Oregon

Eleven Months in and 2 Million Lives Lost

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This week, the world reached a grim milestone since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan China in early 2020. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center reported the global death count from the pandemic had topped 2 million, and was growing daily.

Some days I feel like I have awoken in an alternate reality, seeing mothers walking by, wearing face masks and pushing baby strollers, like I did this morning. It was jarring. I never thought I would experience this, though I always deeply sensed something like this might happen.

I felt that uneasy feeling of disconnect just after the start of the new year in Portland’s Lloyd Center district. I had come there to visit a dentist around noon.

Ordinarily, the business and retail area on the city’s east side would be filled with people, particularly on their lunch hour. Instead it was eerily silent and devoid almost entirely of the site and sound of humans.

I stopped to spin around in a circle, and realized I was alone. We had already retreated, globally, to the safety of closed spaces, eschewing contact, to avoid catching the highly contagious novel coronavirus.

I took a few shots of empty urban spaces of my cellphone, to capture that moment. Looking at the photos now, they look and feel disquieting, just like the scene outside my window of the mother and children, masked out of fear and caution.

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Late Fall Swells at Seaside

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This weekend, I took time out from other projects and headed to Seaside Cove, my normal go-to location for surfing in Oregon. Though waves were ranging from five to seven feet, the conditions were surprisingly calm for a late fall day on the normally frothing Pacific Ocean off the Oregon Coast this time of year.

I caught my requisite number of waves to put my mind in a state that is hard to describe.

For me, when I surf, I can think of nothing else besides waves, the weather, the current, and the ride that still may come. Surfing, which I started in earnest in 2016, has been a way for me to let go of stress. It was almost essential for the years leading to my mom’s inevitable death from Alzheimer’s disease in February 2020. I am grateful for that.

There are other things on my mind now, besides the pandemic: our economy, my nation’s divisions, global problems and conflicts, climate change, and so much more. Some of these concerns are entirely personal. So surfing remains a good check on the weight of life. It gives me a jolt of a good ocean feeling that can last long after I last surfed.

The last year I went out to the ocean less than half a dozen times. I hope to get out a few more in 2021. My job routine is now changing, so it might be possible if the stars align. For that I remain grateful.

I still find surfing to be a deeply personal sport.

However, sport also has downsides. As a commercial activity, it encourages unsustainable tourism. It also brings out human vanity—glorifying physical beauty as a commodity when it is an empty shell and basic narcissism—and turning an activity with deep cultural roots into a commercial transaction.

For me it remains what it has always been since I finally committed myself to start surfing in the cold Pacific.

Swimming Is Silenced

 

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I live about a half mile from the Sellwood Outdoor Pool. It’s a public swimming pool located in Portland, Oregon’s Sellwood Park that is loved almost to death by its patrons.

During a normal summer, it would be filled to capacity with screaming kids and their parents, many who are lower income, as public pools remain one of the most affordable ways to entertain kids and keep them healthy in Portland and most U.S. cities.

On a typical summer night, I used to pass by the pool and hear the kids’ yells, screams, shouts, and general pool noises kids make when they were being themselves in water. But not this summer.

The City of Portland, like nearly all major cities in the country, shuttered its public pools in the spring to prevent congregant spreading of COVID-19. This decision makes public health and human health sense. From the perspective of physical, social, and mental health, it represents a cruel outcome of the mismanaged national response that leads all the way to the situation room with President Donald Trump as the one who helped make our country’s pandemic the most lethal and worst managed in the world.

We are heading into Labor Day Weekend now. In normal times, the pool would still be open in the evenings and all weekend, particularly with temperatures predicted to be hotter than 90 Fahrenheit through Labor Day. The kids will have to find something else to do this year, and they will lose the chance to be kids and learn how to swim.

Closed pools and closed schools are taking on an air of dystopian reality, which we have seen created in unnerving films like Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 thriller Children of Men, where a strange disease had rendered humanity sterile, leading to all schools being shuttered because they no longer served any purpose. Oddly that film’s tension, pitting radical leftists fighting a right wing autocracy, seem to have predicted the spectacle in Portland. The people in the film even resemble the protesters here and the police forces that have engaged them in Portland for more than three months.

I am not fully confident we will be out of this pandemic by next summer. Even with the optimistic timelines given by the United States’ more credible infectious disease experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, returning to normal is no guarantee by next summer. Right now I do not believe the pool will open next summer.

For me, the posted sign by Portland Parks and Recreation is another naïve promise that we will get back to normal, when everything going on now is entirely abnormal. The professed optimism almost seems insulting with the silence.

Summer Daisies

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Sometimes timing is everything. As a beautiful July 4 evening was winding down, i wandered around the campus of Reed College (on of my alma maters), and found this beautiful floral scene. Even with my mediocre camera phone, the blooming daisies captured the joy and beauty of nature at its eye-popping best.

Mid-April snapshot of COVID-19 shopper behavior in Portland, Oregon

We are now nearly two months into my photodocumentary project on the impacts of COVID-19 on ordinary people. I am doing this by taking snapshots on a weekly basis at one location, my Fred Meyer outlet located on SW Barbur Boulevard in southwest Portland.

Each week I visit aisles where high-value commodities that have taken on almost supernatural powers or larger-than-life powers are kept. The prevalence of those supplies give me what I’m calling my COVID-19 Portland shopper sentiment index.

The goods I have focussed on include: dry beans and rice, canned goods (specifically beans), pasta, cleaning goods (such as sanitary wipes and bleach), and toilet paper and paper towels.

I took these shots at the Fred Meyer, where I also saw that customer adoption of voluntary cloth mask wearing still held at about 35 percent of shoppers, the same as the week earlier.

Here’ is my breakdown for April 17, 2020:

  • Toilet Paper: high anxiety (worsen)
  • Dry Beans/Rice: medium anxiety (same, bulk containers were mostly empty, shelves 1/3rd full)
  • Cleaning Goods: high anxiety for sanitizers, medium for other supplies (same)
  • Canned Beans: low anxiety (same)

Portland’s COVID-19 uncertainty appears to have calmed, sightly

I did my normal check of public sentiment this week by checking out what products were available at stores in my area in Portland, Oregon. I also wanted to check if the stores had implemented systems changes to encourage social distancing of six feet to protect essential workers (the employees who help ensure we are fed with food on the shelves) and the public.

To my surprise, I found that three businesses had indeed put measures into place: Grand Central Bakery (in Multnomah Village in Portland), New Seasons grocery store (in Sellwood in Portland), and Fred Meyer (in Southwest Portland). I visited Grand Central and Fred Meyer a day after the CDC issued new guidelines on April 3, after much delay, recommending people wear a cloth mask in public settings like stores, to prevent aerosol dispersion of the novel coronavirus and reduce the spread of COVID-19, particularly from asymptomatic persons. (See this study how infectious patient bioaeresols are dispersed and their risks.)

Cloth mask use was not widespread at stores I saw today (April 4). At Fred Meyer, I found toilet paper, rice, and beans on the shelves. Hand sanitizer is still no where to be found. Hoarding behavior appears to have subsided a bit, given the trends I’ve been documenting with my cell phone while shopping the last five weeks.

My weekly pulse of public mood focuses on shopping behavior of goods like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, rice, and dry beans. I was able to buy split peas and rice at Fred Meyer and lentils and split peas at New Seasons midweek.

Telling the COVID-19 story through visits to my local Fred Meyer

Like millions of Americans who have confronted the nation’s crisis in the face of the global pandemic and threat of COVID-19, I have responded to the new normal by trying to prepare for uncertainty.

Collectively, the behaviors of all of us reveal a lot about how we perceive the threat of the novel coronavirus to our health, our communities, and the economy. One fact I have gleaned is that many people believe the crisis is real and that it will be with us for a long time. I know this because the humble bean and legume have become one of the scarcest items in Portland, Oregon, my home. That tells me that average people want a hedge that will have value for many weeks to come. This is the perfect insurance policy to address this perceived fear.

In Portland, I have been documenting this hive mentality by taking pictures every week (since February 29) at my local Fred Meyer grocery story, on SW Barbur Boulevard, in southwest Portland. I observed several changes described this way through Facebook posts I shared.

March 14 Message:
Week three photo update on Portland shopper behavior in response to COVID-19. Panic level has bumped up again. Staples were cleaned out today: rice, beans, canned foods, pasta, flour, cleaning supplies, sanitizers, TP, paper towels. To me that says my community expects prolonged uncertainty. Seriously dry beans are never cleared out, ever!

March 20 Message:
The new underground economy is already evolving. [Beans] will be one of the new forms of barter, IF, and that’s a big IF, you can find them anywhere in Portland. I give you the humble pinto bean (an old friend who I can no longer find).

March 21 Message:
Like many fellow Portlanders, I have embraced the new reality. For me, the humble legume, the beautiful bean and lentil, is the new power symbol of our uncertain times. I find that reassuring that this often-maligned peasant food eaten by hundreds of millions the world over, because they can’t afford other food, is now the holy grail of worried Americans. I’ve always eaten beans–sometimes 7 days in a row. They are soul food. Today, I still couldn’t find any dry beans. So I bought some canned beans. Comfort food indeed. They do provide this small assurance that somehow we need little and we will get through hard times.

O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum

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A Christmas tree lot near my home in Portland is always a busy place after Thanksgiving and up to the final days before Christmas. I love the smell of Christmas trees. I can remember the ritual from decades ago getting them with my mom and sister on a cold night at a small lot not far from my home in the St. Louis area. Decorating the tree was a tradition we did as a family of three. For me, the sight of a tree brings a feeling of both nostalgia and peace. Happy holidays, everyone.

Final fall fling and fading colors

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Fall in Portland this year was drier than normal. The colors, which are primarily red and yellow, stuck around until the end of November. I took these shots on a route I normally run, through Riverview Cemetery, through the River View Natural Area, and along the Willamette River. A running injury forced me to walk it two weekends back. When you go slower, you see the same scenery differently. The leaves are now mostly fallen and the stark openness of winter is upon us.

Pre-game scene with Timbers fans

 

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The Portland Timbers, the city’s Major League Soccer franchise, have an enthusiastic fan base, including the noisy Timbers Army. I came down to Providence Park in early August for a work project and caught some of the pre-game action. One thing was clear. You don’t have to be a soccer player or athlete to be a hardcore sports fan.