As I count my blessings, I put at the very top of the list the accident of my birth in a country that reacts to a crisis by rushing out to buy toilet paper. By contrast, our neighbours south of the border dash out to buy ammunition.
Canada has always been the North American ‘other,’ a land of limited opportunity where the cult of the rugged individual never really took root. That is because it is hard to pretend you can get through a Canadian winter by yourself. So, we are more likely to accept the idea that you can’t get through a pandemic by yourself either. A couple of months ago, as the countryside gradually locked down, I watched my neighbourhood revert to familiar patterns of self-care that I have seen over my lifetime: checking on the elderly, distributing essentials, sharing and volunteering. The Canadian collective is alive and well.
This time, my efforts to make a contribution met a stern response: “Go home and stay put!” said my family doctor. “You are a wind-broke old horse and very much in the risk group.”
I have been holed up on my little farm for a few months now which turns out to be another item near the top of my list of blessings. The only drawback to riding out the crisis on a farm is there is no excuse for idleness. I read about people in downtown condos taking advantage of their isolation by learning jazz piano or finally figuring out how to podcast and it all sounds very creative and therapeutic. But the farm is a jealous mistress and wants your undivided attention. It cares nothing for pandemics and stock market meltdowns because this is spring after all, the most demanding season of the year with the most rigid deadlines.
Self-isolation is something a farmer does naturally. (And a writer, too, for that matter.) Our first instinct in a crisis is to get into a machine by ourselves and drive in circles for days on end. When the first Covid case struck our community I should have been watching CNN but I was too busy jump-starting lambs with artificial colostrum, administering four feedings of milk replacer daily and giving selenium shots and Tasvax. That and regular battles with reluctant mothers trying to get them to change their minds about parenting kept me occupied for several days.
In the house I had become a reluctant parent myself as all four of my offspring lost their jobs. The two boys came home and the two girls out West occupied Facetime with us for an hour every day. I had to supervise work projects to keep them all away from their screens. The boys pruned the apple trees, fixed fence, burned brush and started building a proper shop for me, something that has been put off every year since we took up permanent residence here 32 years ago. The girls reorganized their work lives on-line and became a permanent presence at the dinner table every evening.
A friend of mine called to ask if we had a good supply of everything. The boys burst out laughing because their mother has been prepared for nuclear winter since 1988. Our basement looks like a survivalist’s mail-order warehouse. If this keeps up beyond 2024 we could be in trouble. In the meantime, since Canada produces 70 per cent of the food we consume there should not be any dramatic shortages. The produce aisle may soon go bare as supplies from California dry up, but Canadians are great gardeners and a vast number of seedlings were put under lights across the country. We can grow a lot of zucchini without very much encouragement.
Big changes lie ahead of us. The polio epidemics that flared up every summer of my childhood in the 1950s forged a coalition between scientists and politicians that gave us the Salk vaccine and paved the way for universal government health insurance by 1966. The polio experience also had an impact on me personally because I shared a desk for eight years of public school with a farm boy on crutches and I learned that he could still play baseball as an umpire, go fishing, sing in the church choir, get married and bombard me with cat videos by email for decades.
A lot of our differences will probably fade as the summer unfolds. As mother used to say, “These things are sent to try us.” This particular trial will be very unusual if it does not remind us that the Canadian collective is a very sturdy association worth its weight in gold.