Sunday, 14 February through Thursday, 4 March 2021
I've had a hard time writing this post, because this entire 2½ week period seems dim - and seemed dim at the time. Not "dim" as in I can't remember it, but "dim" as in a shade of darkness. The sun shone brightly for quite a few of those days, and the temperature even got up to over 80° twice, but I still see it as if I were in a cave peering out.
That feeling is at least partly due to the metaphor being an accurate description of my situation for the first week. Snow started falling during my first night here, and the temperature kept falling day after day. By the first Tuesday, we'd reached -2°, a record low unmatched since 1949. In response, right from the beginning, morning TV news folks were suggesting we all keep our blinds closed to help keep in whatever heat we might have, so I did.
I was very worried I'd run out of propane before the road conditions improved enough for me to drive, so I kept all our windows covered constantly, except the front window. When you live in an 8' x 24' dwelling, you depend on the view from the windows to give a sense of space. The front window has more area of glass than any of the others, and lets in proportionately more coldness. I've noticed it before and was reluctant to open it now, but I felt it was important for the mental health of all 4 of us.
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| You can see there was plenty of the snow outside, but Lily was enjoying the sun. |
So for a week, we were living in an area where little light penetrated, peering out the opening in front - just as if we were in a cave.
And to further the feeling of isolation, I was pretty sick for the entire first week. And because I had many of the COVID symptoms, I felt it was important that I keep my distance from the other people in the campground, which added even more to the sense of isolation.
My lifeline was daily phone calls with my brother, making me feel connected to the rest of humanity. It wasn't so much the shared awfulness of our situations as it was just human conversation. Something to keep in mind for those with elderly neighbors.
David and Anna never lost their running water and never had burst pipes when the thaw set in, so they were lucky there, but they did go for very long periods without electricity. They have a fireplace, though, and managed to come up with enough wood to keep them from freezing, and to heat water and soup. But still, electricity is a seriously important component of daily life and very hard to do without.
I too was very lucky, in my case because I never lost electrical power. Very lucky, because I was supplementing my propane heater with the little electric space heater I bought in Kentucky a year and a half ago when my propane heater needed repairs. I've never thought of that space heater as being particularly effective, but what I do know is that the propane I'd bought on Saturday before hitting the campground didn't last 3 or 4 days, as I'd expected; instead, 10 days later I still had just under half a tank left. Without electricity, we'd have had some real trouble.
On the other hand, I did lose running water. When I first got in, I didn't bother to hook up to the campground's water because I don't have an insulated hose, even assuming the campground's spigot would work (which it didn't). But I think what happened is that somewhere in the system between my water tank, which sits under the front bench seat, and my water pump, under the rear bench seat, either the water in the tank or the water lines froze. My pump made only agonized noises when I turned it on, so I kept it off. After which, I thoughtlessly emptied all the water out of the water lines. By Sunday morning, I was out of all water except the gallon jugs I kept for drinking. So no dishwashing or table-wiping; teeth-brushing and hand-washing were very carefully water-rationed.
Unlike so very many other people in Texas, though, my loss of water came with an up-side: if I'd been flushing my toilet with the usual amount of water as often as my diarrhea required, I'd have needed to empty my waste tanks after only 3 or 4 days - when the roads still weren't clear and I was still feeling pretty sick. As it was, I used snow every now and then and didn't have to worry about overflowing tanks.
The only other problem with loss of water was running out of drinking water. I had both my brother and my friend Paula after me to not get dehydrated as a result of the diarrhea, so that was a problem that couldn't be worked around. I called the campground office for help, only to find that they were "closed until further notice." Then I called the statewide Division of Parks visitor office for some way of getting in touch with the local folks, only to find that they too were closed, because Austin got several inches of snow. Occasionally I saw Parks vehicles drive by my campsite, but they were gone too fast for me to leap out of the cabin and wave them down. I tried putting a sign up by the road, asking for HELP, but nobody noticed it - including pedestrians. Finally, when I was walking the dogs, I saw another Parks vehicle and flagged him down and asked if he'd be willing to fill a couple of gallon jugs for me. Which he did very quickly. Of course I had to warn him to keep his distance in case I had the virus, but he was really nice about it. So with a supply of drinking water, I could keep going.
Here are some highlights from this period:
* The campground is very near a busy farm-to-market road with a lot of traffic, but the snow brought all that to a halt. I didn't even notice how quiet it was until the snow melted and the traffic started again. It was really peaceful for a while.
* A Houston furniture store owner opened his store to let people come in just to sit and get warm, without pretending to buy anything. He said he'd been taught that "the essence of living is giving."
* One morning, the Today Show included a YouTube video of a woman using a fake scratch-off lottery ticket to tell her husband she's pregnant. I'll bet it's impossible to watch his reaction and not feel happy. His part starts at about the 2:30 mark on this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRVcvc_icqw
When I first came to the campground, just beating the arrival of the snow, I'd thought it would be running out of propane that would drive me out first. Once I realized how long my supply was lasting, thanks to that electric heater, I figured it'd be needing water that drove me out. Until that nice park ranger resupplied me. Then I supposed I'd be forced to move to dump my waste tanks, until I lost my water supply. After almost a week, my nausea abated enough that I decided to risk eating an orange, and my whole body told me it wanted to devour every one in that bag of mandarins I'd bought - obviously not a good idea health-wise, but prompting a need to ration them. But what finally made me get back on the road was almost running out of dog food. Not at all the trigger I'd expected.
The morning of the 11th day after I'd started feeling symptoms I could see the end of the dog food. And since the CDC was advising at least 10 days of isolation, I felt like I could go out in public if I were really careful to stay masked and keep my distance from folks. Off I went to the grocery store, the propane place, and the dump station.
By this time, the snow and ice were nearly gone and, though cold, the weather was mostly sunny and cheerful. It was a relief to me to feel like I was leaving the cave, but because I was afraid I'd had the virus, I felt like I should still stay isolated until I knew.
I could see online that I didn't need the test that said whether I had COVID at that moment but instead needed the antibody test that said whether what I'd had had been COVID. The CDC said I needed to wait for at least 15 days after the onset of symptoms to get the antibody test, so I waited until day 16.
A clinic in Cedar Hill that gave that test told me I might lose my Medicare coverage if I took the test from them, a statement that made no sense to me whatever. But it was still nice of them to warn me, so I found another clinic in Arlington, about 25 minutes from the campground. They promised me results in 2-3 days, a surprise because I'd thought results would take a few weeks.
And sure enough, they called me 3 days later to tell me I had not had COVID. When I described my symptoms, they said it was very likely a virulent stomach flu that, they said, has been attacking lots of people this winter. So the good news is that all my protection efforts have been effective and I did not, somehow, get the virus despite careful masking and glove-wearing and social-distancing. The bad news is that I still don't have the possibility of immunity.
Of course I've thought a lot about getting the vaccination, especially recently. I've wanted to be one of the early ones vaccinated, given my age and asthma and constant travels. And I still haven't done it, completely intimidated by stories of how hard it is to get on waiting lists, and having to wait 3 weeks or more even then to get the first shot, and then having to wait 3 more weeks to get the second shot - I just couldn't envision any way I could do any of that.
The most recent news is the approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that only requires one shot instead of 2 and doesn't have to be stored at crazy temperatures. That makes me think it's likely they'll send those to a CVS or Walgreen's, which might be much more accessible for me, since one or both of those are in every state in the country.
A small family is camped not far from me, and we pass their site several times a day on our walks. I noticed they have a New Hampshire license plate that reads: ST8 CTZN. The message on the license plate holder says: "Only a St8 Citizen has Constitutional Rights." I mulled all that over in a vague way for more than a week without checking it out. Then one day they parked their car backwards and I could see the front license plate holder; it read: "Constitutional Rights? Not as a US citizen."
I finally looked all that up and found the Sovereign Citizens movement. The description on the Wikipedia page sounds truly bizarre https://en.wikipedia.org/Sovereign-citizen-movement, and there's even more in this article from the Journal of the American Bar Association. https://web.archive.org/http://www.abajournal.com/sovereign-citizens-plaster-courts-with-bogus-legal-filings Reading all that reminded me of an incident 15 or 20 years ago when I was a public defender, and one of the court clerks showed me a motion filed by one of these folks. I still remember what gibberish it was. It wasn't just that the legal citations and reasoning were completely off the wall, but besides that it barely sounded like it had been written in English. Those articles, especially the Wikipedia one, explain the belief of these folks that using just the right wording acts as a talisman for them to prevail.
Texas Independence Day was March 2nd (1836), and the current governor chose that day to announce that henceforth Texas businesses could open 100%, the statewide mask mandate would be lifted, and he would assume all its citizens would continue to use the "safe practices Texans have mastered over the past year," while all Texas businesses and families "have the freedom to determine their own destiny." Left unsaid are the facts that the virus is incredibly contagious so people are determining the destiny of others as well as themselves, and that only about 7% of Texans have so far been vaccinated, and that there are still 5,000 new cases every week, and that Dallas County alone had reached 3,000 deaths that same day - let alone the laughable concept that Texans have "mastered" any safe practices whatever during the last year.
Now that it was impossible for me to see Texas as any kind of a safe haven from the virus, I started to plan my upcoming travels. I already had a reservation in early March for the Mt. Pleasant KOA, originally intending to go from there up to Missouri for the month of April. But now I had a rethink, and decided instead to go over to the East Coast and pick up the 4 states I missed a few years ago, beginning with North Carolina. My idea was that Florida and other Southern states are overrun with tourists during the winter months, and if I went in late spring and summer, I might actually be able to find room in the campgrounds, let alone tourist attractions.
After learning I was unlikely to be contagious since I hadn't had the virus in the first place, I planned a day trip over to Richardson, to dump more than a month's worth of recycling and to pick up my mail before leaving the area. Anna suggested I plan to stay and visit a little while, since I'd be out of the state for some months, so that's what I did.
I also took Lily by the vet's office in Plano we've used several times, to get her claws clipped and her flea medicine applied. And I made one more stop at my storage unit, intending to pick up my notebooks for Arkansas and Tennessee, which I'd be going through on my way east. That didn't work out, though, because as far as I could tell, I'd buried those notebooks at the very back of the storage unit. I hauled out 3 layers of boxes and, when I still hadn't come to the right ones, I gave it up as just not being worth the trouble. Since I was getting prepared to leave the shopping mecca of DFW, I also stopped off at a Target to get some pet supplies and a grocery store to fill in some gaps.
I saw a billboard for a lawyer who specializes in divorces: "Was 2020 Better Than Your Marriage?" Which is certainly one way to frame things.
All in all, this was a very strange period. I guess I'm glad it happened while I was in Texas, which has the twin advantages of being very familiar to me and very close to my family. I think everything might have felt much harder if I'd been in another state, one where I'd never been before. I was lucky in many ways.
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