The Great Pause

Pete Takeda

Mid-February 2020. We’d been flown out of the Khumbu after having of all things, filmed the first outdoor figure skating exhibit in the high Himalayas. By all accounts it was a success—Olympic level skaters, including a gold medallist, carving the ice on a frozen lake at 4750 m. We even had a trio from Russia Federation hockey squad play a friendly pond match against a scratch team composed of Ladakhis and Americans. All this happened at Gokyo Cho before a crowd of dignitaries, media, and bureaucrats. The event was paid for by the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism to celebrate—in retrospective irony—the Visit Nepal 2020 tourism campaign. To the outsider it must have appeared magical. As an insider, it was dream like to the point of the surreal, an improbable junket in the world’s greatest mountain range, but looking back, it was nothing compared to what was to come.

Back in Kathmandu everyone wore a facemask. There was nothing unusual about that. Masks were and are quite common in most South Asian cities. Unlike in the United States, mask mandates were spurious here, akin to insisting everyone wipe their asses. In Thamel the smog was so thick that visibility was a half kilometre and the grey air built fingers of furry dust on any exposed surface like an urban rime. A drag off my friend’s hand-rolled cigarette felt refreshing perhaps because it was by choice.

In the antiseptic confines of our hotel, CNN Asia reported of the mysterious novel coronavirus. By the time we returned to the States, the CDC had announced that COVID-19 was heading toward pandemic status.

I returned home, where Covid restrictions rolled out like plot points in a strange reality TV series. Deprived of our normal points of view, we all became observers of our own world. But this objectivity was not Buddhist in any way, we had no choice but to look at things from a distance, self-contained, away from each other.

Nature quickly retakes its own place when humanity stalls. In that silent spring, strange things began happening. Animals of all stripes were driven into town by crowds of recent hiking converts, all of whom were marching in masked silence at six-foot intervals on Boulder’s extensive trail network. On normally bustling roads, deer would be seen walking down the centre-line on empty asphalt. Mountain lions were draped in the branches of neighbourhood trees, big cats surveying a savanna that was kept green by the municipal
sprinkler system.

In a very real sense, Covid was good for me. The tech workers and over-achievers in my town were compelled to face the circumstances I’d chosen years ago—to work in isolation, without neither comforts nor distractions of an open world. What struck me was how quiet it was. The exception came every evening at 8:00 p.m. when a collective human howl erupted from porches and balconies across town—a communal cry of support from those isolated to those essential people who had to work. The latter included health care professionals, electricians, and oddly enough, liquor store and cannabis clerks. Thousands of us each wailed for them every night. People looked inward. Some didn’t like what they saw. Some made changes.

I saw strange and wonderful things on the internet—the Himalaya visible from Kathmandu, dolphins in the Ganges, and a blue sky over Connaught Circus. It was a glimpse of the world from ages past, one that would not return permanently until we are gone.

Summer came. I was on the Banff Book Competition jury and so, needless to say, read many books. These books had been shortlisted for the competition for a reason, they were all well-written and considered. However, I found The Bear by Andrew Krivak to be prescient of the Covid times we were living. This book echoed the future, its main characters were a father and daughter who were the last living humans on earth. While survival provided the drama, the challenges were benign—no cannibals or murderous gangs—just hunger, cold, and the elements.

Krivak wrote, “The last two were a girl and her father who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone.”

In the quiet dark of that summer, The Bear fit the times. I read feverishly as the sun shone bright on empty parking lots and deserted open-plan offices. The perennial brown cloud of pollution no longer lurked over nearby Denver. It was always eerily silent until the 8pm human howl.

Change had arrived. In The Bear, “Her father told her once that all animals were creatures of habit and so, too, were they. The difference was she could choose to change her habits. Animals changed when they were afraid. Change before fear has had a chance to overcome you, he said, or after you have overcome it and like a storm it has moved on.”

I missed the places I usually frequented—Canada, Peru, especially the Himalaya. The gyms were closed and as climber, we felt the need to restrain our risk taking. We’d sneak out to climb in obscure outdoor places. Old areas that had fallen out of favour. Top-roping with masks on to minimize risk of accident, we did not want to be a burden on the health care system. Sometimes we would run into another group. We’d share where we were going to make sure we weren’t crowding the same crag. It all felt a bit sneaky, like playing hooky or shoplifting back when we were young.

A climbing friend WhatsApp-ed from Nepal. It was late April and at that moment he was stranded. For most travellers that was a bad thing, but he was stuck in the Annapurna Base Camp. The annual flood of trekkers was absent. A silent spring in the high Himalayas sounded like paradise. He said it was eerily quiet. So quiet he noticed there was not even the faint background sound of airliners that we all have become accustomed to.

Being forced to only observe, I came to the conclusion that for some of us, the mountains are in us. They’re always there and they’ve always been there. We think we go out, explore, discover, climb, report, and reflect. That is human nature: trying to tame and control. But what is the point in trying to do this with deep time?

Within the story of The Bear, the father and his daughter, aged 12, journey from the mountain that stands alone to acquire salt from the ocean. On the way they encounter the remains of a city, long buried by vegetation and levelled smooth by the passage of time. There, “They slept fitfully on the grass under the newly waning moon, two inhabitants of a world recognizable now to no one save those two who had come first, for all the others who had once claimed dominion and name and believed they would be remembered as a result lay inert and buried in the ground.”

Reading these words amidst the dystopia of a global pandemic, nature steadily beginning to re-establish itself all around me, it felt like the reality of The Bear was as likely a future as any other.

Late in the year, a few countries opened up. As a nation reliant on tourism, Mexico opened its borders. I went to climb in a place called El Potrero Chico and stayed in a resort-like camp amongst remote working techies, anti-vax refugees, and cliche Sprinter van types. In North America, climbing has begun to reek of privilege. Climbers go to great lengths to do meaningless things. I eventually made my way to a beautiful obscure area in the mountains of Northern Mexico that I would under normal circumstances never have visited. There, I made new friends, found new climbing partners, and re-energized my climbing. Looking back, Covid was a blessing.

The past has caught up. Looking out the window few months ago, dogs, cars, and lawnmowers added to the usual background din of my neighbourhood. Boulder was its usual brand of uptight cool. Once again it took fifteen minutes to drive six blocks. Indignant soccer moms in line at Starbucks were late for yoga. Ten miles distant, the brown cloud had blossomed once again over Denver.

In the bigger picture, the most poignant thing in those months of lockdown was to watch the world renew itself without us, all the time knowing that we humans would probably return once again, to ruin it all, having learned nothing.

Maybe it’s true that for myself and humanity, time is a flat circle, that for us, all is a repetition of that we have done before. But from that short silent half lap around the sun we now have personal proof that, for nature, parts of being human we deem some of the most important are irrelevant.

Today, I’m lying on bed in a small village near the base of a 6000 m. peak in the Andes. I’m experiencing the usual mountain stuff—for now it’s runny bowels, sulphurous belches, and a fever that provides a hallucinatory clarity. I am back in the mountains perhaps having learned little if anything from the Great Pause that Covid provided. A small difference is that I don’t feel I have to be here, but it’s nice nonetheless.

Summary

Pete Takeda explores the ways nature began to retake urban areas during Lockdown. He discusses how fast things returned to the status quo once restrictions were lifted, leading him to question what, if anything, humanity learned of our place in the world around us.

 

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