Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-20

Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-20

Jeff Gill

 

Where there's no smoke, are there flames?
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Due to some deaths and illnesses in my family, my wife and I have been traveling more during these last two months of restrictions than we have probably in any other two month period of the thirty-five years of our marriage (see how I slipped that in? Happy anniversary, hon!).

 

We have sadly been like too many working Americans, not taking the time off we could, and usually taking it in short pieces, and putting off until retirement more than perhaps is prudent, but here we are.

 

Yet after decades of four and eight day vacations, we've had to spend literally months apart, with trips to Texas and Indiana and managing "self-quarantines" and care and caution while helping out elderly parents. All our travel has, we believe, fallen into the "necessary" category, while working hard to minimize risk, not so much to ourselves, but to those who are at risk that we need to be able to be around.

And my own work, to the extent that I've been "working" as a minister, has been contorted beyond recognition, the hardest part being pastoral care when people die (yes, including one from COVID-19) and there's effectively no way for the usual ministry of presence to be part of my response.

 

Looking ahead, for all of us, is hard. We have to take the best counsel we can, and sort out various and competing visions of what might happen next. And where there's competition, there's likely to be politics, and sure enough, we've politicized epidemiology and public health. Okay, so we factor for that, too, but neither extreme is going to guide most of us.

 

What really baffles me, though, is that no one really knew until about fifteen minutes ago even 50% of the likely course and speed of this virus. The certainty I hear from some about what was known and what we're sure of now I think is misplaced.

 

So people saying the public health actions of mid-March were extreme and foolish I think are like people we see evacuated from homes downwind of wildfire, who come back to untouched homes a few days later and say "that was unnecessary, nothing happened."

 

Our problem now is that this is still burning in patches upwind, so to speak, with unburned fuels between us and the fire, so it's a tough call all around between mitigation and evacuation. But if you insist you won't evacuate a second time, and you've got brush and scrub growing right up to your house and under the eaves . . . and your home has redwood siding with cedar shingles, I'm going to really be surprised if you don't even want to put out sprinklers in the lawn on the upwind side.

 

I still don't know for sure what the right course of action going forward is, but I'm certainly thinking at the very least we all need to reduce potential fuels around structures, and inhibit the spread of new ignitions, even if the initial wave of grass fires didn't do as much damage as we feared at first.

 

And yeah, I'm gonna wear masks when I'm out and about. Call it mitigation, call it excessive, but to me it's like extinguishing campfires thoroughly and reporting smoke and trimming brush near my house. Call it prudent, if that old fashioned word still has any weight.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he is, to be honest, not always prudent. But it's a good goal to have. Tell him how you measure prudence at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.