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This week’s letter is a long one. Maybe they all will be. As poor Petra can confirm, I speak in paragraphs, with footnotes, so let’s just say the words can get to flowing. The title of the essay, Like a Turtle, could refer to the process of getting this first one out, as well. I want to send these out on Sundays, but the technical hurdles of setting up the newsletter “platform,” combined with performance anxiety on this debut, combined with how long the damn thing turned out to be… well, I don’t want to scare you off. It has sections! You can always stop and come back to it later!

In this letter: A year we’d hit snooze on if only we knew how; how much space 1,000 worms take up; why this family is not “reopening”; and the enviable dignity of turtles.

And before we get started, several recommendations. A couple of months back, desiring reading matter of a more escapist type than I usually go in for, I asked my brother to recommend some of the sci-fi he has recently gotten into. If you are sick of the current apocalypse, I can heartily recommend reading (or, in my case, listening to) the following tales of other apocalypses:

• Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. “It’s an incredibly suspenseful book about orbital mechanics,” my brother told me—and he was right! I’ll let you read the blurb, if you go in for blurb reading, but the basic idea is that humanity suddenly discovers the earth has only two years of habitability remaining and has to work fast to figure out how to preserve just a few thousand people in space for thousands of years. The pleasure I took from this book derived from how marvelously completely Stephenson imagines what feels like every detail and centimeter of the situations he throws his characters into. (Also, if you haven’t read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I envy you the opportunity to escape into that story, as well.)

• The Three Body Problem (and its sequels), by Liu Cixin. “It’s an incredibly suspenseful book about quantum physics,” my brother didn’t tell me, but could have—and he’d have been right! Actually, these books aren’t suspenseful and exciting in the same way as Seveneves, although they do have their moments. Instead they are intellectually exciting in the way that they pose moral quandaries and practical problems raised by the prospect of earth becoming uninhabitable (or, more accurately, the human race being annihilated)—not in the near term, but in what seems like an inevitable event that humans will realize is almost guaranteed to occur hundreds of years in the future.

Please enjoy this week’s essay, and thank you SO MUCH for reading.

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Like a Turtle

The turtles are alive, at least. That’s a relief. For several years now, we’ve been keeping two box turtles, one male and one female, in our backyard. They reside in an enclosure with about 40 square feet of floorspace, contained by knee-high walls of cedar planking and featuring rocks and logs and a variety of plants, both cultivated and volunteer.

Every fall, after some set of signals in the weather sensible only to turtles, ours burrow underground and there remain until emerging sometime in spring. And every spring, we start to worry that they are running late and may have died. This year was no different. As the days ticked by, we began to fear the worst and wonder if we might never see them again.

Then, a week or two ago, sharp-eyed Belle spotted “the boy turtle” peering out from his hole in the ground, just one side of his face visible, meeting her gaze with his sage turtle eye. A day or two later, he had fully emerged and begun patrolling the enclosure, taking stock of what this spring had waiting for him. The female turtle seemed to be biding her time, but a few days later Petra caught a glimpse of her shell, as if she had heaved up close to the surface before thinking better of it.

In this regard, the turtles mirror Petra’s and my own sleep patterns. Even though I am working from home these days and am not required to keep any particular schedule, I generally rise around 5 a.m., while Petra always sleeps until at least 7. In fact, after long training, I am generally awake no later than 4:45 and get out of bed just before the alarm on my phone goes off. It is possible for me to fall back asleep at this hour, and on weekends I usually let myself, but on weekdays I prefer to have a couple of hours to myself before the catastrophe of our quarantine quartet reaches full swing.

Checking her records, Petra determined that the male turtle’s emergence came only two weeks later this year than last. It remained worrisome that the female had still not emerged, but even though it was a mild winter, it’s been a cold spring. Here it is one week into May and there is a light dusting of snow on the ground this morning. Belle confirms that the male has burrowed underground again. It is easy to imagine the female turtle feeling confirmed in her decision to sleep in this year.

Certainly this would be the year many of would sleep through entirely, if only we knew how.

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We’ve had something of a population explosion over the last few weeks. In addition to four humans, two turtles, and Axl’s corn snake, the life forms in residence here now include a tree frog, a dozen or so crickets, and approximately 1,000 worms.

Petra discovered the tree frog in a five-gallon bucket someone had left out in the yard. Apparently the frog had trapped himself there by ricocheting in at the end of a poorly aimed leap and then being unable to manage a vertical enough jump to overtop its sides. One of our old aquariums was quickly repurposed as his new home, and the children furnished it with sticks, dirt, and plants from the backyard.

The crickets are food for the frog and so more like livestock than pets, I suppose. Petra bought the crickets in a lot of 20 from a pet store, along with a plastic box purpose-built for keeping and harvesting the things. About the size of a small shoebox, it features two plastic tubes, open at one end and closed at the other and rectangular in cross section. These are inserted at an angle, open end down, through ports on each end of the box. Crickets apparently like to climb and so tend to congregate inside and at the upper ends of these tubes, which can then be removed and a cricket or two tapped out into the stemless margarita glass we are using as the frog’s food dish.

The crickets are, in other words, undone by their inability to adapt their instincts to their actual circumstances, and of course they are not the only ones.

Also more in the livestock than pet category are the 1,000 worms that arrived in the mail about two weeks ago. Inside their box they were packed into a black cloth bag that struck me as surprisingly small, although admittedly I’d never given much thought to how much space 1,000 worms might take up. Why 1,000 worms? Composting, mostly—having given up on finding a way to manage a traditional outdoor composting operation in our tiny yard, Petra has decided to try out worm farming, which is supposed to offer another path from table scraps to good topsoil for the garden.

In preparation for this venture in vermiculture, Petra also obtained two large plastic bins of the type one might use to pack away camping supplies. She drilled holes in the bottom of one and set it inside the other, on top of two pieces of wood, to allow for drainage. Then, following what seems to be the general advice on this point, she filled the bin with shredded newspaper and used a spray bottle to wet it down to what one website described as “the dampness of a wrung-out sponge.”

The worms did not, at first, like their new home. I did not pay much attention to the worms on the day of their arrival until the evening, when I found Petra in the mud room, leaning over the worm bin in a state of distress. Peering over her shoulder, I observed dozens of worms—in what seems like a ready metaphor for all of us in these quarantined times—climbing the bin’s walls, with some of them even having started to wriggle through the holes of the fine mesh Petra had secured over the top of the bin with binder clips.

We summoned the children, who seem as yet not to have developed the slightest squeamishness about touching wriggly, slimy things like worms, and set them to gently brushing the creatures off the walls and back down into the layer of shredded newspaper intended to be their new home. While they did so, we analyzed the situation, eventually determining that the shredded newspaper was simply not wet enough, which if you think about it must have been quite vexing to worms who were probably already rather dehydrated after a couple of days traveling through the U.S. mail in a sack.

We added more water, and, while waiting for the worms to notice this improvement in their fortunes and settle down, tried to make use of what Petra had read was worms’ instinctive aversion to light as a method of dissuading them from their adventuring. When the first light Petra set up didn’t have the desired effect, I assumed that it was because the bulb, being an LED, wasn’t hot enough, but Petra assured me that light alone, regardless of temperature, was supposed to be sufficient to disquiet an earthworm. The problem, it seemed, was that this light wasn’t bright enough.

My eye fell on the rechargeable Maglite, in its recharging bracket on the wall, next to the washing machine. Knowing this light to be blindingly bright, possibly the brightest light available in the house, I pulled it from its bracket and tried focusing its beam on a worm. Sure enough, and despite that the Maglite also uses LED bulbs, it took only a few seconds of being caught in the flashlight’s beam for each worm to recoil and alter its wriggling course back in the general direction of the newspaper layer.

For the next ten or so minutes, while Petra was getting dinner ready, I crouched over the bin in the mudroom, singling out worms from the ever dwindling number attempting escape and hitting them with the beam of my flashlight, like a bouncer up above a concert audience illuminating the dope smokers so his colleagues could work their way through the crowd and drag them out. Or something like that.

After that first tense hour, the worms settled down and have presented no problems since. I don’t know if they truly love their new home, but at least they seem to have grown accustomed enough to their confinement that they are no longer climbing the walls, and it is a mark of these strange times that that is probably about as much as I can hope for you, too.

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I have just concluded what feels like my first true week of working from home. I was first sent home from Waldhurst City Hall more than a month ago, as a “non-essential” worker. This was after the mayor declared a citywide state of emergency and triggered a clause in the city government’s personnel policy in which only “essential” workers report and are paid time-and-a-half for doing so, while everyone else remains home at normal pay.

This approach seems to have been devised with weather-related and other relatively short-lived emergencies in mind, when commuting might be dangerous and the work of plowing streets or clearing rubble would seem to warrant some kind of hazard pay. No one, apparently, had ever imagined we might face an emergency that could last for months, during which identifying the employees at greatest risk would be no easy matter.

As town herald and crier, it was determined that I occupied a middle ground. Much of what I might have done on a typical day before the emergency—blog posts about the budget process, pictures of the city-hall flowerbeds on Facebook, etc.—was deemed non-essential, and yet there would of course be a certain amount of needed virus-related communicating to do each week. “Work as little as possible,” I was told (so that I would need to be paid time-and-a-half as little as possible, too).

Although working as little as possible has long been a goal of mine, it turned out be a disconcerting and depressing one to actually achieve. With so many other people out of work altogether, it felt uncomfortable—if not, in fact, like a sort of crime—to be making a little more money than usual while hardly working at all. So, it was something of a relief when the mayor reopened city hall to all city employees, deactivating the “emergency” personnel policy and returning us all to normal schedules, at normal pay.

There is an awkward aspect of this new development, however. It was assumed that the mayor’s announcement would also return all city-hall employees to their actual desks in city hall, including me. “Pack your bags and get ready to return to city hall,” my supervisor said, in what was intended as celebratory joviality in an email notifying me of the update.

“With young children at home, the earliest I can consider coming back is the start of the school year in the fall, and even that is very much to be determined,” I replied.

“Oh, right,” she answered. “I didn’t think about that.”

It was quickly agreed that this was not a problem, for the time being, as there is essentially nothing within my job duties that can’t be accomplished remotely. The weekend after the mayor’s announcement, I reentered city hall for the first time in more than a month and emptied out my office there of anything that might be useful in setting up a more formal one at home.

As relieved as I am to have been able to make this arrangement, I’m still not in an entirely comfortable position, psychologically speaking. I’m not the only city employee with children affected by the ongoing school closure and—despite the claims of various city administrators that “everyone seems glad to be getting back to work”—I’m probably also not the only one made uncomfortable at the thought of sending my children to day care under the circumstances.

Nonetheless, I am the only city employee being allowed to work from home. It is no real comfort to tell myself that this is because, due to everyone else’s specific, often customer-facing job duties and the particular equipment and/or software they must use in the course of those duties, I am really the only one who can.

I’ll have to get used to this feeling, however, because no matter how uncomfortable it gets I have no intention of doing otherwise, either during the summer when, normally, we would have sent the kids to daycare, or once the next school year starts. I mean, we’ll see how things go, but from the news I am reading and from the behaviors I see around me, I see no reason to think things will go well.

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Admittedly, our state is still turning in encouraging numbers where the virus is concerned. However, contrary to the governor’s increasingly ad nauseam assertion that this is due to “the fantastic job” state residents are doing in complying with public-health advice, any rational observer would have to conclude that our low infection rate is actually driven by the fantastic luck of being a relatively remote state, many of whose residents never even leave the county they were born in, much less visit fabled, far-off places like Pittsburgh and Harrisonville.

Perhaps, from the windows of the governor’s mansion, it looks as though people are staying home as much as possible, going out only for staples like Twinkies, beer, and insulin, and wearing masks when they do, but that is not the view from Waldhurst and somehow I doubt things look any better in most other parts of the state.

The governor makes a decent case for reopening, I have to admit. Conceding the very real dangers that remain, he has pointed out several times now that, if some sectors of the economy are not ramped back up, the nation faces a very real risk of falling into a depression, “not just a recession,” as he puts it. And there are of course very real dangers in that eventuality, too: massive unemployment, food shortages, and even—in his ominous yet opaque phrasing—“neighbor against neighbor.”

This can all be true at the same time that there might be little that can be done about it. The nation is not guaranteed a happy ending, after all. It does not matter how much reopening you allow if people do not feel safe patronizing the reopened businesses. It’s probably fair to guess that a relatively high proportion of people in this state currently do feel comfortable at the prospect of reentering some of the businesses that are now starting to be able to admit them once again. But if—when—the infection rate starts climbing as a result of these increased interactions, that comfort level will plummet.

Because make no mistake: When a governor decides to “reopen,” it is after a calculation that is no less cold for being necessary. The calculation is based on the following question: What will cost him more politically, X number of extra deaths from the virus or the economic toll of X more weeks of shutdown?

In other words, as high a price as we will pay if we cannot soon return our economy to something like its prior functioning, and as real as the dangers are that we will face if that does not happen, a decision to “reopen”—especially before we have satisfied any of the preconditions called for public health experts—is a decision to cause some additional number of us to sicken and die than would have done so under a continued shutdown. The governor, of course, has his fingers crossed that this number won’t be too high.

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Suppose wearing seatbelts were somehow determined to be as economically ruinous as shutting down businesses during the current emergency. Arguments for stopping wearing seatbelts might then be made in similar terms to the arguments for why we should all now be willing to dance into the streets and resume exchanging exhalations with strangers at gyms, restaurants, and hair salons: the odds are you won’t get into a car crash, and—even if you do have one and aren’t belted in—most car crashes are minor enough that you’ll probably “recover” from your injuries.

Just like the arguments for “reopening,” this makes a certain sense at the population level. But would you be willing to reach into the backseat and unbuckle your child—or mother?

I don’t envy any governor the need to make this decision, and I can even accept that the basis on which ours is proceeding is not utterly illogical (I even give the man more credit than I would ever have expected to need to do). Nonetheless, I don’t volunteer, and I will not be volunteering my family, to be sacrificed on this particular altar.

(I realize that some significant statistical distinctions can be drawn between coronavirus and car crashes. However, I’ll just note that, in 2017, about 170,000 people died in car accidents in the United States. With our current coronavirus-related mortality total of more than 80,000, I don’t know if you’d find good odds on a bet that we couldn’t reach or even top the number of auto-accident fatalities by December 31. Also, just for the fun of it, keep in mind that coronavirus resembles car crashes in that “recovery” will in not a few cases mean “alive but with permanent kidney damage, neurological problems, or other life-altering disabilities.”)

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I hope the weather warms enough that the turtles will both be out and about soon, for there is something soothing about observing them in any year and during this one I am in particular need of soothing.

The pace of a turtle is stately, and this and the haughty aspect they assume when they raise their heads high on their scrawny little necks for a better view of their horizon gives the impression of a being who regards itself it as master of all it surveys. This impression stands in stark contrast with what we humans may be tend to think of as its frail and disadvantaged state.

One of the more challenging things turtle-watching asks of us is to imagine how the world looks when one lacks any offensive and all but one defensive capability. Descended from agile and warlike apes as we are, it is hard for us to imagine lacking not only tooth, claw, and/or manufactured refinement thereof but also even the ability to run quickly away from danger. How does the world look to one who must move through it so slowly and who, in response to the arrival of, say, a hungry raccoon, can only put up the shields, hunker down, and wait until the ravening mammal gets bored and moves on? Living this way would seem to require a certain philosophical bent.

Trying to imagine the turtle’s worldview requires not simply imagining being unable to fight or flee but also somehow imagining not experiencing that condition as deficient or lacking in any way. It is the implacable and, for me, incomprehensible unconcern of turtles that soothes me as I watch our two box turtles shoulder through the leaves of the undergrowth in their enclosure.

The fact is that we are all helpless, that even the abilities we cannot imagine doing without have not been enough to prevent us from being struck low by a tiny microbe, like the ultimately pathetic alien invaders imagined by H. G. Wells.

Even with all of our tools and technologies, many of us were barely able to feel safe for more than a few minutes at a time before the virus arrived.

Now that it is here, all we can do is hunker down, like the turtle. If we are fortunate, we will learn to do it with as much dignity.