Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are three national parks, represented in an illustrated leaf. Underneath these symbols is the slogan “where discoveries are made.”

In 2021, New Mexico attracted 7.2 billion in tourist dollars. Many visitors come for the leaf: Outdoor recreation added $2.3 billion to the state’s economy that year. Meanwhile, the atom—the state’s nuclear past and present—attracts a subset of tourists who come to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Trinity test site, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. The most hardcore might also check out the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.

New Mexico is famously the “Land of Enchantment.” “Enchantment” is an abstract noun that evokes remoteness, isolation, and emptiness. It’s easy to see how environmental tourism seeks this out: It’s about sunset-chasing and finding peace in vast expanses of open desert. Nuclear tourism, meanwhile, is an extension of the military’s expansion into civilian life—the cultural arm of a national mission to continue making bombs. It consists of attractions that erase the deathly realities of nuclear events in favor of mythologies of noble actors doing difficult things for the sake of the U.S.’s democracy. But while these two types of tourism might seem opposed, in seeking enchantment, New Mexico’s visitors are oddly alike. In New Mexico, ogling nuclear weapons and enjoying nature are two sides of the same coin: Both activities conjure the state as a blank slate.

New Mexico began calling itself the “Land of Enchantment” in 1999, lifting its moniker from a 1906 travelogue about the Southwest. Author Lilian Whiting wrote that New Mexico was “a territory…whose ethnological interest” in the “remains of Cliff dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist,” and that its future “promises almost infinitely varied riches.”

Whiting saw New Mexico as the one of most “uncivilized localities” of the Southwest, replicating 20th-century attitudes that assumed Indigenous people were on the brink of vanishing. She described the region as unpopulated, but what she meant was that it hadn’t been settled by Anglo-Americans.

The contemporary earthy tourists that come to see White Sands, the Gila National Forest, or Shiprock caption their Instagram posts with similar language to Whiting’s. They’re exposed to the language and imagery of enchantment and emptiness by the state’s tourism campaign. Today, the slogan is “NM True,” but the vision it’s peddling is the same: star-studded vistas, mountains, forest, and sand dunes all empty and isolated. Vacancy—as an assumption that erases racialized communities—is central to enchantment.

The more complicated reality is that these seemingly empty destinations are products of multiple, contradictory layers of history: resource extraction, the seizure of land for national parks, and military land uses. Nowhere is this most apparent than at the seemingly empty sites visited by nuclear tourists.

In the 70 years since the Trinity site—where the Atomic Age’s first blast melted the sand in an explosion 1.5 times hotter than the surface of the sun on July 16, 1945—first held an open house, New Mexico has become ground zero for nuclear tourism. Army officials installed the obelisk of igneous rock marking Ground Zero in 1965. Today, it is a favorite spot for tourists to snap pictures. Officials designated the site and its grounds a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

In 1969, Congress established Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History “as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology.” Initially staffed by Air Force personnel, the institution is a testament to Cold War efforts to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm around nuclear science.

In Los Alamos, the operational laboratories are closed to the public, there are lots of visitor opportunities—including, since Christopher Nolan’s film, downloadable maps of filming locations and local “Project Oppenheimer” themed experiences that involve drinks, shopping, and sightseeing. Soon, the Los Alamos location of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park—comprised of three sites across the U.S. that played a significant part in developing the bomb—will open to the public. The weekend of Oppenheimer’s premiere, local news reported a “swell” of calls to the Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque and tourists “flocking” to Los Alamos.

Seeing the state as a giant playground for recreation and experimentation is not so different from conceiving of it as an amenity for private enjoyment. In both the nuclear and outdoors tourist economies, it pays to be empty. You can see this in Oppenheimer, much of whose plot turns on the title character’s lifelong yearning: “If only I could combine physics and New Mexico, then I’d truly be happy.”

What is he yearning for? Emptiness, it seems. Emptiness offers Oppenheimer freedom from harm, guilt, and accountability. At times, the film feels like an ad campaign for New Mexico’s nuclear tourism: the empty landscape is both a source for finding the secrets of the natural world and a key to a scientific revelation that functions as spiritual enlightenment. But there is no such thing as the frontier freedom that Oppenheimer thought New Mexico’s landscape promised.

Even attempts to dissuade viewers from romanticizing the events of the film reinforce emptiness. In New Mexico, a somber 15-second public service announcement from the Union of Concerned Scientists preceded screenings of Oppenheimer, reminding viewers that nuclear tests contributed to high rates of infant mortality, cancers, and the poisoning of soil and water. The PSA showed a landscape viewed from a passenger train. It evoked Oppenheimer’s ride to the town of Lamy in Nolan’s film, but also could have been Alamogordo, near the test site. The lack of specificity established the scenery as abandoned: modest discolored buildings, absence of people, the toll of a single bell in ambient natural sound.

The concerned scientists likely didn’t intend to glance over the people of New Mexico, but the PSA nevertheless reaffirmed the idea that the state is empty. Is this a result of the bomb’s devastation, or was it always the case? Who used to inhabit this space? Who still does?

Indigenous and Hispano New Mexicans who were present in the region long before Oppenheimer have been the most impacted by the lab. Many New Mexicans know “Downwinders”— residents of the rural Tularosa Valley downwind of the blast who have borne the brunt of the ecological, economic, and negative health outcomes from nuclear testing, but who have yet to receive any formal recognition or reparation from the U.S. government.

Despite those who profit from silence and emptiness, New Mexico is a land of testimony. This state is full of life and full of people who have dedicated their lives to holding each other close. Organizations like Tewa Women United, an all-volunteer organization founded in 1989 that seeks to create and foster spaces that center Indigenous women’s knowledge and health practices, speak to the specific ways the bomb has affected Indigenous communities in the state. The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe held an entire exhibition devoted to the topic in 2022, orienting viewers toward the global connections and hazardous histories that arise from the first blast of the Atomic Age in New Mexico’s desert.

Telling stories like these is what makes New Mexico a real place—not the empty “Land of Enchantment” packaged for tourists. When you visit, work towards listening, and you’ll begin to see past the vistas.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Campbell depicts five well-known tourist destinations from around the world and populates the sites with endangered animal species native to each region. The more lyrical black and white drawings of the endangered species contrast the tourist sites, which are rendered in a brightly colored style reminiscent of textbook drawings. The contrast gives the animals an almost ghostlike quality—fading memories drowned out by the bright solidity of modern life.

Campbell tells Zócalo that she hopes her Sketchbook “may bring just a tiny bit more awareness to the devastating issue of biodiversity loss.”

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While selecting just 10 essays from the scores we’ve published this year is no easy task, the ones we’ve highlighted below reflect the best of Zócalo’s special, eclectic blend of ideas journalism with a head and heart. From a first-hand account of incarceration, to a case for how the global fight against authoritarianism can begin in your backyard, to even why, when feeling adrift, one might consider passage by container ship, here, in no particular order, are our staff’s favorite essays from 2022:

The Valley’s Last Camaro

San Fernando Valley aficionado Andrew Warren and automotive writer Tim Moore pen an ode to the last Camaro to leave the Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant before it closed in 1992. Today, the cherry red Z-28 lives on, serving as a time capsule to a bygone era of life and labor in the Valley.

Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant’s “Last Camaro” became a “memento of what that plant had meant to [workers] and their community,” write Andrew Warren and Tim Moore. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

How Horror Helps Your Brain

Mathias Clasen, director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark, studies why we’re drawn to the things that go bump in the night. “Recreational fear,” he explains, is a form of play behavior that prepares our brains to handle real-life horrors.

How the Kids Are Getting to All Right

As the youth mental health crisis worsened in recent years, young adult fiction writer Bree Barton decided to speak directly to young people to better understand the challenges they faced. For Zócalo and “State of Mind,” a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University, she shares what she learned—and the power that comes with letting tweens and teens shape their own narratives.

If You’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers Is Complicated

USC professor Natalia Molina’s relationship with Los Doyers has never been easy. As someone who grew up in the shadow of the ballpark, she reflects on Dodger Stadium’s dark history of displacing Latinx communities, and how she still finds community in the bleachers.

When the Public Narrative Fails

In a fractured nation, writer David L. Ulin finds consolation in literature. He explains why today, amid the breakdown of American consensus, writers provide lucidity: “In staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.”

With the collapse of society’s public narrative, writer David L. Ulin looks to literature for consolation. Illustration by Be Boggs.

How You Can Spot—and Stop—the Next Putin

With his column “Connecting California,” Zócalo’s Joe Mathews has tirelessly chronicled the inner workings of the Golden State for 10 years. Now, Mathews is introducing a second column, Democracy Local, exploring how everyday people, all over the world, govern themselves at the local level. The spirit of the column is embodied by this piece, which makes the case for why, amid the rise of authoritarian leadership around this world, you—yes, you!—can stop the next Putin-in-the-making.

How My Republican Grandfather Helped Legalize Abortion

Editor-at-large Caroline Tracey weaves personal and intellectual histories to highlight how an unlikely coalition came together in Colorado in the 1960s to support abortion rights. In her essay, Tracey considers the motivations behind the players in this fight for reproductive freedom—one of whom was her own grandfather.

Why Food Vendors Belong in the Prison Yard

Food sales “remain the closest thing to direct contact that C-yard inmates have with the community,” writes David Medina, an inmate at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, California. For the Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?,” supported by the California Wellness Foundation, Medina writes about how these sales have had a positive impact inside and outside of prison walls.

Where I Go: A Big, Slow-Moving Boat

In 2013, Elena Legeros quit her publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. Legeros shares how, out in the middle of the ocean, life aboard a container ship gave her “the space and time” to embrace herself.

What We Miss When We See the Plight of the Refugee

Our ongoing Zócalo/Mellon Foundation inquiry delves into complicated histories around the world, confronting the past in order to better understand it, and to forge paths forward. In response to the central question, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” political economist Mausumi Mahapatro draws on her work with Rohingya refugees in the world’s largest refugee camp, in Bangladesh, to highlight the social and political lives they carry with them and create anew.

Mausumi Mahapatra works in refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, which house close to 1 million Rohingya, like the woman photographed here. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

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May 2013: CMA CGM Dalila, offshore of Yokohama, Japan

The flat sea glimmers like a disco ball and it’s warm enough to sit outside without a puffy coat. All day long there have been whale sightings. … WHALES! The watchmen called me in the gymnasium where I was playing ping pong with Ian and Cloyd, crewmembers from the Philippines. WHALES! Each time I’d race to starboard or port side and scan the sea, squinting for a splash of a fin or tail. Finally this evening I saw the whales on port side, basking in the warm, peach light of the sunset. We saw two that floated like black logs along the calm surface. And another on the starboard side, the perfect outline of a tail descending into the deep.

In 2013, I quit my publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. My trip was generously supported by a fellowship from my college for recent graduates who demonstrated a “strong desire to travel and a deep love of beauty.” I planned to talk to crews, communities, and organizations involved in maritime shipping, and to raise awareness of the industry’s rising social and environmental impact. In truth, my motives were far more selfish. I was in awe of container ships, and drawn to the unpredictability of the ocean. I was also compelled to do something a little reckless, just for me. Mostly I wanted to be far away.

I had been living two separate lives for some time. In my hometown of Seattle, I was a mostly closeted version of myself, so as not to bring any embarrassment or discomfort to my devout Greek Orthodox family. In New York, there was another version of me, figuring out who I was and what I wanted out of an adult romantic relationship, and on the verge of falling in love with a woman. I hoped that time on a big, slow-moving boat might give me space to reimagine how I would navigate the future.

A view of Marsaxlokk Port, Malta. During her journey, the author often walked around the ship, past rows of multicolored containers. Courtesy of author.

July 2013: Westport Business Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

It is 12:25 in the morning and I am waiting in an empty business center in Port Klang. It’s a cement box of a building with scuffed walls, cold metal chairs and tiny television sets playing American westerns. … I’m not certain I am where I’m supposed to be. Hopefully my ship will arrive in the next hour and I can begin the immigration process and board the boat before sunrise. Earlier in the day I was told it would be here at 8 p.m., and then later, 11 p.m. When I arrived at 11 p.m., I was told the boat would not be here until 1 a.m.

As a passenger on a container ship, you are the least of anyone’s concern—insignificant in comparison to the millions of dollars’ worth of cargo on board. There is a lot of time for quiet reflection—with no cell service and only intermittent access to email. Days are punctuated by mealtimes but are otherwise entirely free of programming. On the ship I had a surprisingly spacious cabin with a double bed, desk, loveseat, and coffee table, my own bathroom, and one porthole looking out over the containers. I spent my mornings reading on the couch or writing diary entries at my desk. Sometimes I took a break to climb the several stairs to the bridge, where officers and crew take turns manning the ship, to stare out at the sea or pester whoever was on watch with questions.

In the afternoons I could walk around the perimeter of the ship, past the rows and rows of multicolored containers, a half-mile distance around. After lunch, I often slept. Some afternoons I ran on the ancient treadmill in the “gymnasium,” a small room with some athletic contraptions from the ‘80s. Or I’d play ping pong with any off-duty crewmembers.

The officers were from the countries where the ships were flagged—in the case of this trip, France and Germany. The crew were mostly from the Philippines, but there were others from Romania, Russia, and Kiribati, an island I had never heard of. All of the officers and crew that I met were men.

July 2013: CC Rigoletto, Straits of Malacca

There is one other passenger on board, Victor from Sweden. It’s so cute because no one has really introduced themselves to us, but nearly everyone we’ve passed lets us know that there is a barbeque on deck tonight. They are roasting a whole pig and there will be tiger prawns and merguez sausages as well! This will be the last barbeque for a while because we will be passing around India and it is the monsoon season. I think they are going all out for the occasion. Every day the menu is posted on a printout taped in the stairwell to the mess hall. And every day someone pastes up a different photo of a scantily clad female celebrity between lunch and dinner. Day 1: Cameron Diaz. Day 2: Christina Aguilera. Ironically, the steward also includes on the printout the name of the saint who is celebrated each day.

Before my trips I had assumed I would be one of few women, if not the only woman, on board. I was careful in my dress not to invite any unwanted attention. And when asked, I avoided all conversation around my personal and romantic life—I certainly never revealed that I was dating a woman. One day I was playing ping pong with one of the officers, and he asked me why I never wore skirts—then jokingly threatened to steal all my trousers while I exercised so that I’d have to wear a skirt to dinner.

In some ways, the journey amplified my inclination to hide and my growing frustration with the disconnect between how I presented myself to people of my past, and to strangers, and who I really was. Even thousands of miles away from everyone I knew, with the entire space of the ocean and the anonymity of an experience unshared, I was still building a wall. I had the courage to do so much alone, and yet even alone I didn’t have the courage to be me.

One remarkable day—the day we sailed through the Suez Canal in the first hazy blue light of dawn—the beauty of the experience was punctuated by an email from my family. They were planning a wedding for my sister, a big fat Greek wedding, and I just couldn’t be happy. I was mourning the love and support I feared I would never receive from my parents, and felt guilty for my lack of joy for a sister I loved so much. Waves of anger and jealousy and anxiety swelled up so strong that I felt sick to my stomach. That day, I vowed not to be the same when I returned.

Elena Legeros aboard the CC Rigoletto on the Straits of Malacca, during a barbecue on deck with the ship’s crew. Courtesy of author.

August 25, 2013: MSC Uganda, offshore of Boston, United States

Today will be my last day aboard and it could not be a more glorious day. There isn’t a breath of wind and the sea is a shimmer like static on a deep blue TV screen. We are ahead of schedule and at midday we came to a complete halt in the middle of the ocean and I went outside to suntan, taking dips in the pool of icy seawater. Every time I go outside I sniff to see if I can smell the smell of the Cape. My phone is getting intermittent service and I can hear the Boston-based coast guard over the radio in the wheelhouse.

It’s been nine years since my voyage. In that time I’ve moved from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to San Francisco. I married the woman I love, and we’ve had two children together. We recently decided to move our family to Long Beach, where we rented an apartment that looks out over the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest ports in the United States. Long Beach drew us for a variety of reasons, but I was excited to be so close to the container ships.

These days I feel rooted on land and glad to be close to my family—the one I grew up with and the one I’m building. I don’t feel the pull to venture far away, but I love to see the ships in the harbor, to think about where they came from and where they’re going. Sometimes I check online to see what they’re carrying and the route they’ve taken. I think about the officers and crewmembers on board and how long they’ve been away from their families. I’m reminded of my smallness, both relative to the size of these ships and the expanse of the world they sail. But I’m reminded of strength, too: the strength I found in the middle of the ocean, not in the face of any danger or adversity but with the space and time to discover it fully.

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Now it’s that time of the year when we should give thanks for the only California real estate that’s still cheap—all that space that we’re occupying, rent free, in the heads of our fellow Americans.

This Thanksgiving, as you out-of-state friends and relatives welcome us into your homes across this crazy country, visiting Californians should take every opportunity to tell you just how grateful we are for your constant attention.

It never fails to impress me how top of mind California is across these United States. I recently spent a working weekend in that glorious cradle of American ideas, the home of Washington and Jefferson and Madison, the great state of Virginia. At least, that’s what it used to be called. But between meetings in a hotel conference room, I learned that Virginians now call their state “California East.”

Yes, Virginia has a number of new locations of California-based Trader Joe’s (including a very good one across the street from my hotel). But I don’t think Virginia’s newly elected governor, Glenn Youngkin, was calling his own state “California East” in campaign speeches because of his love for seasonal Joe-Joe’s cookies.

“In a few short years, Virginia has become California East. It happened quickly,” Youngkin warned. Coming from a Republican who attributed this Californization of his state to “the left liberal progressive agenda,” this was supposed to sound critical. But when his allies listed policies and proposals that were turning the Old Dominion into California East, it actually sounded like they were listing the rosy side of Golden State governance: strengthening clean air laws, legalizing marijuana, shortening sentences for non-violent offenders, sending a ballot in the mail to every voter, and going four entire years without executing anyone.

“California East” isn’t a Virginia creation. Political leaders in Nevada and even Colorado have waved the phrase around like a boogeyman to warn about the perils of all the Californians moving in. Then again, can you blame them? We Californians can be so good-looking that you don’t want to look directly at us—lest ye be blinded.

Sometimes, though, this obsession with California is so over-the-top that it can get a little scary. Texas talks about us so constantly that, if it weren’t for the physical separation provided by Arizona and New Mexico, California might have to get a restraining order.

Texans like to pretend that they don’t want California influences around—they even had these great T-shirts made (I own one) that say, “Don’t California My Texas.” But, in reality, they brag whenever Californians or California companies relocate themselves and their California values to the Lone Star State. Texas is now home to 40 different In-N-Out Burger locations, Elon Musk, and an electric grid in even worse shape than ours. Plus, all the transplants have made Austin an unofficial California colony.

Lately, I’ve noticed Iowa and other pork-producing states have rivaled Texas in their fixation on California. Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst can’t stop talking about what they claim is a California ban on bacon. “We thought we’ve seen it all from the radical left … but this takes it to a whole new level: banning bacon? No way, folks,” Ernst said.

This worried me at first, because I love bacon.  So, in order to investigate the salt-cured delicacy’s availability and legal status, I sought out my favorite downtown L.A. food vendor, who sold me a bacon-wrapped hot dog. As a final journalistic confirmation, I Ignored my wife’s dietary advice just this once and ate it.

It turns out that what Iowans are really hog-tied over is California’s commitment to animal welfare. In fact, California hasn’t banned anything; we just won’t let Iowa sell its pork products here until they start complying with our more animal-friendly laws on how pigs are confined. So, the 3.2 million human Iowans may whine a little, but Iowa’s 23.8 million hogs and pigs should love us!

Here’s the truth about what lies in the hearts of Iowans, Texans, Virginians, and everyone else who just can’t get California off the brain: Almost all their criticisms of us are really compliments—love, even—disguised in the homespun idioms of good, God-fearing Americans.

So, Californians, don’t lose your cool if a relative tries to bait you at holiday dinner. Instead, I’ve mocked up this handy California hate/love translator with some common examples to help you understand what your family member is actually trying to say:

– “You’ll let anyone vote, you election fraudsters” means “I’m awed by your state’s commitment to democracy.”
– “You guys love illegals and open borders” means “I find it hard to admit how much I admire your desire to solve the worker shortage and keep immigrant families together.”
– “You don’t respect the rights of gunowners” means “Thank God there’s one American state trying to reduce gun violence.”
– “You’re giving everything to the welfare queens” means “I really love how California led on Medicaid expansion.”
– “Your environmental regulations are out of control” means “Thank you for saving the planet so we don’t have to.”

That said, don’t let all this praise go to your head.  We Californians need to admit to ourselves that we’re not really the unstoppable, progressive colossus that other Americans imagine us to be. Our homelessness is even worse than it looks. PG&E is an unrepentant killer. Our cost of living is crushing. So is business regulation. And our schools, gutted by pandemic closures, really should teach critical race theory—so they can at least say that they are teaching anything at all.

So, my fellow Californians, stay humble as the pie you’re eating as you move around the country this holiday season. Don’t brag about our world-beating economic growth, or the recent sharp decline in our poverty rates. Resist the temptation to mention the long history of would-be American leaders bashing California—I’m looking at you Mitt Romney—even as they buy residences here.

Instead, let yourself savor all the California love you receive, in whatever form you receive it. And give thanks for all the Americans who won’t stop talking about our state. Because California couldn’t afford all this promotion itself, even with a $31 billion budget surplus.

Happy Thanksgiving, California East… oops, I mean, America!

The post Thanks for Being Obsessed with Us, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some nations, like Israel, have introduced such passports. Other places, like New York State, are planning trials. Still others, including Florida and Texas, are gearing up to forbid them altogether.

It’s long been true that international passengers must prove yellow fever and other vaccinations when traveling abroad, and that children cannot be enrolled in school without having been vaccinated. But requiring proof of vaccination to board a plane, be seated at a restaurant, or attend a show—that would be new. The fur has—predictably—been flying.

Vaccine passports are a screen subject that masks the real issue: How much pressure are we as a society entitled to put on those who refuse to be vaccinated?

To end the pandemic, and to return to normal life, we need to know whether people are infected with COVID-19. That’s because people who are infected, whether they have symptoms or not, pose a danger to others. Vaccine passports help make this information more accessible.

We should think about vaccination credentials in terms of the information that they provide us—and it’s looking increasingly likely that demonstrating that you have been vaccinated conveys the same information as a negative COVID test. It tells you and others that you pose no threat, allowing society to open up without worrying about fanning pandemic flames.

This is the case whether the COVID vaccines provide sterilizing immunity—preventing transmission of the virus—or not. Not all vaccines are sterilizing. Rotavirus, inactivated polio, hepatitis B, and flu vaccines are not sterilizing. HPV, smallpox, measles, and oral polio vaccines are.

We do not yet know for certain where COVID vaccines stand, though, so far, the emerging evidence suggests that they do prevent transmission, not just symptoms. Not until we have quite a few more months of experience with the vaccinated will we know for sure.

If we assume, for the moment, that COVID vaccines do produce sterilizing immunity, people who have been vaccinated clearly no longer threaten others. They contribute to herd immunity, slowing disease transmission to protect the medically compromised people who cannot be vaccinated, and ultimately, to bring the pandemic to an end.

Herd immunity through vaccination is a public good that we should encourage, and possibly even mandate. It was obviously unfair to require immunization or passports when not everyone had access to vaccines. But now that all adults in the U.S. can be freely vaccinated, it has become a matter of choice. Failure to get a jab has consequences for others.

If we agree that infected people should not endanger others by frequenting public venues where they can transmit disease, then it follows that we should be allowed to determine who is infected in the first place.

We can do that either by asking for vaccine status or by testing (a cumbersome undertaking, when you have to screen every person, entering every venue, every single day). Vaccine passports will be far more convenient.

Passports are a mild form of encouragement that gives the vaccinated certain benefits—and that spare individuals, and society, the burden of constant testing. Some view forbidding unvaccinated and unpassported people to fly, dine, attend events, and the like as unfair, an infringement of personal rights. But many others recognize such restrictions as an acceptable way of pressuring the unvaccinated to become vaccinated, for the benefit of the common good.

The requirements associated with vaccine passports are not novel. Many regulations and laws forbid citizens from posing threats to others, directly or indirectly, actively or passively. Zoning rules ban flammable materials in cellars, attics, or garages; require houses to be maintained and gardens tended; and make owners control pests and rodents, keep dogs leashed, and so forth.

Other regulations impinge on our bodies to improve our health: requiring the addition of fluoride in water, vitamins in milk, iodine in salt. Still other rules require certain behaviors to keep us safe: putting on seatbelts, wearing motorcycle helmets, using condoms during sex if we know we have a sexually transmitted disease.

Vaccine requirements abound, as well. We require vaccines for children enrolling in schools, for players of certain sports, and for entry into some nations. It’s hard to see why mandating COVID vaccinations to end the most devastating disaster since the Second World War is not taken equally seriously, and by more people. It seems reasonable that citizens be asked to participate in creating herd immunity as in other unpleasant but necessary tasks—defending the nation, or paying taxes. Not to mention that getting vaccinated and avoiding illness reduces the overall consumption of medical resources, benefitting everyone yet again.

Passport resisters might have a slightly stronger case for allowing people to keep their vaccination status private if science ultimately demonstrates that COVID vaccines are not sterilizing, protect only the vaccinated individual from becoming seriously ill, and do not block infection. This would recast vaccination as an individual, but not a public, good.

But even if it turns out that the vaccines merely deal with symptoms, infected vaccinated people still have lower viral loads than unvaccinated people and therefore should be less infectious and less dangerous to others. Knowing who had received their shot still will make a difference.

Passports, simply, should not be an issue. Yes, unvaccinated people without passports would have to endure the lines and possibly the cost of being frequently tested, while the vaccinated and passported would not. But that would be a choice they make to avoid vaccination. If people who refuse to be vaccinated can gain admission to events and venues by testing instead, the unfairness dissipates. Since they are not excluded, only inconvenienced, there is no inequity.

And the larger, crucial social good is achieved: We will know, either through testing or through proof of vaccination, whether someone has COVID-19.

The post It’s Time to Embrace the Vaccine Passport appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For more than a quarter of a century I visited Kathmandu at least once a year, as a journalist and a tourist, hanging on to the magic I’d found there on my first visits. The rapid changes were disorienting and a little dispiriting. The city’s charm was clearly fading, like the bloom on a flower, wilting under the onslaught of construction and pollution. During the civil war, which began in 1996, the city filled with refugees. After it ended 10 years later, the brakes on Nepal’s economy came off, and development surged.

Each time I arrived, I would seek out familiar places to reconnect to the city’s particular energy, as though the voltage had changed and once again, I’d brought the wrong adaptor.

I loved, for instance, the museum in Patan, which offers quiet halls of gilded treasures in a building of exquisite appeal, where the city’s dusty confusion was distilled into clear refreshment. Or the vast and ancient Buddhist stupa at Boudha, a meeting place for Tibetan Buddhists for more than a thousand years. Little more than 50 years ago, this waymark on the trade route to Tibet was set, like a round white jewel, in emerald fields.

Then the concrete swept around it and the surrounding roads became choked with smog. Yet the huge dome still cast its spell, especially at dusk, when the city’s Tibetan communities gathered in the fading light to amble round its circumference: shaven monks, toothless old ladies in their aprons, young women fresh from the office, all whispering mantras, spinning prayers wheels, sharing gossip. It was calming to join this endless procession, breathe in the scent of juniper and lose myself a little.

Both options usually had to wait a bit. More often than not I ended up in the tourist district of Thamel, too far from Patan and Boudha for spur-of-the-moment visits. Thamel was—is—noise and hassle, but I usually had people to see and meetings to arrange and these things were most easily accomplished in its overcrowded streets. Think of any service a traveler might require, and you’d find it within a block of your hotel. For a period, I most commonly stayed at the Kathmandu Guest House, failing, like the proverbial frog in the warming pan of water, to notice when the prices got too hot to handle. When I finally realized I didn’t have to stay there to visit the hotel’s barber, my old friend Dinesh, I moved elsewhere.

Another advantage of Thamel was its proximity to a more accessible touchstone for me to reconnect. This one was more down at heel.

Twenty minutes walking south from Thamel through scruffy lanes, is the center of the old city, popularly known as Durbar Square, where the pagoda temple known as Kasthamandap stands. Kasthamandap is where the name Kathmandu originates—Kastha being wood and mandapa, or madu, meaning pavilion. The oldest surviving temple in the Newari style, it is the hallmark of Kathmandu and its satellite cities. It’s said to be built from timber sawn from a single tree and covers a stone platform roughly 70 feet along each side.

Compared with much Newari architecture, Kasthamandap is rather plain and lacking in ornamentation, but also it is unquestionably the central focus of the city. The oldest recorded reference to the temple is from the 12th century, but it’s likely much older than that. Like Boudha, the structure stands alongside an ancient trade artery on the cusp of the northern and southern parts of the city, a liminal place, at the start and end of things.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that right next door to Kasthamandap is another temple, the Ashok Vinayak. It’s dedicated to the elephant-headed god Ganesh. (“Vinayak” is another of his names.) Ganesh is the remover of obstacles, so if you’re planning a journey or a new enterprise, or you just want your day to go smoothly, then he’s your god. This Ganesh shrine is one of the oldest and most popular in the whole Kathmandu valley, even if the stone icon itself is of little artistic merit. The shrine is so popular, in fact, that this neighborhood is known as Ganeshthan: the “place of Ganesh.”

Women selling flowers in the streets near Kasthamandap. Courtesy of Ed Douglas.

At first light, women bring plates with vermilion, rice and petals to anoint the shrine and ring the temple bell. At rush hour, commuters on their Hero Honda motorbikes pause as they pass. Helmet visors snap up and a gloved right hand comes to the eyes in reverence as they glide on through a cloud of incense smoke, past women sitting on the ground selling vegetables and flowers.

But it wasn’t Ganesh I would come to see. My ritual icon is just across the road—a gilt-metal rodent bolted to a plinth to deter robbers, its grubby backside nestling against the side of Kasthamandap. There’s a chain around its neck with a bell and its pointy snout is tilted upward, polished to a bright sheen by the supplicatory fingers of passers-by. There are often flowers placed between its ears and a tikka smeared on its forehead. Depending on that day’s flower arrangement, the rodent can seem austere or jaunty, punkish or aloof, always full of character, a down-to-earth, quotidian sort of god: demotic, even democratic. Its commonest name is Mushakraj, or more formally, Mūṣakavāhana, a vahana being a god’s vehicle or means of transport: his or her entourage.

Ganesh emerged clearly in Hindu culture around the 4th century and early scriptures mention a few vahana: a peacock, a lion, a serpent, even another elephant. But it’s the rodent that stuck. Rodents can go anywhere, squeeze into tiny spaces no elephant could navigate, thus carrying the quick-witted Ganesh into corners of your life he might not otherwise reach. It’s not just the external hurdles on the road we need to cross; it’s the impediments within ourselves that we need help from Ganesh to overcome, just as he harnessed his rodent friend and brought out the better angels of its nature.

In the spring of 2015, once more newly arrived in the city, I took my regular walk through the alleyways toward Durbar Square and Ganeshthan. The corpse of a rat lay in a gutter on its back, teeth pointing to the heavens. You’re never far from a real rat in Kathmandu. The real ones are pests but they’re survivors, too, scrapping for life where they can, and so earn grudging respect from the locals. Life isn’t easy with an elephant on your back. When I reached my rat, opposite the Ashok Vinayak, he was sporting a Mohican and looking sharper than ever. I took it as a good omen and next day flew on to the far west of Nepal on another mission.

The statue of Mushakraj in Durbar Square after the devastating earthquake that rocked Kathmandu in 2015. Courtesy of Ed Douglas.

Of course, I was wrong. Days later a deadly earthquake rocked Kathmandu. Flying back into the city, I saw from the plane this time that buildings had fallen, not sprung up, and the airport was busy with military aircraft bringing emergency aid. When we landed, I hurried back to Durbar Square. Kasthamandap was gone, a jumble of broken timbers piled on its stone plinth. The nearby temple of Maju Dega, three stories and 60 feet high, was nothing but rubble.

Devastation was everywhere. But the flower and vegetable sellers were already back, nestling against the ruins of the temples. Stricken citizens were out in force, looking for help in clearing these latest obstructions.

So it was lucky that the little Ganesh shrine had survived. And, across the narrow street, for once bareheaded but standing firmly on his front paws, was the rat, nose in the air, sniffing the centuries. I rubbed his snout and then went to look for my friend Dinesh, to see if he was unscathed and would give me a haircut.

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Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We spent a lot of time learning about each other’s favorite places around Los Angeles. Our conversations motivated us to actually investigate the places we had long been curious about. Since workdays were intended for one destination and never allowed the opportunity to explore the stops we passed along the way, we replaced the monotony of going to work with trips to places across the city, learning about the history of our communities, and having fun. Transit stopped being a line from point A to point B. If we wanted to get to point B, we could—and did—make stops along the way.

Transit became not just our means of getting around, but also our way of feeling connected with the outside world. Taking the train to work each morning offered wonderful views of the mountains, the gleaming downtown skyline, and the neighborhoods we passed through. Our fellow riders gave us a sense of the lives we shared the city with, its vitality and diversity. Major events—like protests or strikes or championship celebrations—have a way of spilling out into the transit system and bringing out a sense of shared identity and community.

Union Station took on a deep personal significance. Under its high-vaulted ceilings, we would meet up on our way to work or before venturing out to explore the city. We would pause to grab a coffee and admire the station’s golden hues and tranquil courtyards, or watch the trains rumble out of the yard. Then we would get swept up in the throngs of passengers rushing to their next train as we set out to find something we hadn’t seen before. For one of us—a transplant to LA—changing trains in Union Station was literally their first experience of Los Angeles, making it the natural starting point to take in as much of this new, unfamiliar, and exciting place as possible. As a Los Angeles native, the other was rooted in local tradition and culture, with limited experience beyond East L.A. Exploring the city together led to conversations about the urban changes and development of each neighborhood. And we would trade historical knowledge for the memories and nostalgia for what L.A once had been. We experienced the city through each other’s eyes and witnessed the lives of all the amazing people who contribute to L.A.’s essence.

A city this vast is too much to take in all at once; you can only wrap your mind around it by breaking it down into smaller pieces. For us, we broke it down along the transit lines, learning Los Angeles one route at a time.

We explored the different communities along the Gold Line, starting with Chinatown and Boyle Heights. It’s easy to recommend the beautiful and enchanting neighborhood in Chinatown, where the neon lights dance on reflective surfaces as you walk down the street. Or strolling through Boyle Heights on a weekend night, when the aroma of carne asada wafts from every corner taco stand. The more we explored, the further out we traveled, eventually finding hiking trails that offered an escape from the city, with tall shady trees stretching above your head and parakeets loudly chattering as they soar from one tree to the next.

Along the Blue Line through South Los Angeles, we found beautiful places and wonderful people. In Watts, while disappointed with the scaffolding covering Watts Towers, we found friends willing to talk to us about art in the community. A little further north we found the Alameda Swap Meet and El Faro Plaza, two large warehouse spaces bustling with Latino entrepreneurs and delicious scents from tacos to raspados. In these spaces we found people who showed us the true meaning of community and togetherness. If you have a creative spark in you, the friendly faces in Watts will take you in. And if you are looking for a lively space to watch a game and eat tasty food, the people in El Faro Plaza are there for a good time.

With the Red Line, we ventured past the Walk of Fame and through the Hollywood Hills. While known for impeccable homes, we found secluded streets with wide-open vantage points of the city and a neighborhood intended for pedestrians, with small walkways and staircases. It felt like stepping away from the city; our senses were tuned to the fragrant smells of flowers and fresh air, birds chirping, and dogs barking as we walked past. And even while we were standing in the center of the city, the sounds of cars and trucks were faint and barely noticeable.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

Riding the train at dawn is possibly the most peaceful way to encounter L.A. When the sun is rising over the east, you hear the city waking up. But even before that, you will find Latina women bundled up in scarves and sweaters already boarding buses and trains to move across town. They traverse the city as they travel from the Eastside to their housekeeping jobs on the Westside. Bundled all the way to the top of their heads, lugging large thermoses filled with coffee to drink and wake up as they move. These women would share stories about the large mansions they worked in. These large glamorous homes were meant to look untouched and pristine, and while they maintained these homes, these women would also have to keep an eye on the curious children who needed to be cared for. They would then take the transit system back home, where their work continued as mothers.

The pandemic has limited our movement and put a hold on our adventures. We can’t see new places or stumble upon old friends on our regular commute. The pandemic robbed us of the connection with the outside world that transit offered. We miss the community of people who used transit on a regular basis and were happy to share stories and chat. Now people limit their movement and faces sit behind masks as people protect themselves from the virus. Right now, the trains don’t feel like they have that love and energy we used to encounter, but we look forward to the day that everything begins to buzz with excitement again.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We’ve long wanted to illustrate how transit can be an excellent means of seeing the city. As the pandemic dragged on, we finally conceived Transiting Los Angeles as a way to share the places that we’ve fallen in love with to inspire others to explore them as well. We think of our blog like a series of postcards: “Wish You Were Here.” Despite our different perspectives, transit has shaped a common understanding of our home. While we try to pick up the pieces of our lives amid all this uncertainty, it’s nice to remember that there are still wonderful places within reach. Los Angeles will be forever changed by the pandemic, but whatever comes next, transit will always take us where we need to go.

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I decided to use 2020 as a break from leisure travel. I wanted it to be a year of calm and peace, a year to build my savings, finish some home improvement projects, and work on my screenwriting, the whole reason I moved from New York to Los Angeles in the first place. But I never could have imagined what 2020 would bring.

Aviation—with its sky-high booms and tragic lows—has played out like a Hollywood blockbuster. Evil invades, the hero defeats the evil, happily ever after begins. Then the sequel comes out, and it’s the same thing all over again. The evil has included terrorist attacks, economic downturns, and airplane manufacturing incidents. But not even 9/11 came close to matching this pandemic’s effect on the airline industry.

March 2020 was my last regular month of flying as I had come to know it. Flight attendants typically bid for schedules about a month in advance and receive a line, which is a month filled with trips, or a schedule that has on-call days and off days. Both line-holders and reserves, as they’re called, are full-time employees; one group knows where they’re going, and the other doesn’t. Reserve flight attendants commonly have less seniority, but that’s not always the case.

As I finished my 12th year with the airline in March, I found myself on reserve though working a busy schedule. We knew COVID was spreading, but the fear of a pandemic was not yet a concern. It all seems like a blur: One by one, city by city, starting with everywhere across China, flights were canceling. Nearly all my flights were empty the entire month of March. Still, when COVID-19 hit the U.S., I felt a bit secluded from it all—but nevertheless uneasy. In one sense, as an essential worker, it was business as usual for me: I would drive into the airport on the empty L.A. freeways and be greeted by lines of airplanes parked on the tarmac, empty TSA lines, barren terminals, and minimal passenger loads.

Just before Hawai’i implemented its mandatory 14-day quarantine on March 26, I worked a trip to Honolulu. I went from empty shop to empty shop seeking alcohol to make homemade sanitizer. I found what I needed at Longs Drugs and decided to buy a facial mask, too, to try and destress. Back at my hotel room, I chowed down on some Korean BBQ, sipped a beer, then stared out my window with the beauty mask stuck to my face, wondering if this would be one of the last Hawaiian sunsets I would see as a working flight attendant.

Shortly after that trip, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and saved my job, along with thousands of others. But CARES’s Payroll Protection Program only prohibits airlines from furloughing employees until October 1. Between the millions of dollars per day in losses and the early retirement packages and special leaves on offer, we’ve all known what was coming. Over the summer, more than 50 percent of the airline workforce—from pilots and flight attendants to maintenance and ramp personnel—received warnings of potential furloughs, and in late August and early September, major airlines began announcing upcoming furloughs publicly. My airline family and I have been contemplating our futures as we watch a recently thriving business be brought to its knees completely overnight.

Like so many others whose lives have been affected by COVID, my airline family and I just want our abnormal lives back. Courtesy of Cathy Torres.

I know we’re not the only industry that’s facing an apocalypse. And I know I’ve glossed over the grind of the job—16-hour days, waking up to the smell of jet fuel at your airport hotel, missing out on birthdays and holidays because you have to be at work. I take pride in the work we do. We are the first responders if you fall ill in-flight. We are FAA-certified professionals trained to evacuate passengers in 90 seconds or implement security measures in case of an emergency. Our industry transports organs; hauls mail and supplies in our cargo bins; and reunites families so they can say goodbye to a dying loved one, or hello to a newborn babe. The success of the airline industry is good for everyone, which is why it’s so heartbreaking to see it in its current state.

I now fly about once a month. I receive a guaranteed amount of money to sit at home and wait for that call. I would be lying if I told you that being grounded hasn’t had some advantages. For years, I have fantasized about what it might feel like to be a “normal” person again: to have a healthy sleep schedule, a daily workout routine, eat three meals in one time zone. Now, most mornings I wake up with a cup of coffee and sit at my laptop to write, read an article, or listen to a podcast. I’ve been exploring a more plant-based diet, and my variations on cashew cheese have been shockingly delicious.

I occasionally go hiking at Elysian Park with my friend and fellow flight attendant Lauren. Being at home has been the calm that perhaps my soul yearned for, but my ego and free spirit fought against for years. I could come to better terms with this reality, if it had been my choice.

In July, I had one assignment. It was to report to the airport and stand by for four hours, so that in case someone didn’t show up or another flight misconnected, I could step in, and the show could still go on. That day everyone arrived on time. After my assignment, I walked around the deserted terminals, observing the shuttered restaurants and the lone janitor pushing an empty trash cart around. My extroverted self felt a wave of depression at the emptiness. I left the airport, drove to In-N-Out on Sepulveda, and ordered a burger and fries—giving the proverbial middle finger to my vegan pandemic diet as the restaurant’s signature animal-style sauce dripped on my uniform.

Being a flight attendant is a lifestyle, and many of us have tried to keep our flying lives separate from our home lives. But it’s not that simple. My work life is woven with memories of dining on tapas in Madrid, sipping wine in Paris at the Hotel du Nord, and frequenting jazz bars in Manhattan with the dearest of co-workers and friends. This way of life is ingrained in us, and we’re all trying to solve the mystery of how our identities will change. Who am I, if not a globe-trotting, free spirit of a woman?

For years I’ve avoided the number 13—hotel rooms, flight numbers, floors in buildings. Facing my 13th year of flying, I’m angry and frustrated and anxious—at the company, the union, the members of Congress who won’t sign a new iteration of the CARES Act. But I also know that the only thing that can truly save the airline industry (and maybe my identity, too) is the people. The solution rests on how effectively we come together to fight and defeat COVID-19. Like so many others, my airline family and I just want our abnormal lives back. Days filled with flight delays, crowded seats, and jet-lagged insomnia. Let’s hope we get there sooner rather than later.

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So it’s unfinished, this business of escape artistry, of finding the new in a delimited world.

My partner and I live in northeast London, a mosaic of Victorian terraces and forest remnants cut through by small rivers. From Walthamstow to Wanstead, it’s been home since the 1980s—and our entire world since March. Some weeks in, I found myself scouring the London A-Z and Google Maps for green spaces nearby. They were maddeningly featureless. But maps are products of cultural consensus. They’re not the territory, and certainly not the experience of the territory. So we became terranauts of the local, seekers of the sort-of known—even a “universe next door.”

When we first moved here, it was barely signposted. We discovered its history in stages and on the ground. Wanstead Park, for instance, is a zoo of monuments including an Italianate temple and decaying grotto crouched among towering oaks and limes. I discovered that they are all relicts of a “lost Versailles,” a Palladian-style villa and formal gardens sold off and broken up in the 1820s. Further back, the Tudor Henries (VII and VIII) hunted here, and the dubious favourite of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, owned a hall on the site where she partied up a storm in May 1578.

I was pleased too to find that an artistic hero of mine, the proto-socialist imagineer William Morris, grew up in Walthamstow. And that at the turn of the 20th century, it became ripe ground for techie innovation—not least in early cinematography. We have drunk it all in, the tangible and the intangible, a spirit of place that has somehow expanded mental space.

But these were discoveries of pre-pandemic times. As isolation wore on, I began to think laterally on my feet, nipping through gaps in hedges and gates passed a hundred times. I found old sewage works and scrubland, semi-wildernesses alive with birds. I heard cuckoos, now vanishingly rare, and saw thousands of swifts in flight. And I chased the new in the known. Wanstead Flats, for instance, is a 330-acre grassland I thought I’d “done” long ago. In social-distancing terms, a place where you can see someone coming for miles is a godsend. I went back.

Now, I see its subtleties. A protected acid grassland, where skylarks sing from the tussocks at sundown and kestrels hunt over the broom. Magisterial plantations of hundred-year-old oak, beech and hornbeam. A handful of iron barrage-balloon tethers from the Second World War. And I learned its history. A grazing land from the 12th century to 1996, a haunt of travellers, a military drilling range, the Flats have escaped enclosure and development through a combination of public will and, ultimately, protection by the City of London Corporation.

Proust noted that voyages of discovery are not about visiting strange lands, but possessing new eyes. By paying attention—knowing a place by inches rather than glances—I have become grounded. My mental map bulges with detail. In that process I recalled how young children map as they immerse in the physical world—an interplay of body, brain and environment that builds an interior cartography of space and our position in it.

So it’s somehow fascinating that up to the age of four, children apparently believe they can’t be seen when they shut their eyes, but only when meeting the gaze of another. The science writer Philip Ball noted this in his 2015 book Invisible, concluding: “how extraordinary it is that the self is not located from birth in the body.” I wonder whether the sense of self snaps in when we roam space—and I include imaginative space—with relative freedom. Whether we must move to be centred. Proprioception, sometimes called the “sixth sense,” is the feeling of our physical position, movement and balance in space, modulated by specialized neurons in the muscles and joints. It’s thought to be key to the sense of self.

Balance can be challenged by constraint. But children can see a cosmos in a backyard. The micro-odysseys of lockdown brought me back to mine, a few acres on London Road in Duluth, Minnesota, bounded by trees, a river, and the waters of Lake Superior. From that road, it may have seemed ho-hum. On the map, it was largely blank. But from the inside it was a multi-layered wonderland. It was also not a little weird.

The acid grasslands of Wanstead Flats in northeast London are a haven for birds—from kestrels to the iconic skylark. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

I grew up next to a disused lab, a long, imposing 19th-century pile. Once a fish hatchery, it looked as if it had spawned—clustered around was a clapboarded shoal, our ‘cottage’ and three outbuildings. The most mysterious of these resembled a playhouse on stilts, jutting out from the hill next to the lab, with a catwalk leading to the top floor. Down below were tucked a small, windowless octagonal structure and an inscrutable hut. The whole was like an exotic village inhabited only by us.

My father, who taught fine art, rented the cottage from the University of Minnesota. From this perch, I’d look over at the lab and wonder that a building so substantial could be forgotten. But then, we lived at the point where London Road becomes the old Highway 61, at a bridge spanning the mouth of the Lester River. We were denizens of a space both liminal and transformative. In that edgeworld, our complex had a fairy-tale air, half Grimm and half Perrault. It felt dropped off the map.

The old hatchery’s necessary siting near water made it a natural paradise too, an ecological and geological miniature, exquisitely compressed. Hazards came with the territory: the hatchery pond was a muddy sump, black bears legged it through the elms, and in a bush-choked pond across the road lurked a snapping turtle that could, my father noted with clinical relish, “take your arm off.” I learned to observe, and fast.
 
We can be possessed by spirit of place at points all our lives, but there is no intensity in that process like a child’s. To keep my bearings, I became a namer of places. The Smooth Rocks was an expanse of glacier-ground basalt at the river mouth; the turtle-haunted copse the Little Wood. A hollow cupping a humming sewage processor was the Dell. Shore End was a spiked metal barrier a mile along the beach. Yet close, pressing on the imagination, was the ragged edge of the boreal forest biome. We camped in it, hiked along its fringe, but it was something I couldn’t yet map: a vast realm of moose, bear, great grey owls and the deep darkness.

That tension, between known and unknown, is of course the spring of all discovery—leading humans across oceans, to the poles and tin-canned to the Moon. But I was a kid. I acquainted myself more deeply with what I could reach, and that was in any case in constant flux. Not just a rabbit’s nest under a bush, unpeeled momentarily by the lawnmower, or a gust of cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries. But the primordial mud and slush of spring giving way to brief summers, the snap of smoky Octobers, the epic winters when the lake froze over and, between blizzards, you held your breath amid silent drifts. And we were always seeing with new eyes—my father urging us to look again and deeper, at the ethereal layers of a wasps’ nest or a cobalt shadow on snow.

Meanwhile, I was reading. Books perfectly meshed the quest for certainty with the quest for the new. When I first saw Ernest Shepard’s endpapers for Winnie the Pooh, it was with the shock of recognition. The world of Christopher Robin and Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood was one I understood and soon inhabited: Eeyore’s Gloomy Place became as solid in my mind as the Smooth Rocks. Shepard’s genius was to give a bird’s-eye view of places of the mind, to zoom out just enough from extreme locality to keep it personal.

A handful of WWII barrage-balloon tethers on Wanstead Flats are a visible reminder of its long human history. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

We left London Road when I was nine. Long after, navigating new cities, states and countries, I discovered that I had the dreaded “lousy sense of direction.” I found unfamiliar urban grids as confusing as off-road expanses of the Sonoran Desert. Map-reading I learned, but it was meaningful only when I did the route on foot.

Some years ago I was drawn to Wayfinding by the science writer M.R. O’Connor, which investigates human navigation in the satnav age. O’Connor’s research took her to Australia, where she wrangled with the idea that the Dreaming tracks of indigenous peoples are a “mnemonic device” for finding one’s way—a memory palace with the landscape itself taking the place of mental model. She meets Bill Yidumduma Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people who has memorized thousands of stars, and tells her that many long tracks align to them. She quotes the scholar David Turnbull on the Dreaming in Maps Are Territories: “The landscape and knowledge are one as maps, all are constituted through spatial connectivity.” This “noospheric highway system,” she writes, manifests as a sense of direction in the mind.

So what is happening to our sense of direction under quarantine? Tragically, it has rocked many to the core. I feel it has also clarified what matters. I am looking deeper at where I am, redrawing my inner cartography to get to the other side, wherever that is. That has not been just a journey in space. It’s time travel into moments of improbable humanity: barrage balloons, Virgin Queen, and all. That I’ve pinned down the functions of all those outbuildings on London Road seems no less improbable. My Eden there is no longer a place of enigmatic decay. It’s restored, and on the map. But the beach, the rocks, the curve of land are the same. For now.

What lasts, and what doesn’t, preoccupy us all in this pandemic. There is no real escape from it. On walks in a vast cemetery near the Flats, we have seen ranks of spoil from many new graves among the historic trees. Once we entered a glade and stumbled on a fenced marquee—a temporary morgue for COVID-19 spill-over.

We restless bipedal apes have survived plague, famine, century on century of war. But on this leg of the journey we face interlocked crises—ongoing environmental neglect and damage, self-serving politics and greed-driven industry—in tandem with terrible injustice. All of it plays out on a limited Earth.

I know that science has laid the depth of necessary fact, that technology can leverage potential solutions, that the blueprints and roadmaps proffered by international organizations have their place. But there is another kind of knowledge.

In my bones—or at least my hippocampus—I know how irrevocably we’re tied to nature. An early drenching in it tends to do that, bolstered by exposure to the science, from the stardust floating through us to the seething cosmos of the human microbiome. The wonder comes first, then curiosity—and respect. Perhaps, like Bill Yidumduma Harney, we need to memorize more stars to feel the path beneath our feet.

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