Observations on an unrelenting virus.
Years ago, my family vacationed in Allegany State Park. Hiking the trails, I remember boulders, as big as cars, appearing in the forest as if by magic. Nature’s litter, scattered throughout the woods among the trees. Giant rocks lying dishevelled and messy, standing like gray dinosaurs here and there without reason or explanation.
“Look at these,” I said. “Where did they come from?”
“Glaciers,” I was told, “they were left behind when the glaciers melted.”
Over the years I have come to understand that beauty can be born of terrible change, arriving unexpectedly, surprisingly. Like boulders left in a receding ice age, beauty can be an uninvited gift, an erratic leftover, stoney baggage picked up along the millennial journey. But these obstacles, these erratics, rocky reminders of a different time, demand attention, explanation. They are abandoned remnants. Story starters,
As 2020 draws to a close and COVID begins to recede, like a glacier, this virus will leave our human landscape forever changed. The journey through these 12 months presented an erratic glimpse, rocky obstacles. Now, 2020, the erratic year that changed the world is receding, and leaving damaging reminders, like boulders willy nilly here and there.
“Look,” I ask, “where did all this come from?”
This time there is no answer.
December is upon us. As family holidays approach and a new year beckons, I embrace it with apprehension and new found appreciation. Yet, somehow I still feel frozen in the glacier, waiting for its recession and perhaps fearing the erratics left behind. As a storyteller I know 2020 will offer rich opportunities to mine the unexpected, the huge obstacles which continue to appear, left behind by an ice age called COVID. A newly reshaped landscape will present beauty grown from the devastating surroundings forever changed in the slow trog that was this year.
As we migrate to an online-cyber reality, finding new trails through a forest of tellers and tales, sharing stories of differing genres, cultures, and styles, perhaps the detritus left by the receding COVID virus may expose the erratics of beautifully-storied stones, giant and scattered waiting to be discovered and appreciated, examined and explained, as we look back on our trek thru a dark time. Stories, like beautiful boulders, silently wait, quietly offering an explanation.
Mike Perry