THE MAD MASKERADE

On a Friday evening, in July, 1991, my wife, our fifteen-month-old boy, Kevin, and I were driving back to New Jersey in our light blue 1985 Ford Escort hatchback following a trip to Toronto. We enjoyed our four days there. Any cultural hint of the Canadian Coronamania that would manifest itself 29 years later went over my head. Though in retrospect, maybe I should have known there was something odd about a city that was so clean, that nicknamed itself “Toronto the Good” and whose residents were so deferential that they said “Eh?” after many statements. Canadians were the proto-uptalkers.

How could a country with so many ice hockey players simultaneously have so many Covid-compliant, emotionally frail people?

Though New Yorkers also went Corona crazy. Shows how tough, skeptical and free-thinking they weren’t. Tribalism and conformism run deep.

As was our wont when we had kids in tow—eventually there were three—our family’s summer vacations often consisted of trips in a small, packed, roof-racked Escort station wagon to cities of various sizes: Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Detroit, Richmond, Asheville, Charlotte, Wilmington (NC), Winchester, Roanoke, Ithaca, Portland (Maine) Johnstown, Burlington, Montreal, Kingston, Troy and Amsterdam (NY) mixed with tent-camping in state parks. We hiked in forests, found beaches or lakes at which to swim, amusement and water parks, used bookstores, and ice cream stands. We stopped in on old friends and sometimes stayed overnight with relatives. We stayed in m/hotels that had two things we didn’t have at home: cable TV and air conditioning.

Pre-Anthony Bourdain, we did these trips with no reservations. And no cell phone. We made up each day’s plans just before laying down to sleep the night before. At the end of each day, often well after dark, I drove up to and walked into a place of public accommodation and asked an individual staffing the counter if they had room for us.

On that Friday evening, we planned to camp in a state park in very lightly populated Southwestern New York State. As we headed east without a phone or GPS, the clouds thickened and darkened. Rain was obviously on the way.

Three or four hours into the trip, and not long before dark, we reached the state park shown on our accordion-folded paper map. We were ready to get off the road. I drove up to, and entered, the park office, which had no other cars in the small lot. I’d read in some guidebook that this park had cabins. I asked the ranger if there were any left. He said there was one.

I said, “Great, how much is it?”

“Twenty dollars a night.”

I replied, “Great, we’ll take it,” reached for my wallet, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and placed it on the counter.

He added, “But you have to stay two nights.”

I said “OK"—instead of “Great”—and pulled out another twenty.

While I was willing to pay for two nights and stay for only one, I guess my diminished enthusiasm about doing so signaled my travel plans. The ranger frowned and said, “You can’t stay here.”

I asked why not. He said, “On weekends, you have to stay two nights. It’s our policy. It encourages usage.”

It surprised and dismayed me that, at this hour, he was sternly standing on ceremony.

I implicitly fessed up to my intention for a one-night stand by saying, “I understand your policy but it’s nearly dark and it’s clearly gonna rain. And I’ve got a wife and a fifteen-month-old in the car. I’ll pay for both nights. And I’m already here. Who’s gonna come way out here in the dark on a rainy night looking for a cabin?”

Unmoved by my presentation, he refused to give me a registration form.

I told him I had to go talk to my wife. I returned to the car and told Ellen what was going on. She couldn’t believe it. She suggested that I tell him we’ll stay for two nights. I told her I had already thought of that. That’s why I had come out to the car.

I went back into the office and told the ranger that I’d talked to my wife and she wanted to stay for two nights.

He wasn’t buying it. Showing no emotion, he replied, “I know you’re not really going to stay two nights.”

Of course he was correct; we had told family in Pennsylvania that we’d visit on Saturday. And we had to be home by Sunday. Thus, we couldn’t stay two nights. But damn, Ranger Rick, show some mercy and flexibility!

We had no good alternatives. We were miles from nowhere. And uneager to resume driving. So I exhaled and asked, “How much for a tent site?”

It was twelve bucks. I pushed the same twenty back across the counter, filled out a form, went back to the car and we drove to our spot. I resignedly pitched the tent. An hour later, we went inside and fell asleep.

Very predictably, before midnight, the skies opened. It rained super hard.

As water soon penetrated the tent, especially from the bottom, none of us could sleep. Ellen carried Kevin to the car. I hastily packed the tent and joined them there. We reclined the seats and tried, and failed, to fall back to sleep. After an hour or two, we headed out into the driving rain.

There was, at that time, no ability to search for “hotels near me” on a smartphone. And I was too angry at the ranger to be at risk of dozing at the wheel. So we drove six hours in a downpour until cloud-veiled light appeared and we drowsily ate breakfast at a small coffee shop. Thereafter, we visited several households of family in a nearby coal region town.

—

Except for knowing how to put one up, I don’t know much about tents and how effectively they might be coated with some water-resistant product. I did actually buy and try this one time. Nonetheless, I can say this with certainty based on several, unforgettably unpleasant rainy night camping experiences: the ostensibly “waterproof” tents I’ve owned may have looked impervious. But they damn sure did not keep those inside dry during any serious storm. They failed even though I routinely set up a “fly” over the tent’s top and a plastic ground cloth underneath for extra protection.

Who’ll stop the rain? Not my tent.

I have, on rainy camping nights, thought of Avogadro’s number and how many water molecules are in the amounts of water that fall on a tent during a storm. There are five sextillion, i.e, 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules in a single drop of water. Thousands of drops fall on a tent, or pass through its bottom, during any serious rain. Tents look like they can repel water. And they do, to some extent. But ultimately, when it rains, septillions of aqueous molecules pass through the unseen spaces between threads in stitched nylon. A tent resembles a sieve. Though seemingly sheltered, I’ve gotten very wet on several tent-ed nights.

Just as a tent’s superficially protective appearance deceives rainy weather campers, so, also, were many deceived about the Covid masks’ effectiveness. Billions of viruses can fit on the head of a pin. Thus, viruses also move around the gaps between masks and skin. If significant amounts of air didn’t get through or move around masks, mask wearers would have suffocated. Masks also have pore spaces. You can detect odors through them.

Organisms and fluids, i.e., liquids and gases, characteristically, readily disperse. Further, small things inexorably spread far and wide and seep into unimaginably small spaces. Atmospheric lead from very distant 1960s car exhaust is found in polar ice. Wind carries invasive plants seeds very long distances. As do macro-organisms, microbes defy containment; they invisibly leak out of places, like labs, and migrate boundlessly, eiher actively or passively. Such mobility is another reason that I doubted masks would stop viral transmission.

I also reasoned that even in the very unlikely event that masks did block viruses better than tents blocked water, anyone who was scared enough to mask up should have felt protected and not cared about whether others covered their faces or not. Despite the masks and other theatrical “mitigation” modalities, unless one was committed to long-term isolation, there was no way to hide from viruses.

Above all, The Virus itself—whatever it was or wasn’t—never scared me. I knew I’d survive infection, as would nearly every remotely healthy person.

From Day 1, I saw the harm that the lockdowns would cause and, thus, opposed them. But when I saw the government require measures as phony as masks, it was clear that they were lying about all things Covid in order to incite fear.

The masks were also a way to build—and signal—group identity and to show the-powers-that-shouldn’t-be how many people could be conned or cowed into going along with the overall Scam. While the masks and each of the other mitigation charade had obvious biological or logistical flaws, government functionaries enforced these measures as rigidly and counterproductively as New York State Park rangers enforce weekend two-night minimums.

Some people have asked me how I knew, from Day 1, that the coronavirus response was an overreaction and a scam. I ask them how they didn’t know.