At the beginning of these exceptional and uncharted times, I felt immediately forced into some existential questions. What could be my answer as a musician to this new situation in which a global pandemic shook the world ? How to turn the isolation and the potential anxiety into something nurturing, something validating my existence as a musician? Correspondents is an album that John, who lives in El Paso, and I soon realized was going to defy the distance between us. It generated a daily correspondence of audio files and annotations during the course of about two months. Just like any good correspondence, we responded to all the content we were sending to each other. No picking, no ruling out or ignoring any propositions here, but instead, making a point in considering and answering all of each other’s ideas. Openness from both of us more than anything and listening to where the project was leading us, provided me with joy and a great feeling of freedom during this COVID year of 2020.
—Gabriel Naïm Amor
Naim Amor. Photo by Justin Clowes.
As the reality of the pandemic settled in and the lockdown was secured, I knew that everything was going to change. Clearing and creating new spaces for work, school, and music had to happen, and not without some serious urgency. It was about that time the text from Naïm came wanting to know if I would like to exchange files for some new music created in this troubled time. I said yes, and within a few days I sent him a drum track. I had changed my setup, added an extra rack tom, several other cymbals. I set up the vibes and marimba and had everything ready to go. This first track is a sort of familiar bolero beat that I’ve been known to play often with brushes. I played with a kind of form in my head, not a melody, but a feeling within a form. I listened once back and sent it off to Naïm. The next day he had composed a melody to the form I had established with the drum line, and that was the beginning of our correspondence. As we became correspondents to the music, channeling the immediate moments of our predicaments to become the producers of what has become a storyline of song, to be able to create something when everything else had come to a stop. I could see it as another discovered layer of what love can do, even in the midst of the most troubling times.
I am a portrait and event photographer in my 15th year of business in Tucson. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to impact Tucson in March 2020, in the span of one week, all of my scheduled photography assignments were canceled for the rest of the year.
After processing the shock of the pandemic and financial implications, I considered how to utilize my photography skills, social work background, and social media platforms to support and educate the Tucson community. Tucson Frontline Workers portrait services was born from the desire to provide a forum for our frontline workers to share with us in their own words their Covid-19 experiences.
All portraits were completed outside, strictly following social-distance guidelines. Each portrait and statement is posted on multiple social media pages to amplify the professionals’ experiences. To date, 85 frontline essential workers and first responders have been featured in this no-cost portrait series.
My intention to serve our frontline is based on my intrinsic understanding of the challenges all services-related workers face even during “normal” times, now greatly compounded by the pandemic. My hope is that all Tucsonans become aware of and compassionate to the plight of all of our heroic frontline workers and their families and exercise safe behavior such as wearing a mask and following social distancing guidelines.
Alica, Medical Guest Relations. Photo by Kathleen Dreier.
The mask that protects me from this virus is as suffocating as my fear of the virus. I feel isolated even as I am out in the world and doing my normal routine. Those of us who are “essential workers” are weary and afraid. Our emotional labor has increased greatly because people are so tense and scared. We have to act like everything is normal, offering calmness and confidence even as we monitor every single cough and ache for signs of COVID-19. Most of my family and friends are self-quarantining, which makes me feel separated from the collective experience. While I am happy I live alone, so I don’t risk infecting others, the isolation adds to my stress. Part of me is so grateful for my job, my co-workers, and my health, and another part of me wants to hide at home from everything that is happening. But like many others, I find the strength to keep up and do my job so others can get the help they need.
Rick, Grocery Store Manager. Photo by Kathleen Dreier.
When the panic first started and people began stocking up, I was excited about the major increase in sales our store was having. Sales easily doubled and almost tripled in a very short time. Within a few days, as I watched my shelves get completely emptied of paper, rice, beans, and water, my excitement turned to anxiety. I have to get those shelves refilled so that people can eat. Supply and transportation issues that are completely out of my control made that very difficult. I felt like I was letting my customers down. I feared that I could be fired. I know the importance of my job in the food supply chain and how much comfort just having food in our pantry can bring during a crisis. I was not doing the job as I strive to do all the time.
As the initial surge of shopping calmed down, our company was already doing lots to protect the health of the employees and of our customers. Now the impact of the health side of this crisis on me, my co-workers, and my customers has come more into my focus. Before social distancing, how many people could have infected me and how many people could I have then infected? Will or when will the other shoe drop? When will grocery workers, frontline essential employees, start getting sick—me, my co-workers, my friends?
I love doing my job. I enjoy my co-workers, their humor and good spirits. Customers are generally understanding, kind, and appreciative. I’m so very thankful that my job is still here and that my company is doing so much to take care of us. Right now though, I am unsure of everything. My world is unbalanced.
Diana, Nurse-Midwife. Photo by Kathleen Dreier.
I am a nurse-midwife in Tucson Arizona. This is me coming home from work in the morning.
Life during the pandemic is different, both good and bad. Tolerance of uncertainty is an essential skill, and something midwives are used to.
What worries me most are my clients who are socially vulnerable, living in unsafe situations, or in homes full of violence and addiction. I worry about the children. Families have suffered from social isolation, quarantine, and separation. I worry about the life-course health consequences of worsening poverty.
The same social injustices that existed before COVID are only magnified by this disease. Egregious health disparities plaguing our women and children are only getting worse during the pandemic.
These are the tools and rituals in my saddle bag that I rely on during COVID:
My fetoscope. COVID-19 has required many communities to get back to the basics for childbearing families to preserve hospitals for sick people. Avoiding the use of electronic fetal monitors for normal, healthy, childbearing moms is an important way to keep moms and babies safe. It is becoming a lost art. When COVID hit New York City hard, I was involved in helping to promote national guidelines for teams that have not been trained or supported in the art and science of “listening.” This fetoscope was given to me by my mentor and is a symbol of midwifery and family centered care; especially important during the pandemic.
My computer. COVID has required that we organize our care delivery differently for the safety of the community and each other. This means I use my computer more than ever. In my 20 years of being a midwife, our workflow has changed tremendously. The word “midwife” means “with woman.” I sometimes feel like I am “with computer.”
The electronic health record is an important part of quality and safety. It is also a driving force of burnout in our field. I bring my own computer to and from work, because sometimes I need to work on several workstations at once to keep up with the charting. On the bright side, telehealth has taken off during COVID! Be with a provider in the comfort of your own home, when you want it, in your natural habitat. I hope we keep this option going!
My street clothes. When I am not working clinically, I practice strict social distancing. I wear a mask in public at all times. We don’t wear our scrubs to or from the hospital. When we get home, our street clothes go straight to the wash and we go to the shower. My shirt says “Support Matters.” It comes from La Leche League. We know that the support provided by the healthcare team matters. Nurses, medical assistants, doulas, lactation consultants, social workers, behavioral health, physicians, and midwives matter. Our team has united to support families and each other during the pandemic and I am proud.
My sleeping bag. Midwives are no stranger to long nights. We have changed our call schedule to limit the number of midwives who are exposed to COVID. If I nap, I sleep in my own sleeping bag and wash it immediately when I walk through the garage door. We are all vulnerable. No one is immune.
Healthy midwives have died across the world over the past eight weeks. We are scared.
Herman, Hospital Housekeeper. Photo by Kathleen Dreier.
This whole notion of being a housekeeper and considered a “frontLine worker” is fairly surreal to me. I say that because I served in the Iraq War on the front lines. At that point in time I was a frontline worker. While I understand the terminology, I didn’t really grasp the magnitude of the current title I was given until I was assigned to the COVID-19 ward. I was officially at Ground Zero, back in the war zone. I was right in the thick of what the entire country was grappling with. I have a front-row seat to the devastation, the brutality, and the raw carnage of a disease that many people did not, and some still don’t, believe is a real thing. It only took one shift to change my mind.
As I make my daily rounds of cleaning, trash collecting, sweeping, and mopping, I am required to enter rooms where life and death are engaged in a tug of war, with the balance of power tipped toward death. However, I also get to witness angels in protective gloves and gowns provide some of the most intensive and critical care one can imagine in order to give the patients a fighting chance.
The work that I perform is dangerous, yet critical. It is thankless, yet rewarding. It is repetitive, yet vital. And most important, it is never-ending, yet it is “essential.”
Laurie, 1st Grade Teacher. Photo by Kathleen Dreier.
I am a 1st grade teacher who works with a high population of English language learners.
It felt like a sucker punch when I heard schools were going to close, thinking about how much learning, growth, and community students would be missing out on.
The big questions that came into my mind were: How can I provide access to learning to students who do not have technology in their homes? What are the most fundamental concepts I should be focusing on with such limited student contact time? How will I maintain a sense of community with my class? The answers are that all these have been and continue to be a challenge.
What has been inspiring is to see parents, with all they have to juggle, working so hard to ensure their children move forward with their learning. I feel that many parents and I have become educational partners in a deeper way than I have experienced before in my 20+ years of teaching.
What has been uplifting is seeing my students’ bright faces on my computer screen, watching them continue to interact as a community and grow as learners. Doing reading tutoring over the phone with students who don’t have internet, but are still able to share the joy of a good story together. And celebrating with our whole class, doing a drawing project with our art teacher, that ended with proud faces holding up their finished products.
Students and families have had to make significant sacrifices, as all of us have, in order for our community to move forward safely. It may take considerably more time and sacrifice, but my hope is our community remains diligent, keeping ourselves and each other safe. Visit Kathleen Dreier at www.kathleendreier.com.
Kathleen Williamson and her goats. Photo by Gregory McNamee
Sometimes I feel like I landed the leading role in an existentialist film. Then, as changeable as the weather in Hamburg, or Chicago, or whatever city enjoys such claims, by afternoon, I’m back to my usual persona: an action hero in a dystopian novel with a spiritually uplifting light at the end of the anthroposcenic tunnel. Five months into my pandemic hermitage, I’m staring at a black postcard on my desk with bold white print that says, “Don’t Be Afraid.” Next to that is one of the last photos of Joanna and me together, taken in our barrio homestead, Villa Grace. It was the second or third time her hair had grown back. I’ve lost count.
Before the pandemic dug in, I was very gratefully absorbed as Joanna’s ally, advocate, company, and spouse as she braved what she called a “breast cancer experience” that metastasized at the end of 2016. We graduated in late 2019 from Banner Cancer Center to Casa de La Luz home hospice. I was tending to my little urban homestead. Liz Fletcher, Vivian Smith, and I were working up a list of pop dance tunes for what was to be a popular local cover band called Kat and the Mehitabels. My law practice was reduced due to Joanna’s health, but still a daily responsibility. Songs I had written over the last few years were in the oven, waiting for some time to get into Duncan Stitt’s studio.
As was typical for Joanna and me, keeping current and (increasingly) concerned about politics and the environment was also time-consuming. And, thankfully, there were the heart-fortifying rehearsals and Sunday worship gatherings with the Southside Presbyterian gospel choir, led by Dorothy Reid, in which I sang tenor. As Joanna’s culinary palette narrowed due to chemo and radiation, she came to depend on the pizza at Time Market, where we loved to dine together.
In January 2020, news of the virus in Wuhan as a potential pandemic made its way to Tucson and for the first time in many years, due to Joanna’s compromised condition, I decided to avoid the Gem Show and annual visits with my dealer friends from Bali. I stopped taking any new cases and stopped visiting clients in the prisons.
Joanna died at home on February 20. Per plans that she approved, she was waked and buried at our home on February 22. It was an amazing gathering of locals who knew Joanna as a friend, professor of art, artist, writer, and yogini, and as my wife. Her sister from Missouri, and old friends from Nevada, California, and Illinois flew in. I could namedrop here but won’t except to say how grateful I am for all those who came to the house and brought food, music, good spirits, prayers, and helped create a good old-fashioned personable, simple, noncommodified, organic, Irish wake.
Joanna died just in the nick of time because the pandemic came up fast on the heels of that gathering. If it were a week later, the wake probably wouldn’t have happened. At the wake, I jokingly warned all my friends that for the next few months I was going to be a whore for hugs, little realizing hugs were going to disappear off the face of the planet before I could change the page on the monthly calendar. In hindsight, we see early March super-spreader funeral events were happening in the United States. Mrs. Reid’s funeral at Southside Presbyterian on March 7 could have been one, but thankfully was not. I sang at that service but ducked out before the final moments to avoid the crowd, many of whom would have wanted to hug and console me. I knew it wasn’t a safe environment for any of us. Some folks thought I was “cray-cray” paranoid, but I was just informed.
From that point on, I was in a trifecta storm of life changes: Joanna was gone and with that all the good and difficult activities, all the great conversation and snuggles, as well as all the endless medical and/or hospice appointments and caretending. My law practice was down to two cases, which have since wrapped up, and the Pandemic caused a shutdown of personal social life and live cultural events. Since March, I can count on one hand the friends with whom I have visited, always outdoors, usually with masks. My dress and professional clothes are gathering dust. Band practice ceased. The church finally stopped gathering in person, and Zoom sucks for performing music.
Like a lot of privileged folks who aren’t in dire financial straits, I have found my inner introvert (people who know me would be shocked to hear this). Regardless of the three big time demands suddenly being gone, however, aside from obsessive doom scrolling, the days are richly active and stimulating. I’ve got about twenty books cracked open and read whatever I like whenever I like. Among the novels, I especially liked The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. The most inspiring media I’ve taken in during the pandemic lockdown is an unedited “On Being” interview with John Donohue (thanks to Simon Donovan, who sent it to me after Joanna’s wake), perfectly timed to our current needs to embrace blessings and beauty. I’ve also been handwriting letters to family and friends, which I’ve wanted to do for years, at a small writing desk situated in the part of the house where there is an internet dead zone.
Whatever happened to the hug whore, you may ask. I haven’t had any real hugs from humans since shortly after that wake. On Easter Saturday, however, within a few hundred feet of (Capricorn) Joanna’s homestead gravesite, my Oberhasli nanny, named Scosee, gave me two kids, uniquely named “Billy” and “Bucky.” They were supposed to be goat chops in about twelve months. After three days of nursing and getting essential colostrum, the greedy kids were masticating poor Scosee’s teats, and I separated them. That entailed ME having to milk Scosee and bottle feed the kids three times a day, which eventually went down to twice a day after about two months.
With the more relaxed pandemic, post-Joanna, almost-retirement pace of life, I was able to just hang out with the little cuties without any concern about the clock and discover from observation and experience, rather than farming books, how very smart, attentive, and heart-meltingly affectionate goats can be when given time and attention. They became friends instead of assets or exotic home-raised organic dinner.
They have been providing lots of entertainment and oxytocin. These wethers—neutered bucks—are now three months old, and I have them trained to be gentle with me, not jumping up or pushing. We take walks in the riverbed of the Santa Cruz, where they are learning to stay with the herd rather than run after some cute jogger on the Loop.
But for the pandemic, more than any other reason, I don’t think I would have had the relaxed time to hang out with the kids to the degree required for a high level of bonding and trust. It’s a gift to experience this and learn. A mature wether can carry about 25 percent of its body weight. Now, with my back not getting any younger, I’m fantasizing a future with goat walking, hiking, and camping with Billy and Bucky as eager pack goats and Scosee Mama feeding us all.
Seasons, calendars, clocks no longer measure the passage of time for me. It rained softly for the full day of Joanna’s wake and burial. Yesterday, for the first time since then—and a whole month after the Fiesta de San Juan, the official calendar start of the monsoon—we finally got real rain again, the first monsoon rain.
Blessings noticed are marking time now.
Kathleen Williamson is a Tucson-based musician, songwriter, organic farmer, anthropologist, and attorney.
I got lucky with this song. Usually, I get a little snippet of a melody with a phrase attached to it and I have to build a song from there. “We’d Go Out Dancing” dropped out of the sky fully formed, with the first two verses and a chorus. From there it was just a matter of filling space.
I think the inspiration for the music came from the band STEAM, who had just finished recording a CD in my studio. Their waltzes, in particular, stuck with me. One was about a dancing chicken(!), the other was a young woman getting lost in the magic of the music and her partner’s embrace. In my mind, I was seeing an outdoor barn dance, with twinkling lights strung up above the dance floor and the moonlight shimmering silver in the trees.
“People are waltzing, under the stars” was the original first line, but it didn’t lead anywhere. It was just a sentimental snapshot from our pre-Covid lives. I already had “slap on the back and a shot and a beer” in the first draft of the second verse, so I reset the first line to match: “We’d go out dancing down at the bar.” The rest of the song is, basically, my life.
“It started out as a very good year” was based on my gig schedule before the shutdown. It had been a busy season, between lucrative C&W band gigs and the Paul Green blues band on the side. When the shutdown hit, my old-school monthly planner became useless. I had no gigs and no studio clients, so I spent the next eight weeks remodeling the recording studio for social distancing, adding a separate entrance, a partition, a couple of exhaust fans, and a UV light in the A/C system.
It took a couple of weeks to finish off the lyrics. Even after getting past the first draft, it seems I’m always stuck with one weak line that lingers, much like a mosquito when you’re trying to go to sleep. Suddenly, a new line pops up and the mosquito is gone. It can be maddening, but also rewarding in the end.
This song isn’t particularly profound, it’s just a snapshot of a moment in time. Fortunately, I’ve moved on from that moment. My calendar is no longer gathering dust in a drawer, the recording studio is getting some bookings, and I’m feeling better about what’s to come. I do feel bad for all the venues and restaurants and their unemployed workers. It’s such a shame our country couldn’t have handled this better, but that’ll be covered in another song, no doubt. For now, all we can do is hope Dr. Fauci is right about a vaccine coming. I’m dying to go out and eat someone else’s cooking.
Duncan Stitt has been a longtime presence on the Tucson music scene, playing with the Saddle City Band in the 1980s and with John Coinman, Kevin Pakulis, and many other local musicians today. A recording artist and producer, he was the music director for the Last Waltz 50th Anniversary Show at the Fox Theater and the piano player and songwriter for David Fitzsimmons’s Old Pueblo Radio Show. Visit him at www.duncanstitt.com.
I have not forgotten your invitation to partake in taking part of the daily grind of covid.
I started to write it several times and it never really came out like what I had been doing. It read more like a call to arms. Which weirded me out.
I’ve noticed there’s been a permanent patina of depression for around 6 months or so that I figured was just like what it’s like when we get this old and not have a bevy of diversions to remedy during pre-pandemia.
So I chose to see it as a new allergy. Something ya learn to live with. Some days a little gets done. Other days not so much once summer hit. And the monsoons quit. And even back when the Catalinas had their fire time. It’s impossible to tell.
Although I woke up yesterday and felt great again. My son has had to leave college and come home. Took up a job delivering for amazon. What other jobs are there? He and I went down to the covid test site for a father son date. When we self swabbed, it caused a barrage of rapid fire sneezing by us both inside the truck cab so that if one of us was a covid culprit, we had just bombarded each other. Hilarious.
An hour later both results came back negative. (Walgreens on Valencia & 12th. )
So. We took the day. Got some take out and ambled about the roadway with windows down at 108 and it felt fine. We drove around all day. This and that. Eventually got more take out. And even when I was back in bed around midnight, the son felt like getting a burger at in and out. Which is where we go to then park and babble about life and any lack of. Earlier that day we also managed to get in some exclusive indoor court time for an hour. That was huge. He had not been privy to an indoors court for 6 months since his basketball world came crashing to a halt when his school and team shut down.
The next morning I woke up with no depression. The old spirit had returned.
Anyhow, just before the dampendic hit, I had made the decision to quit touring anyway. Something about it signaled it was time to stop. So. I figured out a way to do that and buy an abandoned house everyone thought was condemned because the walls were falling down. However, since I had been a renter there 27 years ago, I had some inside knowledge of what was really wrong with it.
It’s the same place I lived in when the 90s began and held such promise before they went topsy turvy and impeded. The week it finally fell back into my care, the UK record label coincidentally was rereleasing the album that featured the home in its artwork.
Somehow the home and all its haunting memories impossibly called me back in.
The plan was to work on that house everyday instead of touring. Then touring shut down anyway all around us. That in itself is a sea change that doesn’t seem to generate the attention it deserves due to all the other sea changes occurring at the same time: social injustice unrest, unparalleled unemployment, disastrous pandemic handling resulting in tremendous death and despair, tragic global warming condition escalating and in general a grand lack of inspired leadership in these uncharted waters of sea change galore.
For the music maker, the era of Spotify had stolen the back-end income of touring by gutting all royalties from recorded works. This forced all recordists to have to tour more in hopes of maintaining their livelihood. The more touring you do, the less your value expands because of the relative saturation of your availability. This slow motion train wreck is a recipe for home wrecking too. When pandemia hit, the wrecks weren’t even an option anymore. This dampendic has killed off more creative prowess than can be processed and in its place came a torrent of terribly lit and awful sounding bedroom iPhone concerts whereby every right handed player was portrayed as playing left handed now. What was left of the music world had literally turned sideways.
I kept working on the house. Some days it’s monumental. Other days it’s just mental. But as hard as it’s been to tear down and rebuild walls, update wires, find new used parts & windows, score & plaster, plumb pipes, delegate a crew of one or two pandemically, accidentally destroy stuff trying to fix it and then paint endlessly . . . it’s way easier than touring with jet lag.
When the shutdown hit, the house was a steady gig. A job you have to pay to work at.
It’s been like that now for 6 months while the world has cocooned.
During this time many songs have come this way anyway. I have a simple screen-less home setup and have been recording hours of original piano songs I’ve never bothered to learn. Since they are as loud as a whisper but seem to roar during this time of stillness, I’ve put them out on bandcamp and blatantly titled the album Cocoon.
Also, my co-writer director and I have been working on finishing a film we were lucky to have shot just before pandemia forbade further production. It’s a western you don’t have to take acid to see because it’s already embedded into it.
So maybe I’ve just finished your assignment here trying not to.
All I know is I’ve always been suspicious of the man made clock and now I know why. It was never really real. The sacred clock is another matter however. It knows when is when and what is not.
There is no man made time anymore. And when we think of how relentless and insane travel was before all this, it makes some sense that something had to give. To snap. To come crashing.
For all the front liners and folks with sickened loved ones, and those themselves befallen with the virus, along with the torrent of visuals depicting brutal systematic killings and abusive protest responses, it’s all been an unbearable sadness to withstand. We are changed. We have been deprogrammed from the brainwashing of our previous existence.
Back when the virus was headed this way, I’d begun a regime of natural immunity boosters and maybe it helped. There had been a coupla times when something invasive was attempting to pounce, but it didn’t take hold.
I will end with some advice. Gargling with mezcal is an essential practice. It’s no joke. It’s actually mezidicinal.
Love,
Howe Howe Gelb has been making music in Tucson since the 1970s. Find his latest album, Cocoon, and other releases here.
In January 2020 I was in a planning meeting with colleagues at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, where I am coordinator for the Art and Science Program.
Someone suggested that we start offering online learning experiences, that it was the wave of the future for all universities. (Biosphere 2 already has a robust, impressive lineup.)
I smiled, noted the suggestion, and quickly changed the subject. I’ll admit to inwardly rolling my eyes and scoffing in disdain. Online? For nature-oriented learning? Our specialty is teaching science and art through direct field experiences. We teach field sketching, nature journaling, nature writing—all of which relies on being . . . in nature. Online is for people with no soul, no sense of reality, no adventure!
By the end of February I was just finishing up a new book, Nature Journaling for a Wild Life, which was all set to debut in the booth my husband and I have rented for several years at the Tucson Festival of Books in mid-March. We’ve written many books on natural history, outdoor adventure, and Southwestern short stories, and always do well at the festival and meet many readers and make new friends.
With this new book I was excited to sing the praises of learning to practice “intentional curiosity” as the core of nature journaling: to ask questions, to dig deeper, to focus one’s mind both intently and intentionally. In the book I suggest that we learn about nature by learning to see, not just look. By drawing to learn (not learning to draw), we also succeed in practicing a very satisfying and healing kind of meditation.
I had the booth prepped; new posters and promotions printed; talks planned; and looked forward to a busy summer already filled with sold-out nature workshops, events, and adventure guiding gigs . . . and then. COVID.
Cancellations. Lockdown. Income zero, overnight.
In the first month it was just pretty much being stunned, glued to the computer reading horror stories, watching our country fail.
But then a funny thing happened. My book sales took off. People were desperate for something to bring them inner peace, to take them away from these horrors.
Membership in the Facebook group The Nature Journal Club grew from 9,000 to 15,000 in just a month, and a small group of us started offering fellow members Zoom “meetups” to nature journal online. We had no idea what we were doing but just jumped in with crude tutorials and demonstrations. I figured out how to use my iPad as a document camera to demonstrate live sketching and watercolor.
Interest exploded. Soon our little club gatherings format was too small, so I started offering free online workshops on Zoom through my own business, the Field Arts Institute, on our website.
Not happy with just “show and tell,” I started working with a friend who is the field program coordinator for Stanford University’s School of Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences. We developed a fun way to take our students on virtual field trips using the latest 360-degree viewer experiences either through university resources (ASU and University of Worcester in the UK have excellent ones) or the new Google Earth tours.
Ryan and I took students on field trips to Tuolumne Meadow in the Sierras and the Lake District National Park in northern England. Then Ryan got busy in his online teaching for Stanford, so I continued on my own and have since taken students on field sketching and nature journaling field trips to Sabino Canyon, the Dragoon Mountains, Yellowstone National Park, and Botswana.
As many as 150 people have registered for my virtual field trips, joining from all over the world. This never could happen in person—this meeting of like-minded people just for a morning, to enjoy a wild place together, learning about plants and geology and wildlife and conservation issues.
A group of 300 middle school students (four classes in one school) used my book, which I gave them free in PDF form, as their text book for the first virtual “BioArt” fusion class and it was a huge success: kids in Boston learning to sketch leaves and observe birds and ask questions about nature they never even thought about.
On Summer Solstice, a group of people in The Nature Journal Club even organized a global nature journaling event, with people from all corners of the earth measuring the sun’s arc throughout the day, sketching diagrams, and sharing them on Zoom the next day. We had a father and son in South Africa comparing their pages with a woman in Ontario, and a family in India showing their results in comparison to someone’s observations in Brisbane.
I don’t think any of this would have come to pass if not for COVID.
And as much as I have come to love this global reach, there is one aspect I had not counted on that took me by surprise and brought me to tears. I had several people let me know that they loved the virtual field trips because they are disabled and could never do these adventurous “hikes” and safaris in the reality that is their life.
And thus I’ve spun 180 degrees, and learned not just to accept teaching Nature in the Time of COVID. I now love it. I think it is here to stay, and I’m glad.
Will it replace in-person nature explorations? No, not a chance. And best of all I think it will encourage many thousands—hopefully tens of thousands—to learn to love nature, and that means more will want to see it protected. Mission accomplished.
Roseann Hanson is a naturalist and explorer who has been keeping nature journals for more than 35 years. She studied journalism and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona and has worked in the American Southwest, Mexico, and East Africa as a conservationist, naturalist, and writer. Visit her athttp://www.exploringoverland.com.
Listen: Petey’s Pandemic Report from the Banks of the Ol’ Guajolote
Petey Mesquitey
Petey Mesquitey was born and raised in Kentucky and came west to attend the University of Arizona. In the spring of 1980, after some years of college and ten years of playing country music in bars around the Southwest, he applied for a job as a laborer in a wholesale nursery. As he likes to say, 40 years on, “Doggone it, I’m still a laborer in a nursery!”
In May 1992 he recorded and aired his first “Growing Native”radio show on KXCI-FM, our community radio station. Every week ever since, to this very day, he has regaled listeners with stories of the flora and fauna found in the wild borderlands of southeastern Arizona.
Petey and Mrs. Mesquitey live on a small homestead near the Chiricahua Mountains with their dogs and cats and various other critters both domestic and wild.
What’s mostly kept me going is my writing. But even a sedentary person needs fresh air and a bit of natural light. So in the spring of the pandemic, before it got hot, I’d go running in the morning along a trail near my house, in the western part of the national park. When I use the term run, in this context, it’s mostly because it’s quicker to say than “slowly, awkwardly jog.” Have no fear: you don’t need to picture a sleek, self-righteously fit athlete and feel irritated/envious. I’m typically outfitted in compression tights for a creaky knee and hip, plus weird, armored-looking ankle-and-calf gaiters I wear as a rattlesnake defense—I’ve leapt over several in my time, but someday, I figure, one of those sleepy jokers will wake up suddenly and surprise me. I also wear an elaborate hat, sunglasses, and earbud setup, since I can’t run without music, and a geeky water-vest apparatus with ugly-looking, intermittently slimy feeding tubes that flops as I go. I love the desert, true, but I also value the trail for its solitude. Even when no plague has descended over the land, I don’t care to risk encountering my fellow humans. As a jogger I demand nearly complete invisibility. Though I do like to see other animals, jackrabbits and mule deer mostly. I tell myself they’re not inclined to judge.
When it got hotter, I couldn’t get up early enough. I’m not intrepid and I can’t stand to exert myself outside once the temperature at 7 a.m. hits the 80s. I lapsed into inertia and focused more on drinking mail-order wine at the cocktail hour. It was biodynamic, though, so 100-percent healthy. But I did make a couple of excursions into the White Mountains, where my children spent a week in a so-called pod with their friends’ family for a break in the quarantine monotony. Up there I decided not to run, not wishing to subject my hosts to the spectacle of me in my compression tights and water vest. There’s a psychological limit to hospitality, and I try to respect it. Instead I went for quiet early-morning walks in the forest. There I saw lupines blooming, a small herd of feral horses, and an Abert’s squirrel that maybe had a nest nearby and got angry at me, chuffing and slapping a tree trunk until I retreated. My favorite part was the sound of the wind moving the ponderosa pines.
Lydia Millet. Photo by Nola Millet
Lydia Millet is a Tucson-based writer. Her latest novel is A Children’s Bible (see here for an excerpt). Visit her at www.lydiamillet.net.
Gabrielle Pietrangelo is an independent musician and teacher based in Tucson. You can find her latest release at www.gabriellepietrangelo.com or find her on most music streaming platforms. Enjoy this beautiful contribution to “Tucson COVID Tales”…
grocery shopping without fear sipping a perfect martini at a classy bar Tucson Symphony concerts piano improvisation duets with John and his clarinet hugs my kids learning Dungeons and Dragons with my grandson Art receptions and art walks potlucks my brother Chuck talking politics in someone’s living room flute and piano sessions with Jerry a campfire on a lake with family riding in Panchito’s ambulance playing the timpani with the Green Valley Band the morning prayer at el comedor teaching English in 100 degree heat in Nogales, Sonora fish tacos with Pancho Ronin (g-daughter) playing her ukulele shrugging off a minor sore throat or cough cheek kisses in Mexico dressing up to go somewhere a president who talks in complete sentences dinner parties breakfast at The Goods with the Wild Women of Tubac driving to Puerto Peñasco right now bookstores patio dinners with friends Ashland Shakespeare Festival hopping on a plane to anywhere sharing a condo with girlfriends on a beach airports and people-watching a family reunion in Iowa hello hugs, goodbye hugs being dirty and not worrying about it
—Peg Bowden
Peg Bowden
Peg Bowden grew up in Tucson, left for 30 years, and came back, like most authentic desert rats. In pre-COVID days, she spent time in Nogales, Sonora, trying her best to upend the draconian and inhumane immigration policies of the US government. She has written two books: A Land of Hard Edges and A Stranger At My Door. Peg lives on a ranch in the San Cayetano mountains with her husband, two dogs, a feral cat named Tamale, and a lot of open-range cattle.
Send us your written work, poems, video clips, photographs, or some other expression of what you’ve been creating or doing during the pandemic. Offer advice, confess to slothfulness, celebrate having down time, lament the extra burdens that the plague has imposed, share beauty—whatever your response, we’d like to hear from you and consider your work for publication on social media, on our web page, and/or in some future edition of Zócalo. Email editor@zocalotucson.com
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