think we’ll be okay, but that’s a big if. This is no joke. What’s left of democracy is on the line; the fate of the planet is on the line; lives are at stake. Running off to the Canadian wilderness to smoke fresh trout in a tent doesn’t sound nearly as scary as what’s possible if we make the wrong choice. Please vote. I’m begging you.