Distancing
When the orders for instant evacuation arrived, my husband and I were stunned. That was only because ours brain knew how to make the most obvious become the least accessible. Our brains knew how to distance that which could not be handled.
The signs were there all along.
The visibility for one thing.
For two days now, the visibility was so poor that I couldn’t see the silhouette of the great towering madrone tree with its bleeding red branches that tapped my bedroom window at nights. We (in Santa Cruz), who were used to curtains of fog robbing us of visibility until sunset sometimes, saw dark ominous smoke billowing and rushing in with exaggerated urgency. The surface of our kitchen counter and the dining table looked as if covered with grey sleet. We were struggling to take adequate breaths without throwing ourselves into a fit of cough.
At first, Ram and I had to agree on some ground rules.
Three minutes.
Tres minutos.
Only the absolute bare-bone essentials.
Claro.
Meet at the garage?
Aye.
Three minutes
Three minutes.
It was a scavenger hunt, except it didn’t feel like one.
In fact, I am not sure there were any feelings at all to be registered on the Geiger counter.
When we regrouped at the said time, and at the said location, we quickly reviewed each other’s stashes.
My husband had found the passports and some original birth certificates, immigration papers etc.
I had packed our overnight essentials, Ram’s medications, and a plastic box of kid’s photographs (if I took all the photos that mattered, we would need to rent a U haul.)
We threw them all into a backpack. I have carried heavier packs on day-long hikes. And we were off. Just like that.
The first rude awakening was at the hotel. We, who have not been next to a fellow human for over five months on account of Covid-19 and social distancing and all, suddenly found ourselves surrounded by throngs at the hotel lobby. Folks carrying whatever they thought were essential and a quick glance could tell you how varied that definition could be — sure, there were suitcases and garbage bags filled with valuables, suitcases inside garbage bags or the other way around, a vanity case here, a jewelry box there. An occasional man carrying a garden tool, or a stack of hats, but surely everyone had a pet — it was a menagerie of animals waiting at the reception as hotels were implored to accept guests with pets during these times. Even the dogs seemed to grasp the magnitude of the situation and lost their usual playfulness and rambunctiousness and sat still next to their humans like uniformed children in a prep school. The cats were all in their cages and there was not a single meow. Some of the cages had bunnies, a kid was holding a jar with a panicked goldfish, a woman in overalls was carrying a turtle like a Hermes hand bag.
If folks weren’t wearing face coverings, we wouldn’t remember we were in a pandemic.
Why should we anyhow?
Our predicament had suddenly placed the threat of a deadly, killer virus in the back burner. Apparently, there is a hierarchy to existential threats.
We took the very last room they had available. We were lucky.
Who said face masks concealed expressions? There was no mistaking the affection and care this group felt for one another. You just have to learn new ways of reading human connections, I told myself as we let ourselves into our room, we, who hadn’t stepped into public space or used a public restroom in over five months.
Then, the calls poured in all night long. Mostly because our extended family lived on either side of GMT.
The telephone conversation with our two daughters, though, brought home the first recognition of what we had signed up for, inadvertently — the loss a thirty-year old home — a structure (at one point) that welcomed both our daughters, that partnered with us in raising them into adulthood — had witnessed deaths and other tragedies, done its part in sheltering us, offered us respite, grown with us, created memories for us, and had inextricably become us.
Our daughters also reminded of us of a couple of very special items that they would have loved to have taken with them had they known— we talked about how together we had created some memories and worked hard at erasing others, and thus and thus, Ram and I were, without our knowledge, already starting the process of mourning an impending amputation.
Of course, what’s important is that you are both safe, everyone said to us. Their comparison was “perishing” as a potential option B.
Of course, we agreed.
But it was hard to articulate the idea that so much of us was dying within us and how we were struggling to reconfigure ourselves against this constant erosion of want might seem to others as quotidian, the customary, the mundane. Right at that time, slow death of parts of us still felt very much like dying as a whole. We decided to save the gratitude of “just being alive” for another morning,
It was a sleepless night, mostly because we tried to consider other time zones of folks calling us for reassurance.
Early next morning, Ram and I hopped into our car and drove home.
We knew what the task was ahead of us. We had to sneak back into our home one last time.
It was absurd in one sense and yet, it wasn’t.
The two-way highway through the Santa Cruz mountains was now one-way only and single laned. As we summitted the Santa Cruz mountains, the familiar burn smells and smoke brought back bouts of cough. Dense smoky skies came back into view giving us a preview of what was ahead.
Thousands of folks were fleeing and we among them. Exits were blocked off, barricades littered the sides of the roadway, warning signs transformed the view ahead into a Marigold field.
Patrol cars raced past on the shoulders of highway 17 against a backdrop of wails of distant ambulances.
The fleeing cars barely inched forward and as we got close to the exit to our home, there was a fleeting moment of shared surprise. There were no barricades at this entrance. The gates of this exit swung open. It felt like as if someone had rolled out a red carpet.
We quickly exited and drove into our neighborhood.
We had undertaken this journey hoping to go home one last time, if for no other reason than to retrieve our daughter’s favorite treasures, but we had no hopes we would actually be able to accomplish this task. The failure of this mission was already a promise, but the steps needed to be taken towards this failure.
The drive through our neighborhood was chilling — there were no vehicles on any of the driveways, every house looked boarded up, the usually manicured yards were unkempt, the welcoming committee of our friendly neighborhood dogs were conspicuously missing, the homes themselves were covered in soot as if getting dressed up for Halloween, and the ever-present smoke turned the sun into a glowing red moon.
It was really hard to be back. It felt as if we were trespassing. Or that we were looters.
Ram reminded me to tell our cleaners not to come to work that day.
I chuckled to myself. We could have cleaned up perfect for the sacrifice.
I retrieved the stuffed seal baby and the collage picture frame from each one of our daughter’s rooms. I remembered a box of old home videos of our daughters as babies locked inside VHS mini tapes and stuck in the attic, never looked for or looked at, in over twenty-five years.
Retrieved!
Two sleeping bags.
Check.
Ram drudged up some additional papers in a portable file case.
We checked our mail that only brought bills to our house. Imagine leaving behind unpaid bills for a home that was no more.
Someone had advised that we throw everything possible inside our pool. Like what? I asked horrified at the suggestion. China, dishes, clothes, shoes, jewelry he said. You can always clean up later.
I imagined going deep-diving for treasures in my own murky pool and finding cutlery. No, thank you.
I walked through every room, taking pictures with my eyes. It was surprising how every little object, from a table fan to a trinket, to the handrails to the clock, spoke to you when you listened. They have much to share but I had to stop them midsentence. The most precious thing, I decided, was my memory and there was no way that could be salvaged by sinking in my pool — it was easier to leave everything as was, as is, than disrupt its wholeness.
Time was of the essence and we needed to get away. The whirring helicopters over us reminded us.
One last thing, ram said.
Okay?
Okay.
Your choice, we agreed. Three minutes.
I saw Ram pick up the watering hose in our yard. What was he thinking, I wondered. Was he hoping to douse down a few dozen towering red woods nearby?
No, that was not what he had in mind.
I saw him squirting a parched, jejune looking Black-Eyed Susan, usually resplendent with flowers. Every sprinkle seemed to revive it.
The quotidian nature of his act inspired me — and on my part, I refilled the bird feeders and cleaned out the bird bath. But there were no birds to be seen, expect a lone ruby-throated hummingbird.
As we drove away, there was this sense of leaving forbidden territory — our car paused as we drove past the meadow, as was customary. Watching this meadow had become a curtain call before we launched ourselves onto the stage of our daily lives for the past thirty years — an act that has rewarded us handsomely with displays of wild animals, sometimes coyotes, sometimes foxes, even cougars at times, ever present flocks of wild turkeys or quails, always, always a herd of deer, innumerable birds — hawks, woodpeckers, stellar jays, chickadees, titmice, hawks and then, a sweeping acrobatic owl and, once or twice, a self-adulating male peacock dancing.
This time, though, the meadow was bereft of any signs of life.
We drove away fleeing, without a destination, only a time stamp of departure, but no ETA. Ram and I sat in silence as we just drove and drove. It was one of those rare silences where you felt as if you were running through a maze, in lock step, making the same decisions, and taking the same turns — you were both moving ahead wordlessly, and you were advancing — each twist and turn a goal onto itself.
The smoky sky gave way to a sliver of azure.
After a long while, Ram asked if I knew how coconuts came to influence south-Asian cuisine.
It felt like a pivot for the tiniest measure of time.
I smiled.
I am sure you will be asking Siri the first chance you get, I said.
Thaila Ramanujam is a physician in private practice in California. Raised in a literary family as the daughter of a prominent Tamil author, she developed a passion for Immunology early on and moved to the University of Washington to pursue research. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and her work have been published/ or won awards in Nimrod, Asian Cha, Glimmer Train, and Readers. Her translations have appeared in International Literary Magazines. She is a columnist for a Tamil literary magazine, Kalachuvadu with international readership and has an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont.