Gardening an Emergency Manager’s Apocalypse
I’m a public health emergency manager; I’ve worked this Covid-19 pandemic for almost a year. But like everybody else, in March I got sent home, reeling. I’ve worked maybe twenty disasters, always in Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs), always managing twelve hour cycles with action plans like clockwork and (sometimes) free coffee. As urgent as the work was, these EOCs ran on the camaraderie of professionals struggling to make the right calls in impossible situations. This time, instead: My desk, four kids, a national tragedy beyond reckoning, and an iPhone.
In the 1930s, my grandfather built a two thousand acre farm in southwest Georgia, working lumber and peanuts with my father over generations. In Brooklyn, I’m grateful to have a patch of yard. Still, not knowing what else to do, I started to garden, every day, measuring my conference calls by trowels of dirt.
That first week, I laid Astilbe against the south fence as an ambulance screamed by. Seven days later, constant sirens accompanied my lamium as I dropped in a shade garden piece by piece under our lone Catalpa tree. I was adrift, working to build a team zoom square by zoom square as fatalities rose and PPE evaporated. Far away, two funerals in Albany, Georgia, triggered an outbreak that left my parents and I, separated by a thousand miles, at the twin poles of deaths per capita. Back in 1918, during the Great Influenza, it took some weeks for the population to understand how serious the pandemic was; in March, I still believed we would stand together as a country against this threat.
On April 14th, when New York City added more than 3,000 probable Covid fatalities to its death rolls, I planted a President Lincoln lilac with a prayer for leadership. I’ve worked epidemics before, more than one. They always hurt the marginalized worst. We all knew, we emergency managers, that people of color would die in significantly higher amounts. But the folks running the national show seemed to be laughing instead of listening. The virus burned on into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts. At home, our three year old gave up on potty training; my six year old screamed through each day, bereft.
In mid-May, they took my next door neighbor to the hospital. She had just turned one hundred and, still sharp, would whisper her exploits as an FBI agent during World War Two through the fence while she fed my dog ice cream. She waved at me from her stretcher as I shoved some coleus in a planter; twelve days later, she was dead. It was the same day George Floyd was murdered, and the grief woke many to the injustice baked in around us. After disasters, you often see this awakening; it’s a race to see whether it lasts or fades back into the ether as the impact moves on by. I thought it would bring us together, to fight with justice against this horror.
In June, I nestled a dogwood in the ground against our back fence as a memorial, its flowers in the shape of a cross. It was too late in the season to plant a tree, really. I shaded it through brutal July with a strung-up blanket and prayed it would survive, as the virus roiled up in Texas, Florida, California and protests swelled across the globe. Surveys showed that the protestors were more afraid of the virus than others; they marched despite the risks and, as a result, didn’t cause the spikes we saw in other superspreader events. I laid out marigolds, an annual, as a ward against trusting in the future and to beat the mosquitos back.
When September came, I dug in lines of catmint down our south-facing fence and heuchera across the north. The world breathed, and muddled, and screamed. In school, emergency managers learn that in disasters you tell the truth and present a unified message, you provide good resource support and trust local decision-makers. You adapt. But we live in a mirror-world. None of that happened. For those with eyes to see, the death now, this winter, was created during those months. The rest is just the slow motion unraveling of a story told by incompetence and bad faith, and written in death. I kept planting just to watch the sun inject chlorophyll with energy; to watch my little sprigs of green arc up toward the light.
Last week, the first hard frost came and shriveled my garden into history. This week, our death rates top 9/11 every day. We elected a new path, thank God; this winter, though, we’ll all still sit in our grief saying prayers until spring comes and my lilac, if it survives, finally blooms.
I’ve gardened for nine months. I’ve watched all of the best practices of my field trampled on day by day, with beloved folks paying the price with their lives. I’ve learned too many lessons I didn’t want to know. Pandemics change us, they whirl through us, poisoning things we thought would last forever. After a plague, Athens fell. After another, the middle-class emerged. An apocalypse is something beyond a tragedy; like it or not, it comes with a revelation attached. It’s past time for us to choose ours.
At the end of this, maybe we’ll get lucky, maybe we’ll be able to burn out the ignorance and hate that’s helped cause all this death. But gardening is about tending — not just rooting out the bad stuff, but what you plant.
On his red Georgia dirt, my grandfather filled a thousand acres with Longleaf pine no one could harvest until long after he was dead. Me, watching my Astilbe rot in Brooklyn, I don’t know if I have that kind of faith in the future, anymore. It depends on our revelation, I guess. Bare ground, after all, just invites weeds back. The question is, what will we plant to make sure this never happens again?
