TIME OUT

 

I’ve been taking a break. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. In fact, I hardly realized it was happening. I just suddenly awoke to the fact that it was about to be August, and when I looked up at the wall calendar over my desk, it was showing May.

“What the hell?” I thought. Did two months really get completely away from me? It was then too that I realized that I had written nothing for this blog in two months. I mean, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know I was delinquent in my deadlines. I knew I’d “missed a deadline or two.” But two months!

I changed my calendar and promised myself to get it together, to return to my usually highly disciplined writing schedule, to shrug off apathy and start living again.

Then, all of the sudden one morning, I glanced at the date on my laptop, saw it was September, raised my eyes to look at the calendar on my wall, and saw that, there, it was still August. What the hell! Yet another month had drifted past. I was beginning to feel a little like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but without the state of immortality or all of the quaint and interesting townspeople.

The fact is, however, that I haven’t just been “vegging out” for more than twelve weeks. I mean, I’ve been working. A lot. I had gotten impossibly behind on a ghost-writing project. I was contracted more than a year ago to ghost the autobiography of one of the lesser-known members of one of America’s traditional “royal families”. You would all know the name. Just about everyone in the Western world would. When I was first approached by the publisher for this private edition book and asked to provide a deadline, I said I figured three months give or take.

By the time we’re through, it will be more like a year and three months. It’s become impossibly unprofitable for me, even though I managed to talk the publisher into negotiating a fifty percent increase in my fee. The publisher can’t wait to be done with it either. And like me, they claim, they’re losing their shirt.

But at least they have the advantage of owning a book that, although it is likely to have a very limited audience, that audience is filled with people who might very well entrust them with their own life stories, especially because this promises to be a good book. Myself, I don’t have that advantage. When I’m done, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief that a difficult project is finished and pat myself on the back for a job well done. Or then again, maybe I’ll just think bitterly about how much time and energy I put into a book that isn’t mine in any real sense—thousands of hours of time and energy when time and energy are at a premium in this chapter of my own life—for a book that no one will ever know I wrote. Hence the term ghostwriter.  

There was a time not all that long ago when, once I’d given my word, I would have met that deadline even if it nearly killed me. And I would have met it by doing “the best I could” in the time allotted. But there’s something about reaching this stage in life (seventy plus, with a forty-seven-year writing career behind me) that makes you immune to a lot of the rules you once imposed on yourself—or let others impose on you. Priorities change when you are no longer “building a career for yourself”, when your reputation is already well established, and, furthermore, when you know that the time has come for your career, such as it is, to be whatever you want or don’t want to make of it.

It didn’t take long to figure out that I was way off on my estimate. Especially when I had written the first two chapters which contained a great deal about the world-famous family to which the subject belonged, only to have her reject them out of hand. This was her story, she said, not that of the family to which she had often wished she didn’t belong, because it was more of a burden than a benefit.

So, there was a rather lengthy process of making her understand that while her life might be interesting in itself to a handful of friends and family members, what made it more interesting to a much broader audience was that she was a relatively unknown member of a very well-known family and that even though she might want to be her own person, it was impossible to separate how her life had been from the fact that she came from a very wealthy and very famous clan. The truth was, just about everything that had happened to her was inextricably connected to that fact. There was simply no denying the fact that being who she was born had a profound effect on her being who she had become.  

More specifically, what was perhaps most interesting of all was that the story was her personal history within the environment created by that family. Indeed, how she had coped with that—and how different her life had been

from what an outsider was likely to imagine—was the main value of telling her story. 

Renegotiating the storyline and the telling of it with her took several months. Then suddenly, one fine morning, she got out of bed on the other side, and it was all systems go. The pause, however, gave me time to think as well, and I decided that I was no longer okay with publishers imposing impossible deadlines on me or setting any but the most basic of rules for how a story would be told. I no longer wanted to feel like I was digging ditches instead of writing, obliged to write for money rather than getting paid for writing the very best way I knew how.

It was a kind of revelation. I discovered that I was no longer capable of writing any way but my best. Not the best that time or publishing constraints allowed, but as well and as authentically as I knew how. As a result, the narrative that I am now very close to finishing for the client—and in which I will have no acknowledgement whatsoever, since that is the fate of the ghost, a job that couldn’t be better named—is of far higher quality and authenticity than could ever be expected for a private edition, such as this will be.

What’s important about this isn’t that I’ve gone above and beyond for the client—which I have—but that I have been true to myself and my craft. I haven’t compromised on research, fact-checking or quality writing, and that achievement is of major importance to me as a writer. What it has meant is that an assignment that could have turned into a nightmare has instead made me feel accomplished—not like a hack to whom the importance of the money far outweighs the importance of the work. 

But I can’t blame free-lance work entirely for being as remiss as I’ve been in fulfilling my commitment to my regular readers, or in at least letting them know earlier what was going on.

Regarding this point, I can only say that there were just entirely too many external factors eating at me to permit me to concentrate on more than one creative task at a time. In short, my normally robust multi-tasking mechanism was jammed by extenuating circumstances. My growing concern over these external factors seemed to cut me off at the knees, to partially cripple and disable my usually ample and eclectic creativity.

To start with, a few days after I wrote the last entry here, my sister-in-law, Alicia, passed away. It shouldn’t have been unexpected. She was eighty-two and had been seriously ill for three years—what doctors described as dementia accompanied by Parkinsonism. We, the family, had been supervising her care for that entire time. And we decided early on that we weren’t going to have her placed in “a facility” since she had been single and independent her entire life and had lived in the same century-old apartment on a busy avenue in Buenos Aires for the past three and a half decades. She would, we decided, end her life surrounded by the things she was familiar with.

Alicia, left with headscarf, as she looked when I
first met her in the late 1960s. Enjoying a seaside 
holiday with a friend and little brother, Miguel, little
sister Virginia, and her mother, Teresa.

Twenty-four/seven, she was in the capable hands of a male nurse, who was a friend of my brother-in-law’s, and his sister, who took turns seeing to her many, many needs. Thanks to their effectiveness and care, she didn’t spend a single day in the hospital and they became so attached to her that they considered her a sort of surrogate grandmother—and cared for her more and far better than the majority of young people would care for their real grandmother. Their loyalty to her was absolute.

On several occasions, the work and knowhow of the nurse pulled her out of downward spirals that should have ended her life. And the next day he would again have her sitting at the table for her meals and doing supervised exercises in her bedroom or in the patio, depending on the weather. We had long since understood that this wasn’t like some other terminal illnesses that have a more or less accurate prognosis. We simply were in it for the duration, as she would have been for any of us. So there came a time when we had almost forgotten, as one does, that death would be the ultimate factor.

So, it came as a sort of vaguely anticipated shock when the nurse called to say that, after having her breakfast like any other day, her blood pressure started dropping steadily. He got her on a drip and sought to bring her back the way he had before, but this time she simply went to sleep and slipped away. It was over and the feeling was one of utter emptiness.

Like a lot of other people, I had already become saturated, frustrated, jaded with the general climate in which we are all living—the seemingly endless pandemic and the great divide between science and politics that is perpetuating it; the juxtaposition of democracy and authoritarianism that is no longer the worldwide phenomenon that used to geopolitically divide East from West and North from South, but which now is threatening to end the once largely successful two and a half-century-old experiment in American political tradition, and the general sense of being utterly fed up with an atmosphere in which those who should be representing the people are obsessed with their own selfish political goals and no longer do anything for the good of their constituencies because they are too busy trying to put each other out of business.

Never mind that I’ve spent an enormous amount of my career commenting on political and social realities and am bound at some point to keep doing the same because I can’t stop trying to analyze what often seems so utterly incomprehensible. For even an obsessively political person like myself, however, there are moments when you are simply fed up and can’t think about it anymore for a while without feeling nauseous. And the current moment in politics almost everywhere, but especially in my native United States, is a perfect one in which to feel nauseous.

But life goes on. And giving in to despair is not only an attitude of defeat, but also a monumental waste of time. So, I’m back, and with new impetus, and an unwillingness to compromise my vision of the past or of the future in the slightest, whether writing for my literary blog or for my political blog. Because my writing is who I am, and if I can’t be completely honest with myself and with you at this late stage in the game, when will I ever be?

 

A TRIP TO THE DENTIST

If you’re anything like I am, once you get a dentist you like, you never want to switch. And sometimes finding one you can live with is a little like trying to find a spouse.

In this second case, as an aside, I should (better!) note that my first choice “took”—met her when I was eighteen, married her when we were both twenty-one, and have been with her for the past forty-nine years (much to her credit, since I’ve never been an easy person to live with and because we’ve had to weather some very difficult times). But from what I’ve witnessed in observing others, this is an exception to the rule.

At best, generally speaking, dating, engagement and marriage—or the more modern version of marriage, which has to do with dating, tentatively living together, seeing if it works and continuing on until it doesn’t then going separate ways (sometimes amicably, other times definitely not)—tends to resemble a fishing expedition. Whereas, at worst, it can be a dangerous big game safari, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the hunter and who the hunted, and in which the one who thinks he or she has bagged a real prize can end up getting eaten for lunch.

Choosing a dentist usually isn’t quite that bad, but it can still be similar to taking a devil-may-care walk in a minefield. The first one I had in Buenos Aires was a noted odontologist. He had written several books on dental materials and was a professor at the national university’s School of Dentistry. He was recommended by an American compatriot. I figured the guy’s documented expertise would be a real advantage. Turned out, however, that he wanted to try out every material known to Man in my mouth. What he didn’t tell me however, was that I actually had an excellent set of teeth that I was, little by little, wantonly destroying due to stress. I wouldn’t find that out until years later. So he puts in a nickel crown on a tooth that my perpetually clenched jaws have cracked. Why, because it’s such a hard, durable material that it will be “eternal”. (Yeah, but also so hard that when stressed, it will shatter the tooth under it...which it did within six months). And so I lost my first tooth.

This was also the guy who took out my impacted wisdom teeth. One of them was a real bitch. So, the Material Boy gets out the niftiest little miniature stainless steel hammer and chisel set you’ve ever seen and starts wailing away on my jawbone. After about ten minutes of this, I feel like I’ve gone a couple of rounds with Muhammad Ali and my jaw muscles go slack. “Resist the blows, Mr. Newland,” he tells me encouragingly as he hammers away, “or I’ll break your jaw.”

After that, I happened on another prospect. He was recommended by the guy my sister-in-law was dating at the time—a fellow who was, it should be said, a notorious skinflint. But his pride and joy was a lovely sailboat that he had, which I think was probably what my wife’s sister found most attractive about him. His dentist belonged to the same sailing club and was, he’d have me know, the best in the city. And “best of all” he was cheap.

So the next time I have a tooth complaint, I go to this new dentist with a hearty recommendation from my sister-in-law’s beau. I find his office a little down-at-heel but, I think, “an honest professional, somebody who charges a fair price and so can’t afford better digs.” We talk about our mutual friend, about the sailing club, about what a great person my sister-in-law is, and finally, we get down to business. He’s giving my ivories the once-over, tapping on this, pulling on that with his hook. As he takes it out of my mouth, the hook slips from his hand and falls on the floor. He snatches it up again quickly—as if invoking “the five-second rule”—and is about to slip it back into my mouth.

Before he can, I catch him by the wrist and say, “Hang on a sec. Don’t you think you’d better sterilize that?” He laughs as if I were being a big sissy and says, “Don’t worry, the floor’s immaculate. But hey, if it bothers you, I’ll go get one out of the sterilizer.”

As soon as he heads for the little back room, I’m out of the chair, stripping the dentist’s bib from around my neck, and headed for the door. He pokes his head out and says, “Hey friend, where are you going?”

“Be right back,” I say. “I just remembered I left the beans on the fire.”

Third time was the charm. I met an outstanding dentist—also through my sister-in-law since he worked in her neighborhood—who was knowledgeable, resourceful and empathic. The whole time he was working on you he was reminding you to let him know if you had the slightest pain. There was, he said, no reason to have to withstand pain in the dentist’s chair and if I was in pain, it made his work all the harder. He discovered that I had “very high resistance” to anesthetics—the bartender at my favorite haunt had been telling me this for years—so he started using one that he imported from Germany “for people like me.”

I was kind of male-vainly proud of this fact, the high-resistance thing I mean, until he told me that such resistance was a sure sign of an inability to deal with stress, which meant that I operated at a high level of tension all the time. How was my blood pressure? Fine, thanks for asking. (I’d never had it taken). I had a high-stress job. I was a news editor in charge of an editorial department at a paper that was opposing the dictatorship that was running the country. You couldn’t get more high-stress than that. But hey, I told him, my friend Mr. Whisky and I were handling it just fine.

“Not according to your teeth,” he says. “This one has a fissure, these two are chipped, these are showing signs of gum retraction...”

“So you’re telling me I have bad teeth?”

“No, I’m telling you that you have an excellent set of teeth that you’re destroying as a result of bruxism.”

“Brux...what?”

“Bruxism, when you clench your jaws all day and grind your teeth at night. I’m going to make you a bit to help you keep from wrecking the rest of your teeth in your sleep.”

The Doc and I had a long and fruitful relationship. In fact, when I moved out of the city and went to settle a thousand miles away in Patagonia, I would wait to go to the dentist until I could fly back to Buenos Aires. Then came the day that I called his office and got no answer. There was no message machine. Nothing, no response, though I called a dozen times to try and make an appointment. On a trip back to Buenos Aires, I went by his house, where he also had his office. The block of wood on which his brass shingle had been mounted was still there, but the plaque itself was gone.

I called up my sister-in-law and asked if she knew anything about the dentist.

“Oh, him?” she says, “he moved!”

“Where? I need an appointment.”

“Italy.”

“Italy!”

“Yeah, he got dual citizenship because his dad was Italian and decided to take up a friend on an offer to open a dentist’s office together over there.”

“Well, that’s just great! Now, what am I supposed to do?”

“Uh, stop whining and find another dentist?”

So the search began again.

In the ski resort that was the nearest town to my new home, I knew practically no one. By coincidence, however, one of the few people I did know happened to be a dentist. I was reluctant, however, to go to him, since my first encounter with him hadn’t been as a dental professional, but as a local wheeler-dealer.

He showed up at an adventure tourism conference that I was attending and made a special point of meeting me. He had set up a private horseback trek for the next day in the mountains near the small, remote, Andean town where the event was being held and invited my wife and me along. We had a great time, if a very long journey—ten hours on horseback in the mountains is a long time when you haven’t been on a horse in twenty years and were never much of a rider to begin with—but I had a gut feeling that this wasn’t a disinterested invitation.

And I was right. Not long after I moved to Patagonia, he contacted me to talk to me about a business venture. He was planning on gaining control over a swath of land “on the other side of the lake” and wanted me to come in on the deal. I said, “Why me! I mean, I know a lot of people think us Yankees are born with a gold ingot under our arm, but believe me, I used the last of my savings to buy my place, and I’m just a regular working stiff.”

Not to worry, he told me. Anybody could make money with money. The trick was to do business with “other people’s money.” I should leave that to him. “All he wanted me to do” was be the general manager, you know, the visible face of the development venture. If I came off as honest to other people as I did to him, I’d be worth my weight in gold.

Frankly, I needed the work. I was trying to adapt to having moved from the big city to one of the remotest parts of the country and wasn’t at all sure how I was going to make a living in a place where my twenty years as a newsman would be about as useful to me as ice cubes in an igloo. But, nothing about this sounded kosher. So I did what I was good at—investigation. What I found out was hair-raising. This dentist, with his flashy clothes and flashy cars was better known for his scams than for his practice. The venture he was talking about was, I discovered, a move to take over land that belonged to local Indians and the often poor families of pioneer settlers, who had old deeds that tended to be “iffy” under modern regulations. And much of their land owed back taxes, through which a slick lawyer—which the dentist had as a partner—could find a way to pay the state and gain temporary possession of the real estate. I didn’t understand the details and didn’t want to, since the few other people I knew and talked to about him said I might want to steer clear of Doctor X.

Taking their advice, I started avoiding the guy. Finally, he one day drove out to my place and wanted to know if I was giving him the cold shoulder. Honesty’s the best policy, so I told him the truth. That I’d looked into the venture and wanted no part of it or him. He acted hurt, said he was sorry I felt that way. That he’d offered the deal to me first because of the great respect he had for me...yada yada yada.

But then, I suddenly had a dental emergency and had no idea where to go, so I called him up. I needed a root canal and a cap and he was the only dentist I knew. So I called him.

He was friendly and accommodating. Gave me an appointment right away. His place was impressive. I complimented him on his consulting room.

“Ha!” he said. “This is nothing. Let me attend you in my VIP salon.”

“Your what?”

“Follow me, friend.”

He led me into an adjacent consulting room that looked more like a stateroom on a private yacht—dark-stained teakwood paneling, indirect “mood” lighting, a small built-in bookcase with leather-bound volumes, tongue-and-groove eucalyptus flooring, an overstuffed soft-leather-upholstered armchair, a Tiffany-style belle fleur floor lamp, and, at the center of it all, his dental chair, covered with the same deep-green-stained soft-leather upholstery as the armchair but surrounded by equipment that looked like it had been designed by NASA. Off to the side, I noticed a sideboard with several bottles of single-malt scotch and fine Irish whisky.

“So, you entertain in here as well?” I asked, nodding toward the whisky.

“Oh that,” he laughed. “No, whenever one of my high-end clients is in the chair, I offer them a whiskacho. Doesn’t bother me if they drink while I work. Would you like one?”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t be shy, I know you like whisky.”

“Thanks, I’d just like to get on with it.”

He sat me down in the incredibly comfortable chair, turned on an examination light that seemed to have come from a lighthouse, and started going over my teeth with a fine-toothed comb. Talking around his mirror, I said, “Itha gnolar ung uh ’ower ‘igh aha gack.”

Fluent in dentist-speak, he said, “I know, I know. I’ll get to it. But since I’m in here anyway I’ll have a look at the others too.”

Then he got out a card with a perfect set of teeth, uppers and lowers, diagrammed on it and a fine-tipped marker and as he continued his examination, he went, “Hmm...aha...tsk-tsk...wow...uh-oh...” and so on. And as he did, he marked this, shaded that, circle this and exed out the other on his diagram. When he was done, he took his mirror out of my mouth, shut off the examination light and said, “Frankly, Dan, I don’t know how in the world you’ve gotten this fat with that mouth. How the hell do you eat?”

“Obviously, no problem, except for the molar on the right at the back that I came in here about,” I said, starting to get irritated.

“Okay, well, let’s see...” He got a calculator out of the pocket of his tailor-made uniform jacket and punched keys for a few seconds. “I figure you’ve got about ten thousand dollars worth of work to do there, but don’t worry I’ll extend a credit line to you which you can sign today and you can pay as you go with one easy monthly installment.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Wait a sec. I just came in for a dental emergency. All I want to take care of is the tooth I came in for.”

“Well, I don’t recommend that. I mean, teeth are like car parts. You have to fix them all, because if you fix one and not the other one, it starts affecting other parts and all of the sudden the whole thing breaks down.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks for your concern, but for today, let’s just take care of the one I came for.”

His mood darkening, he said, “Okay, if that’s the way you want it...Follow me.”

He led me, with the bib still around my neck, back to the plebe section and sat me in the normal chair before calling in another dentist—a pretty, young woman professional who seemed serious and efficient.

“This is Lola,” he said. “She’ll do a root canal on that tooth. Then we can talk about the rest.” Lola did a wonderful job, put in a temporary filling and sent me to the receptionist, who broke the price to me so quickly that my knees went weak. The dentist dropped by the reception desk and said, “When you come back to get fitted for the crown, we’ll set up that credit line.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

“Would you like to set up an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“I’ll check my schedule and call you,” I said. I had no intention of calling, or of ever coming back.

So I went around babying that temporary filling for a time while I tried to find a dentist who drove a Ford or a Renault instead of a Mercedes-Benz. At about the same time that this was going on, I started doing well enough in my new environment that I figured it was about time we got some real health insurance. Once we did, I went to the local office and asked for the name of a good dentist. The young woman who waited on me handed me a list of all of the dentists in the area who had health care contracts with them.

I said, “Uh, great, but what I’d really like is a recommendation.”

She glanced around to see if anybody was eavesdropping, then confidentially, she said, “We aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Okay,” I said, “let me ask you another way. Who is your dentist?”

Without hesitation, she said, “Dr. R.”

“And do you like him?”

“Like him? I love him! There’s not another dentist like him in the world! He almost makes you want to go to the dentist.”

“Okay. Give me his number.”

And that’s how I met Dr. R., or Marcelo, as I call him by now. I’ve been his patient for the past twenty years. And I’m pleased to say that he’s enough younger than I am that, with any luck, he’ll be my dentist forever! He is a firm believer in non-pain dentistry and he always remembers why patients are called “patients” and tries not to abuse that patience any more than necessary. I’ve never had to wait for him to attend me more than ten or fifteen minutes, and only when an unexpected emergency has cropped up. He respects his appointment schedule almost to the minute.

Marcelo is prone toward detailed descriptions of maladies and solutions affecting his patients. His explanations are consistent, timely and educational, crash courses in dental hygiene and mechanics. He has been an auditor for pre-paid medical insurance firms to help them decide who the best professionals are to have on their rosters—which is why he was discreetly appalled that I had been to Dr. X, letting me know he was glad my better judgment had led me to limit my contact with the guy to one visit.

My dentist is a minimalist. He will never recommend radical, expensive treatments when something simpler will do. And he always provides his patients with a series of options when they are available. His own rates are reasonable, he works with all major medical insurance firms, and he partners with dental mechanics who are just as honest and reasonable as he is.

Over the course of our twenty-year relationship, he has never once given me cause to doubt or distrust any treatment he has provided to me or to ever feel that he was “just in it for the money”. For instance, if you’ve always wanted a gold incisor or ornamental edging on your front teeth, you’ll have to find another dentist. He’ll refuse to tolerate your vain fantasies. Nor will he cap your teeth because you’ve always wanted a perfect smile. If you get a cap from Marcelo, it will be because you needed it, and it will look exactly like your original tooth.

Absolute, no-bullshit trust is what he inspires, which brings me to why his take on the COVID-19 pandemic is so telling. Last week, I knocked loose a cap. I sent him a text asking for an appointment. He texted back that, due to the pandemic, he was just now reopening his practice after a fifty-day hiatus. It was, he said, “really complicated” but if I was game, he’d see me on Tuesday morning at ten.

Now, I should point out that, ever since I moved to Patagonia, I’ve become more and more hermit-like, but at least I would go out once or twice a week with my wife to go to the bank and then to breakfast, or to do the Saturday shopping and have lunch out. But since the start of the lockdown in Argentina in mid-March, I hadn’t been past our front gate. So my naturally hermit-like tendencies had become borderline agoraphobic. Going to town to go to the dentist after sixty days in absolute isolation seemed, then, like a very big deal.

I left early, masked like a bandit from neck to eyes, in case of traffic jams of the kind I was used to near town at that time of the morning. I needn’t have worried. Strict federal quarantine measures are still in effect all over Argentina. Citizens can go out for very limited reasons (to buy groceries, to go to the doctor, to go to the pharmacy, to go to essential-service jobs) in accordance with the numbers of their national ID cards: odd numbers one day, evens the other, Sundays stay-at-home. Except for a Provincial Police quarantine checkpoint where things slowed to a crawl, the rest of the fifteen miles to town was smooth sailing in very sparse traffic.

I was able to park right in front of the building where my dentist has his office, something unthinkable on any normal weekday, when I would have had to leave my truck four blocks away at a parking garage. I looked at my watch. I was forty minutes early. Any other time, I would have walked a block up the street to a bar I knew and had a cup of coffee, but all bars and restaurants remain closed because of the quarantine.

So I sat in my truck and reflected for a while. All the way into town I’d been thinking about how carefully I had followed the safe and sane social distancing and prophylactic measures put in place by Argentina’s federal government, how I’d defended them against the comments of American acquaintances who considered them “exaggerated”, overly cautious, martial law-like, etc. How I had defended them as well against Argentines with conspiracy theories about their being part of a plot to impose authoritarian rule. In fact, I had gone them one better and lived in complete lockdown.

But I also reflected that it seemed natural for fear to wear off, for people to get used to existential dangers and to take bigger and bigger risks as soon as things started getting inconvenient. I couldn’t help recalling the AIDS epidemic when, despite the proven fact that condoms saved lives and protected against a modern-day plague, huge international campaigns had to be mounted to convince people to use them, to convince men to put them on and women to insist that they did and to convince people having same sex intercourse to implement these precautions as well. Now it was masks and despite the overwhelming evidence that they helped save lives, people were still rebelling against putting a piece of cloth over their mouth and nose, as if their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were being violated because the health authorities were striving to keep them out of harm’s way. It was like with seatbelts when they were first made obligatory: “By god, I won’t have the damn government telling me what to do. If I want to fly through the windshield at seventy miles an hour and split my skull open on a tree trunk, that’s my constitutional right!”  

Still, I wondered if I wasn’t incurring in an overabundance of caution. I was almost terrified to leave home, and even more scared to be going to the dentist. How did I know what precautions he was taking not to infect himself and me with this deadly virus? Maybe, however, I was just being a paranoid lunatic.

Again, however, I needn’t have worried. Marcelo was being paranoid (abundantly cautious) enough for the both of us. At the door of his building, I was stopped by a burly security guard in a black mask who asked me where I was going.

“To the dentist,” I said.

“Hands...” I held them out and he doused them liberally with a spray bottle full of alcohol. “Turn toward me, sir. Raise the visor of your cap.” He then pointed a little pistol-like thermometer at my forehead and waited for it to beep. “Okay, you’re good to go. It’s on the mezzanine.”

At Marcelo’s office, I knocked on the door. I heard him say, “Just a minute please,” and then heard him scurrying and rustling around inside. Finally, he opened the door. He was already masked and gloved and wearing his operating uniform. The waiting room looked different, stripped of everything extraneous—curtains, floor coverings, the TV that usually hung from the wall tuned to a news channel. There was a vinyl sheet hanging between the waiting room and the door to his consulting room.

“Okay, stop right there,” he said as I stepped inside. “Take off your coat and cap and hang them there. All right. Now come over and sit on that chair, take off your shoes and place them on the paper mat next to the chair. Fine. Now I’m going to ask you a series of questions. Do you now have or have you had a fever in the past fifteen days? To the best of your knowledge, have you been near or cohabitated with anyone who has had fever or symptoms of COVID-19 in that time? Do you know anyone who has had the virus, and if so, how have you interacted with them?” And so on for over a dozen queries.

When we were done there, he said, “Okay, now come with me.”

We stepped to the other side of the vinyl curtain where he motioned me to sit on a second chair. From a small table he picked up a disposable paper poncho and slipped it over my head, covering me to my waist. Then he picked up a hoody made of similar material and placed it on my head, with the bottom skirt of it covering my shoulders and chest. Then he knelt in front of me and slipped a pair of paper boots on me that covered my legs halfway up to my knees.

He led me into his consulting room. Which had also been stripped of every ornament and doodad. It was his chair, his dental equipment and his bare desk. Nothing else. He covered the chair with a large paper sheet, then invited me to sit down and lie back. Once he had accommodated me, he said, “Now it’s my turn.” And for the next five minutes or so I could hear him busying himself with preparations in the next room, including a thorough scrubbing of his hands before he snapped on a fresh pair of gloves.

Marcelo came back looking as if he were hazmat-uniformed for a day’s work in the core of a nuclear reactor. Fifteen minutes and my cap was back on my tooth good as new. Now we did the process in reverse—back to the chair outside the consulting room door where he stripped me of all the paraphernalia he had put on me. Then to the waiting room where I put my shoes, jacket, mask and cap back on, and finally, standing near the door, I signed the card that he would turn in to the insurance company. I was about to turn and leave when he said, “Wait, give me your hands.” He liberally squirted alcohol gel on them and told me to wipe them down. Then he used his gloved hand to open the door for me and we bade each other good-bye. I realized that as soon as his next patient arrived, Marcelo would have to go through this entire tedious process again...and again...and again...

Once back in my truck and on my way back home, I realized that nothing that I was doing to keep my wife and me safe from the virus was an exaggeration. I knew Marcelo to be a minimalist and a non-alarmist, and if he was taking all of these precautions, they were necessary. And for a moment, I felt sorry for all of those who didn’t believe that they were.

My dentist, I knew, had my back.      

VALUABLE LESSONS...THAT WE WILL LIKELY IGNORE

I live, as I’ve mentioned on occasion, in the forest in the Andean Patagonian region of Argentina, just “over the hill” from Chile. The ski town that is up the road about twelve miles from me is a sort of mirage. What I mean by that is that it sits on a transitional line in nature between the vast and semi-arid steppe land and the richly forested mountains of the Andean Cordillera. This is one of the still privileged areas of the world where humankind’s direct impact has been minimal and where millions upon millions of acres of natural woodland—forests so dense and wet that they are sometimes referred to by scientists as “cold rainforests”—stretch, basically, from here fourteen hundred miles south to the southernmost city in the Americas, Ushuaia, in sub-Antarctic Tierra del Fuego. So, a mirage, as I say because when you’re in this ski town, Bariloche, you have the illusion of forming part of civilization. But wander a relatively short distance from Bariloche in any direction, and you’ll be smack in the middle of the wilderness, disconnected from the world and on your own in terms of survival.

When you come to Bariloche, you fly over miles and miles of wilderness, touch down in the midst of the mirage, and live a somewhat unrealistic existence until you fly back out again. You have the illusion of being “somewhere” when, in reality, you’re in the middle of nowhere. And any interruption in the transport and supply line promises an existential crisis locally.

This fact tends to be brought home to locals and tourists alike when there is some emergency. It happened, for instance, during the last volcanic eruption in the area a few years back, when dense abrasive ash in the atmosphere made commercial flight impossible for months on end and people had to opt for land transport, once roads had been reasonably cleared of pyroclastic debris, in order to journey the thousand-plus miles back to Buenos Aires, the city from which literally all things spring in Argentina. So much so that there is a saying here in Patagonia: “God is everywhere, but his office is in Buenos Aires.”

The corona virus is illustrating this fact once again, but in a much more compelling way, since all non-essential land travel has been banned by the federal government and all domestic flights everywhere in the country have been grounded until September. Only a handful of international flights are leaving the country—scant charters coordinated with embassies to repatriate foreign tourists and business people—and no flights are coming in from abroad until further notice. A good example of what this means on an individual basis is the case of my wife’s cousin, who traveled from Buenos Aires to Bariloche to visit her daughter who lives here, and was surprised by the national quarantine. What that signifies for her is that she has no idea when or how she will be able to return home, since her flight has been canceled and there are no other means available for her to leave. She is, then, stuck for the duration.

When I first moved to the place where I live a quarter of a century ago, only a handful of misfits like myself lived out here in the sticks. Now I have probably five times as many neighbors as back then. It remains a very natural neighborhood with no sidewalks, no pavement, no streetlights, etc. A small human enclave surrounded by forest and soaring crags, and on the edge of a system of glacial lakes and their attendant lagoons. But when I get out and walk around it sometimes looks to me, comparatively speaking, like Grand Central Station...or at least way more like suburbia than it used to. Neatly mown yards and symmetrical gardens have been carved out of the wilderness and tall elderly hardwoods have been sacrificed to the cause of sun-worship, to home-owners’ fears of falling branches and to their resistance to leaf-raking and autochthonous plants.

And then too, there is evidence that a growing number of leach beds on steeply higher grounds above the lagoons are over-fertilizing the wetlands. Poor construction of individual sewage disposal can lead to raw effluvient water pollution, in a place where, when I first arrived, the water in most glacial basins was potable without treatment—and remains so wherever people are still absent.  

In town the problem is far worse. In recent years Bariloche has grown beyond all control. Traffic jams have become a major problem at peak hours of the day, and the sewage disposal system built shortly after I arrived, when the town first started growing exponentially, was already obsolete when it opened. It wasn’t long before raw sewage was leaking into the vast and stunning Lake Nahuel Huapi on which the city fronts. In summer, at certain points on the twelve-mile lakeshore and mountain drive between the turn-off to my place and town, the smell of raw sewage can be stifling, especially around choke points for tourism and local residents, like the densely populated suburban area known as Melipal, or like the Campanario funicular that, on any given day, carries literally thousands of visitors up the mountainside to the eatery and observation site at the top.

In the suburbs closest to town, construction has crept up the mountainside year after year. And although limits are always set on how much higher the suburban sprawl can go, the lines keep getting moved higher and higher as demand for prime real estate soars. What no one wants to talk about are the consequences of ever-advancing deforestation and excavation in these areas. And as long as the price of land continues to increase, it will surely be an unexplored topic of conversation among everyone but the area’s environmentalists until the inevitable happens and homes are devoured by mudslides some spring or fall. It wouldn’t be the first time. A decade or so ago, a couple of houses on the Ñireco River near downtown tumbled down the hillside during particularly heavy autumn rains.     

Still, compared to the urban areas of the world most devastated by the intrusion of humans, this entire region remains a natural paradise, with the largest populations being limited, fortunately, to a tiny proportion of the vast Patagonian wilderness.

I decided when I first moved in to make as little impact as possible on the breath-taking nature that surrounded me. I cut down none of the centuries-old southern beeches than towered over my little cabin. Nor did I weed out any of the beech, cypress, radal, wild apple or laurel saplings that bristled all over my one and a half-acre grounds. I was advised that I should have someone come in with a team of oxen to drag out the dog rose and Spanish broom by their roots, because if I didn’t, they would take over. But when I saw them bloom gloriously in the spring, I didn’t have the heart. They also warned me that I should cut down two old Douglas firs that were growing below the house. They were “exotic invaders” I was warned, seeded by birds from the grounds of an old hotel just over the ridge, and once they took root, they would drop their cones and seed the ground with dozens of others of their kind like a veritable plague. But they looked so beautiful with their pine-green bark and spreading evergreen branches. They were like Christmas come early when they were festooned with hundreds of new cones.

When I first arrived, I remember thinking it strange that the trees on this piece of land were divided between centenarian hardwood that soar a hundred feet or more toward the sky and young trees no more than ten or fifteen feet tall with trunks no bigger than my wrist. Large stretches of the land were coarse and barren, breeding aggressive burrs and Spanish nettles en lieu of grass.

I asked a savvy native of the area, who was in his seventies at the time, about this. Why, I wanted to know, were there young trees and old trees but none in between. And why, when there was such dense forest all around, was this particular place split between wooded areas and semi-arid patches where nothing but brambles seemed capable of growing.

Fifty years before, he told me, when all of this was a single, heavily wooded, hundred-acre rural establishment, there had been a forest fire that had advanced to this point before the autumn rains put it out. Some of the big old trees had been spared while others had perished, and underbrush had been burned to the bare ground. What I was witnessing, he said, was the forest taking back the land, slowly but surely re-populating it with native species and exotic ones like the tiny firs coming up all over the place down below the house where the two old ones stood. The firs dated back to when the hotel just over the ridge was built on the lake back in the nineteen-forties and the landscapers used pines to line the half-mile-long entrance lane.

“If you’re lucky, and don’t do like your foolish neighbor up the way and cut everything down,” he told me, "you might live to see this all be fine woodland again.”

In the end, the only thing I did to combat the burrs and help the forest floor along in its transition was to seed hearty rye-grass and sweet clover in the driest places and add water for a couple of years in a row and then let the grass grow knee-high and tassel so that it would seed itself from then on. Over the years, I’ve stepped back and watched how, left to its own devices, my little piece of nature has gone through an evolutionary transition and flourished. The once tiny hardwoods have grown into a tall, sturdy, young forest. And the once dry patches are now filled with tall green grasses, dog rose bushes, lush stands of Spanish broom and rising saplings. The once knee-high wild apples are now tall trees that bear hundreds of apples that the burrowing parrots flock down out of the mountains to consume each fall. Where the two big Douglas firs used to stand alone, there is now a deep, dark grove of tall straight evergreens.

The forest has returned because I have let it take its course and in return it permits me to live in peace in a world of lush verdure and brilliant splashes of color the year round. Here and there I hack out the smallest paths necessary to allow me to contemplate this progress. But in the end, my land belongs to nature and nature has been kind enough to let me squat here for a few years. The forest was here long before I arrived and will be here long after I’m gone. I’m just passing through.  

   

I’ve been giving greater than usual thought to this as a result of the corona virus emergency shutdown that has taken place around the world. In these apocalyptic times in which environmental experts keep broadcasting unheeded warnings about the suicidal course on which humankind is embarked if we remain alienated to our surroundings and to the carrying capacity of the very planet that we call home, this brief hiatus has—or should have, at least—brought home the fact that the smallest of efforts to change our ways could mean the difference between the survival of future generations of human beings, or the inevitable sixth great extinction in which humanity will be the species that goes the way of the dinosaurs.

Rather than seeing a slowing of the process of our demise, these environmental experts are shocked to find that their “worst-case” scenarios of less than a decade ago were way too optimistic. Environmental deterioration due to human-induced global climate change is occurring at break-neck speed. According to their revised models, it may not just be “future generations” that must suffer the full effects of certain areas of the world being rendered uninhabitable, but some of the current youngsters as well, who may have to struggle to survive as aging adults inhabiting a spoiled environment.

What we can see clearly as a result of the current worldwide shutdown due to a modern-day plague is the dramatic way that the earth reacts when we stop doing what we’re doing and give it a chance to make a comeback. That’s because nature is not personified. Nature does what it does and involuntarily copes or doesn’t with human advancement or retardation. Nature doesn’t care what Man does. Nature does what comes natural, continues on its way, deploying its processes that are affected or not by a vast array of elements, just one of which is the advance of humans on their environment.

The earth doesn’t care what the environment is. It doesn’t mind one way or another if it is habitable or inhabitable to human beings. It will keep on being the earth and evolving according to its circumstances at any given moment and will be totally indifferent to whether people are still part of the scene or not. No matter what happens to humans, the earth will keep being the earth and whatever the earth is at any given stage will be self-evident and self-defining, be it the deep blue and bright green planet that we’ve been lucky enough to know as our home or a hostile, radiation-burned, un-arable desert bordering on a dead sea. It will still be the earth, and we will no longer even be a thought or a memory.

The point is that, no matter what the deniers might tell you,  it’s up to us whether we continue to exist or not. And up to now, it seems, we’re willing to self-destruct—or, at least willing to ensure that any chance for a human race in the future will be nil.

What the corona emergency has dramatically demonstrated is that if fear of a present phenomenon is capable of distracting humans from their mad obsession with self-destructive behavior long enough, their battered environment rewards them with clear signs of immediate recovery.

The process of curing a badly damaged environment could take generations of consistency. But the short-term effects of even a marginal and involuntary mending of our ways are stunning. For instance, since the start of the lockdown, Los Angeles has registered several days in which its air was some of the clearest and cleanest in the country. LA citizens awoke on those days to the uncommon sight of the tall mountain peaks that surround the city, and which are sometimes not visible for months or years on end. This is the same California city that, if you look up smog in the dictionary, you might well find a picture of it next to the definition.

The waters of the usually pestilent if iconic canals of Venice have settled and changed from murky brown to transparent green and one photographer was so moved by the change that he filmed a jellyfish swimming contentedly through the city’s aquatic thoroughfares. There are reports from cities and towns in Europe and the US of herds of deer appearing within the city limits, or bears napping on tree branches above urban streets, of coyotes slinking across rooftops like they might across a mountain ridge or hillock, of wild mountain sheep flocking along city streets and into parks to graze and of wolves taking a sunbath by the sides of highways.

Seismographs are registering much lower shockwaves with the movement of trains, subways, pylon drivers, oil drills and fracking equipment stilled. According to one UK scientist, there is simply “less rumbling” on the earth’s surface.  LA isn’t the only place where pollution indices have plummeted.  Earth-scanning equipment on satellites is registering a noteworthy drop in the concentration of greenhouse gases such as nitrogen dioxide that are normally spewed into the atmosphere by the internal combustion vehicles and power plants that are an outgrowth of the human race’s addiction to hydrocarbons. Nowhere have these pollution indices improved as much as in Europe and China, where very strict social-distancing norms have been enforced. And for a fleeting moment, the planet has taken a baby step toward curing its ever-increasing fever.

In science fiction, the scene is often a hundred years past Judgment Day and the world remains a grim and arid place where little survives. But what this period of lock-down should perhaps teach us is that nature is wiser and more positive than we think and it is willing to reward us for repentance. We are being given an optimistic glimpse of how much better, safer and more fruitful our natural environment could be if we would just make a minimal but concerted effort to live more simply, to streamline our bloated economies, to more fairly and more economically utilize our resources, to ask ourselves what the difference is between what we need and what we covet, between a pleasant existence and a life full of striving in order to accumulate what, in the end, is a plethora of non-essential and unnecessary “stuff”.

The key to preventing the human race from growing so obsessed with consumption for the sake of consumption until we ourselves are consumed in the sixth great extinction would be wise and compelling leadership and limitations on the obscene accumulation of wealth that is the main driving factor behind our impending demise as we become too obese and complacent for the environment to be able to carry us anymore. Unfortunately, all too often, humans appear to be prone to seeking the leadership of individuals who are ambitious more than wise, greedy rather than frugal, self-serving instead of empathic, purveyors of violence rather than peace and seekers of power rather than servers of their fellow humans.   

The fact is that while we’ve been deathly sick, nature has been getting well. And that should be a valuable lesson to us about how to save our one and only human environment from destruction—namely, by loving and respecting our home and concentrating on refraining from doing it irreparable harm. Because, in the end, the ultimate punishment will be to ourselves.  

For a brief moment, we have given our mostly senseless, wasteful advances a rest and let the planet breathe! What should impress us most about the corona crisis is not just how we manage to come out on the other side of the plague, but what we learn in the meantime about how to save ourselves from the biggest and final plague of all, the sixth great extinction from which no one will survive, except the earth that will live on to evolve another day—with us or without us.