Memos from Quarantine #44: "The More I know, the Less I Understand"

It’s the first weekend in May, I now have both my Pfizer vaccines, and as Southwest Airlines would say, I am “free to move about the country.”

 But do I want to? That’s the question with which many of us are starting to wrestle.

 I spent 21 years clawing to get out of my home state of Maine. Now that I’ve been back here six months under pandemic quarantine … I kinda want to stay.

 Yeah, I don’t entirely get it either. Not so long ago, I was the guy who had a grill in every port. I had favorite restaurants – even favorite meals – in San Francisco, London and Mumbai, and I visited them at a decent pace. I knew exactly where to shop for vintage books on the streets of Paris and how to order cheese bread in Brazil. I was that guy on the airplane who’d flip through the back of airline magazines and try to find diagrams of airports I hadn’t visited.

 Now, I enjoy getting breakfast at the restaurant in town, where the staff will comment on whatever book I’m reading today, and I’ll sip coffee and watch the fog lift off the lake. I get provisions once a week (groceries are for city dwellers) at the general store, where I have equal access to produce, firewood, taxidermy services, and I can even rent a roto-tiller to jumpstart my garden (if I knew how to roto-till. Or have a garden).

 My nine-year-old daughter has been visiting me for school vacation this week, so we’ve been all about the adventure. And when base camp is the old farmhouse at the edge of the hundred-acre wood – where we have lions across the road, peacocks in the yard and Revolutionary and Civil War veterans buried behind us – one has to be creative in finding new adventures.

 Last night, we ventured out at sunset to explore the legendary Devil’s Footprint in nearby Manchester. This is a boulder set into a cemetery wall alongside the North Manchester Meeting House, which was built in 1793. According to legend, during the construction of the road alongside the Meeting House, this same boulder could not be moved. A frustrated worker is said to have vowed “I would sell my soul to the Devil for this rock to be moved!” The next morning, the rock had relocated – and now displayed odd markings, one of which looked like a ‘hoof shape.’ The worker, by the way, was never seen again.

 Of course, one needn’t leave the property to find legends. I was wandering the acreage yesterday, exploring the old stagecoach path and berry bushes, and I was reminded of a 90-year-old story I’d read in both of novelist Erskine Caldwell's autobiographies.

 It was the summer of 1931, just after Caldwell sold the rights to his book Tobacco Road. He lived here with his wife, the former Helen Lannigan, and they had a steady stream of guests enjoying this lavish summer resort. One of them was Rijmor, a twenty-something young Danish woman whom Caldwell described as “slender of figure and friendly in manner.” Of her stay here at the farm, Caldwell wrote “it was ideal in time and place for the enthusiastic nudist that she was.”

You know a story is going to be good when it includes the words "enthusiastic nudist," right?

So, imagine how Depression-era Maine greeted the sight of nude Rijmor leaning over to pick blackberries in the backyard brambles. She was spotted first by a neighboring teen, then by the mail carrier. By midafternoon, cars of curious onlookers were lining up along the road outside the house. By evening, the wife of a town selectman was on the phone to the Caldwells.

“She had told her husband to see to it that an ordinance would be enacted at the next town meeting to make it punishable by fine and imprisonment for any person, male or female, to appear outside of a dwelling without being properly and completely clothed,” Caldwell wrote. “In conclusion, she advised Helen and me never again to invite a nudist to visit us within the boundaries of the town of Mount Vernon.”

 So, it’s with these stories in mind that I look forward to a summer not of airplanes, hotels and conference halls, but rather sunsets, barbecues and canoeing on the pond. I made arrangements yesterday for landscaping, house painting and to have three enormous pines felled and split. They’ll feed my fire pit this summer and my woodstove this fall.

 My days, meanwhile, are still spent working with my global team in the UK, India and Australia. And I regularly participate in events in Europe, Singapore and New Zealand. My internet connection here is far more reliable than what I had near greater Boston. It’s ironic to be better connected to the world now that I’m more isolated from it.

 Life has taken some perplexing turns these past months. I find myself frequently drawn to the Don Henley song The Heart of the Matter:

 "The more I know, the less I understand,

All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again.”

 Meanwhile, let me close with some insight from my pandemic spirit guide, Regina Phelps, who consistently offers informed, reasoned advice about the virus, variants and the value of taking a fresh look at where and how we work post-pandemic.

 Like me, perhaps you are fully vaccinated and wondering “What next?” You, too, are free to move about the country … or not. I’m curious how you’re leaning.