Uncertainty of news about the Ukrainian invasion and the pandemic – Personal hiking adventures – Absence of facemasks in a local brewery – A two-year retrospective – Evening statistics
If the previous entries have concentrated mainly on the personal level, it is not because I have lost interest in more pressing issues such as the pandemic or the Ukrainian invasion – very far from it – but on account of the impossibility of getting either new or reliable information about these matters. With regard to the Ukrainian invasion, for example: the Russians are passionately protesting against the war and Putin’s regime; the Russians who support the war outnumber those who oppose it by a factor of two-to-one. The Russian losses are confined to a few hundred; the Russian losses number in the thousands. The Russians have deployed their arsenal with less expertise than outside observers had expected; the Russians are using hypersonic weapons to great effect, causing much damage and loss of life. And so on. I simply find it impossible to determine any clear picture of the war at large from such accounts; and to judge by the contradictory assessments emerging from the Pentagon, our military experts are as perplexed as I am.
As far as the pandemic is concerned, we seem to be in a holding pattern. It has been “winding down” for weeks on end, but both the CDC and the WHO have been reluctant to say when it will pass to the endemic stage. And understandably so – new variants are continually emerging, and no one knows whether any of these will expand to the point of displacing the omicron variant and, if so, whether such a variant will be more lethal in its effects than the relatively benign omicron, whose mortality rate is considerably lower than those of the variants that preceded it. So the pandemic remains officially a pandemic for some indeterminate period.
And in the meantime we in the U.S. continue to look after our own affairs, as is usual, buffered as we are by oceans to the west and to the east, and without much regard to what is happening in other countries. After the winter storm of the previous week, weather in the East has been calm and warm for the most part, and indeed unseasonably warm over this past Friday and Saturday.
On Saturday I went with other members of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Association to go over a possible extension of the trail route along the grounds of the Noman Cole Pollution Control plant with representatives from the county and from the plant itself. Going alongside a pollution treatment plant does not, in the abstract, sound like the most attractive route for a trail, but in fact the plant facilities are surrounded by tracts of undeveloped woodland for the purpose of allowing odors from the tanks used for treating the sewage to disperse so that they do not become an irritant for the inhabitants of the nearby housing developments. It was quite gratifying to see how the various officials reacted with enthusiasm to the possibility of filling in one of the gaps in the PHT, which currently is still non-continuous in places.
Also, I had an interesting conversation with one of them, who has been a participant in Civil War reenactments. He was telling me about the differences between hiking for relaxation and going over battlefields such as Antietam in preparation for such reenactments. The loads they carry (including muskets, which are very cumbersome) hinder them greatly, and of course they wear 19th-century standard military boots, which are much less comfortable for hiking than the boots I select from outfitters with due regard to their fit and weight. I mentioned a visit I had taken some years ago to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD; he had never been there, but we both discussed various aspects of medical treatment in those days (operations without anesthetics, medicines based on heavy metals such as mercury and antimony, etc.) and concluded with profound thankfulness for living in an age with much more sophisticated treatments both for wounds and for diseases.
The presentation of the proposed route was concluded by noon. After lunch, RS and I went a few miles together, going from Mason Neck West to Lorton, with most of our route taking place in Meadowood. It was very warm that day, and although rain had been in the forecast earlier, it remained warm (though not humid) and fairly sunny for the duration of our hike.
Then on yesterday, the first day of spring, RS and I joined the Harpers Ferry Bolivar Trail and Town Alliance for a hike along the Appalachian Trail from Harpers Ferry to Snickers Gap, ending up at the Bear Chase Brewery on Rte. 602: a hike of well over 21 miles and with about 4000 feet of elevation gain. The group that went on this hike contained several members considerably younger than RS or myself; but, if the truth must be owned, they were for the most part not especially swift, and RS told me afterwards that they were somewhat confounded by the ease with which I outdistanced them. There was a bit of confusion at one point. We were supposed to wait at the David Lesser shelter to regroup. But I arrived there at 11:10 and a few others came in over a period between 11:25 and 11:40. We waited for a time but the remainder of the group was slow in coming. Finally we noticed a couple of group members simply hiking past the intersection between the AT and the trail leading to the shelter, so we decided that it was best to continue. This day, thankfully, was more seasonal in temperature, for the latter part of the hike included the beginning of the “Roller Coaster,” a 13½-mile segment in the AT that derives its name from going up and down over several steep hills in succession, and it can be unpleasant to cover in extreme heat.
I arrived at the brewery at about 3:40. I had expected to see others there, because I thought that a greater number of hikers in our group had bypassed the shelter than was actually the case. So I was the first to arrive and I spent several minutes looking in vain for some of the others. The brewery is located on a plateau above Snickers Gap and is unprotected by trees. The weather became very blustery and I eventually waited inside, venturing out periodically to check whether any other hikers had arrived. The brewery, to my mind, is a less inviting place to linger than the various wineries that I had visited after various other hikes. The taproom, which is the main room for the customers, is a large rectangular area enclosed by windows with full-length glass panes to enable one to savor the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But the crowd of people and the background music in an enclosed area make it difficult to hear others even when they are seated next to you, and the seats are little better than stools, consisting of flat metal plated material supported by high thin legs that elevate one’s feet well above the floor when seated. There is no denying, however, that the grounds are handsome and that, in addition to various brews, they serve wine and various foods as well. Eventually I found the wife of the hike organizer, who had been tasked to meet with us and provide transport to some of the hikers to the point where we began. She was accompanied by her 8-month old baby, an infant with a very happy disposition, serenely nestling in her mother’s arms and not displaying the least amount of fretfulness in response to the noise about her. I was glad to obtain their company, for I had to wait for some time. With one other exception among the group, the first wave of hikers did not arrive until about 5:00.
Although I had a facemask in my pack, I did not use it. None of the other customers or any of the personnel tending the bar was wearing one, and if I had put one on I would have had to remove it in any case whenever I began to drink or eat. To wear one upon entering therefore would have seemed like an affectation and, since we were in an area that the CDC has declared such measures to be no longer necessary, I decided against using mine in such surroundings.
Yesterday, in addition to being the first day of spring, marked an anniversary of a sort. The official declaration of the beginning of the COVID pandemic, of course, took place on March 11, 2020. But it was on March 20th of that year when I first embarked upon keeping this record. It therefore seems appropriate to take a retrospective glance at this point and to see the extent to which matters have changed since the pandemic began.
I am very thankful to say that my personal health remains unaffected during the events of the past two years. It is not merely that I had escaped the ravages of COVID, but I have not been afflicted with ailments that attend many when they are in their sixties: no bursitis, no bone loss, no need for crowns or root canal work, and so on. I have remained active during this time and my stamina remains unaffected. The hike of the preceding day was, as I said, nearly 22 miles, but while I was certainly tired when it ended I was not prostrated and I could attend to other tasks (such as the hour-and-a-half drive back home, for example) without strain.
I continue to bring a facemask with me (either on my person or in the car) whenever I leave my house. It has become as much of a habit by this time as checking to ensure that I have my keys in my pocket before I close the house door.
Physical activity appears to have increased generally, even though the impetus to get out of doors in waning. It is possible that many people, after being forced to go out of doors more often on account of the pandemic, have discovered how beneficial and enjoyable such activity can be, and have therefore incorporated it into their daily lives. Certainly I encounter more people on the trails than I did formerly. There were many on the Appalachian Trail yesterday, even though the weather was less encouraging than it had been a day or so previously.
By degrees the inhibitions on social life and convening in crowds have been lifting. Indoor gatherings are more frequent and all interstate travel restrictions have long since disappeared. Both the Capital Hiking Club and the Wanderbirds are planning to resume bus hikes. Details are still being worked out, but it seems likely that we will be reverting to the arrangements we have had in the past. Masks are still required for public transportation but more people are using buses and the Metro than I had observed previously.
Travel has become easier, although it is still somewhat more complicated than it has been before the pandemic began. Travel within the country’s border is not difficult. At this point wearing a mask on airplane flights is the only additional complication. International travel is still somewhat more cumbersome, although that may change. Many countries do not require proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test result within 24 hours of the airplane flight. It is still necessary to submit to such a test to re-enter the country, however, and that circumstance is not likely to change for some time.
Theoretically it should be possible for me to visit museums more frequently and take in entertainment such as concerts or theater performances. Practically I have not yet done so. A kind of inertia, I suppose, has set in with regard to such activities, and it will require some effort to overcome it.
It is rather sad to look back at previous predictions and to see how far off of the mark they have become. In July of 2020 I suggested that the virus case count worldwide could expand to as many as 800 or 900 million – but I did so by way of hyperbole. The case count is currently approaching 500 million, so such a prediction no longer seems extravagant. The development and deployment of the vaccines, of course, have slowed down both the infection rate and the mortality rate. But COVID has claimed the lives of over 6 million to date. Several months earlier I predicted that our own nation would see over 1 million deaths from the pandemic; it seemed a remote possibility at the time, but currently our death toll is approaching that undesirable milestone. Over 24% of living Americans have contracted the virus – and that is only the official figure, for many may have received positive results from home testing and have never reported it.
In addition to the toll that the pandemic has taken on our health care system , it has also played a role in damaging the nation’s social structure at large. But that is so complicated a topic that it must wait for a separate entry to cover it in more detail.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide:471,912,762; # of deaths worldwide: 6,104,113; # of cases U.S.: 81,428,553; # of deaths; U.S.: 998,212.