FOOD CHAIN

What does it say when you wake up most days, 3 to 10 minutes before your alarm is set to go off? I have been good at that for some time. When I had obligations, keys and a schedule to follow I didn’t want to wake up before I needed to be up. A good night’s sleep is a reward now but the waking up is the best part. Waking up in the wee hours is not so good but with daylight leaking through the blinds it is like an invitation. It sounds corny but it is what it is; I get another day. 

Outside with shine in the treetops but not on the ground, it looks like any day in late March, any year. For the birds at my feeder and the neighborhood cats, one day is pretty much like another. Of course their life spans cycle quickly. I can’t tell when one nuthatch dies and another takes its place but the scene is predictably repetitious. I make the distinction between the world of weather and things and, the world of human experience. In that other world it looks normal. But humans are waking up to a new set of circumstances. We’ve been dealing with global warming for decades. It has been a hot political issue with people lining up on one side or the other depending on what they think they have to gain from the outcome. But pandemic isn’t debatable even though our President and other demagogues around the world try to minimize its threat. 

Pandemics are normal events in the bigger picture of life on earth. Events that target turtle or bird populations rage out of control right under our noses and we don’t even know it is going on. Life on earth is not the private domaine of human beings. From microbes to Blue Whales, every habitable location in the biosphere is occupied by organisms that replicate their own DNA and pass that genetic code on to a new generation. As humans, we exercise more direct control on the natural world than any other species but that does not give us control. It is my personal view, subject to scrutiny and debate of course but humankind would fare better if we sought balance rather than dominance. We are instruments in a natural orchestra, not the composer, not the conductor, not even a section leader. Everything we do is in reaction to something else and, due largely to human hubris, we haven’t got that message yet. 

In my world today there is a virus, a microscopic parasite if you will that needs a host. We are it. It consumes people no less than Blue Whales consume krill, tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans. In this case it takes a lot more virus’ to consume people than whales versus krill. But the arrangement is comparable. People at large don’t care about the fate of krill. But every organism that lives and dies is part of a food chain and there are consumers for even us. When it is an invisible predator wanting nothing but to grow and reproduce at our expense, we care a lot. If our immune system is strong and it can fight off the virus, we survive. But with any predatory species, they prey heavily on the weak and the old. That’s me; not the stallion I once was. 

This pandemic is sweeping through the civilized world, leaving enough humans to carry on but also a a deadly path of victims who perished in the process. I want to not be one of those victims. For me, the best strategy is to avoid the pathogen altogether. So I am sheltering in a safe place, avoiding people and things that could possibly be contagious. The virus is new; no cure, no vaccine. The best health care experts believe that between one and two million Americans will die of Covid-19 and it will be a month before the crisis peaks. To be honest, it is frightening and it should be. 

But curling up in the fetal position and fretting over what might happen is bad medicine. I’m so happy to have a strong family and friends, I have to believe that I can dodge that bullet. The last time something like this happened was the Spanish Influenza pandemic in 1919. It swept the world with devastating casualties for nearly 3 years. We are not the first generation to live in deadly times. The whales at sea and the birds at my feeder, they don’t have a clue.