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2020 Pandemic Journey Day 43


May 3, 2020

Today’s reflections on yesterday – This weekend marked the soft reopening of Iowa in most counties. I don’t think people are flocking to restaurants to dine inside, nor are they rushing out for retail therapy because most of our favorites are still closed. They cannot go to a movie, a concert, a sporting event, or a neighborhood pub, but they can play outside.  And in droves, they did.  In the state park that I visited with my new cohort, the parking lots were brimming, and so were most of the trails. Walking in the woods here felt more like walking down the midway at a fair, and the mood matched the festive visual.  I imagined that many of the parents with hyper kids must have felt as if they had been released from jail or the loony bin. They would follow their children down to the creek, then passively observe them splashing around in the shallows and looking for snakes and frogs to torment. Exceptionally few people adhered to the public health measures of wearing a mask or of any social distancing.  It has been a long stay at home period, and their relief was palpable even if their civic vigilance appeared to be taking a hike in another dimension.

We moved together through the woods like livestock in a Temple Grandin handling system. Most of us wore smiles and grins as we peered into one another’s face, as if we had awoken from a mutually shared lousy dream.  And we encountered LOTS of new puppies! Maybe this was foreshadowing for a year-end baby boom.

I am a people watcher by nature, but I struggled so with this shoulder-to-shoulder walk in the woods  that after fifteen or twenty minutes of flowing with my fellow humanity, I slipped off on a side trail up a little tributary draw.  There, I found the space to notice new flowers in bloom: Bell Worts, Jack in the Pulpits, Standing Phlox, Freckled Violets, Mayapples and Toad Trillium. At the head of the draw was a cross-hatched sandstone outcropping, heavy in iron patina. I followed a deer trail to the top bench and bushwhacked my way back to the entrance road. Locals tell me that this is morel mushroom season, but I was no good at finding them, being new to the geography. I hope one day I will hunt mushrooms here, but it was not today.

I could find fault with many of my fellow woods-worshipers because of their lackadaisical behavior with coronavirus safety. Still, I know that the chances we took, being outside with the masses, was worth the risk. Like the risks pilgrims take to bathe in the Ganges or that Mardi Gras revelers take to folic down Bourbon Street; the spirit knows what it needs, and we attend to that as we can.  And while the governor reported that there were another twelve hundred and eighty-five new cases this weekend, I wager they did not come from the likes of nature walkers like us. And as the dose makes the poison, I want to believe the breeze in the trees diluted our  peril, while the sunshine boosted our resilience. And our transient community provided respite from the weeks of dutiful solitude so that nature could heal what doctors won't treat.

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