Via California - May/June 2020 - 29

" It's not a sprint, " my wife tells me. " It's a marathon. "
We're on Day 20 of sheltering in place. It feels
like Day 200. My wife is a social worker, gifted
at coping strategies. She's devising one for me.
" There's no Pandemic for Dummies, " she advises.
" You have to find your own resilience. "
I'm trying, but it's not easy. I'm a travel writer.
I've spent my life working to capture the world's
wonders in words. Now, thanks to Covid-19, my
world shrinks every day. I spend hours canceling
long-planned trips. Goodbye, Sonoma coast. So
long, Sierra Nevada. Some other time, Montana
Rockies.
We are lucky, my wife and I tell ourselves five
times a day. We're healthy, we have jobs, and there
are few better places to be quarantined than our
ocean edge of San Francisco. I can slip a leash on
Maisie, our yellow Labrador, strap on my protective
mask, and within minutes be strolling through
Golden Gate Park. If I want something more
strenuous, I lace up running shoes and-carefully
maintaining a safe physical distance-pound the
jogging path along a Great Highway now blissfully
closed to cars.
It all feels normal, until it doesn't. Until you realize
that it's Day 30 with no shelter-in-place end in
sight. Worry sets in. About San Francisco: Will the
bookstores, movie houses, and coffee joints that
make the city the special place it is return when
the virus is under control? Worry about our firstjob-out-of-college
son, sheltering in place in far-off
New Jersey, reachable by only by Zoom. Worry
about the family trips we'd tentatively planned with
him, to places he has yet to see-Alaska's Inside
Passage, the Grand Canyon, Utah's Highway 12
and the impossibly beautiful red rock country it
traverses. Will those places be out of reach forever?
What helps? My wife, our dog, gin and tonics,
and books. I can't venture out into the world, but
I can read all about it. I gravitate to old friends.
Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain, that poem to
California's high desert where you savor " deep
breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the
stars. " And a newer classic, George Black's Empire
of Shadows, an epic history of my favorite place in
the universe, Yellowstone National Park, the kingdom
of grizzlies and geysers and the chasm where
the Yellowstone River cascades down canyon walls
seemingly sculpted in molten gold.
With such aids, good days follow the bad. I
put on the running shoes and head to the Great
Highway. Another brilliant spring day-bright,
breezy, with whitecaps skittering on a slate-blue
sea. The path is bordered by short, decorative
wooden posts. I run past one and spot something
new. Nailed to the wood is a small oval blackboard
on which someone has scrawled a message in white
chalk. The words are blurred. I bend down for a
closer look. We Will Get Through This.
I stand there for a moment, warmed by spring
sunshine and the message an unknown neighbor
has left for the world. A marathon, not a sprint, I tell
myself. We will take our son to the Grand Canyon
and the Inside Passage. I will order a Cubano at my
favorite neighborhood coffee joint. I resume my
run. We will get through this. We will. -peter fish
peter fish is a
San Francisco-
based writer
whose work
also appears
in the San
Francisco
Chronicle,
Coastal Living,
and Sunset.
AAA | VIA 29
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