If you drive south out of Chicago through the industrial plumes of Gary, Indiana, then around the southern edge of Lake Michigan, then north beyond the towns of Harbor Country, then off the interstate onto a stretch called Blue Star Highway, then you’ll find dirt fire lanes that end in wide sweeps of dune and beach. Here, in a town called Covert, I’ve been weathering out the pandemic with my family for the past six weeks.
We are “doing fine” up here, I say to friends, which hides the intricate dramas of private life even as it is mostly true. A more exacting response would chart the wild calibrations of my mind as I toggle between newsfeeds, conversations with colleagues, an excess of e-mails, late-night reading, and a desire to put something into words, while fully knowing that I will fail to track the gross transformations of what this is. This is not “working from home,” this is an apocalypse of the interior life. That life, my life, is scarcely threatened by the exceptional risks taken every day by cashiers, delivery people, and health-care workers. I am a separate story, or rather, I am no story at all. The forms that shape my days, my thinking, have all but disappeared. Gone are hours at the library in Chicago where I work; the meals with others; unprompted conversations; my time with women.
Many of our days in Covert, with devotion, with enjoyment, I have found beauty in the cycle of family life, especially in the time we spend outdoors. We walk through thick woods grown out of the ruin of ancient forest. Logging created Covert, a scrappy frontier town now credited for its curious history of racial integration. Covert was never a postbellum Freetown nor a utopian community: its integrated schools, churches, and political systems—as early as the 1860s—seem to have been a result of scarce necessity. I wonder about this history, about what humans are capable of becoming, when they abandon how they’ve been told to live.
I have been waking up very early, too, hoping to work before my boys thump out of their beds. I hesitate before sending detailed e-mails to colleagues: a fall seminar, a spring conference, an exhibition in 2021. What are the ethical strategies for planning past this pandemic? Who can even imagine this far out? The hours of the day dissolve quickly and the present moment, revolving, seems our only center. A close friend, on the phone, tells me to slow the fuck down. A few days later, the New York Times basically says the same thing, in a column called “Wellness” or “The Upshot” or “Smarter Living.” Or maybe it was the Chicago Tribune, which still publishes—the charm of it—horoscopes and comics. The article has disappeared, and I keep spinning.
Who’s the bad guy? asks the youngest, jumping up and down on the sofa.
