the tris mccall report

The head of the Mill Creek Marsh Trail is in a Kohl’s parking lot. I’d call that peak Jersey, if everything else about Jersey wasn’t also peak Jersey; we sustain long peaks here. It’s also telling that no matter how far you press into the swamp, you’ll never lose sight of the Turnpike or the Secaucus utilities complex. This is the back half of Hudson County: the part with the brackish water and the flat big-box stores, the plumbing, the power-generation, and the transport. I’ve always found it a rewarding place to explore.

Although I knew it was there for many years, I’d never been to the Mill Creek complex of footpaths. That’s mostly because the Marsh Trail is difficult to reach by bicycle. To get to the Kohl’s and the Marsh Trail, you’ve got to contrive a way of crossing Route 3 and Route 495, which is a dicy thing to do even if you’re in a car. Technically, Secaucus shares a border with Jersey City, but it’s a doozy, a boundary reinforced by the swamps, the gooey Penhorn Creek, the great industrial car-parks and repositories of truckloads of stuff, the Fedex and Goya complexes, and the infamous Highway 1-9, the most unforgiving stretch of road in the galaxy. If I were a marsh bird, I imagine it would be a snap to get from the reedy banks of the Hudson to the mud flats on the Hackensack. Traveling to Secaucus reminds me that I don’t have wings.

It also reinforces my feelings of vulnerability. Over the past few months, busy as it’s been with talk of quarantines and border-crossings, and aspersions cast in our direction by loudmouth governors who don’t want Jersey people infecting their states, it’s occurred to me, many times, that it would be a simple thing to isolate Jersey City. All the authorities would have to do is close a couple of bridges and barricade a couple of roads. We’d never get out.

Secaucus seemed like a smart answer to the questions posed by the day yesterday: sun out and sixty degrees, some restrictions relaxed, Jersey City parks likely jammed, Hilary’s little green car waiting on the street, undriven and unloved for two long weeks. We didn’t want to travel too far; Mill Creek, at fifteen minutes away, felt reasonable. George had sent a good article by a Massachusetts doctor that broadly reinforced many of the points made by Jonathan Kay and Muge Cevik, and further suggested that our chances of catching the coronavirus from a passerby on a trail was low. A brush up against a stranger on a path through the reeds might not necessarily be the end of us.

As it turned out, there was no reason to worry. Besides the birds and the bugs, most of the trails through the marshes were blissfully empty. We passed a few other people on the red gravel pathways, many of whom were walking dogs or watching birds or just stretching their legs after long weeks indoors, but nearly everybody was masked, and absolutely everybody took the distancing suggestions seriously. One of the things that has infuriated me about the discourse I’ve heard from distant quarters is the implication that Hudson County is under a fascist lockdown — that we’ve had masks put on our unwilling faces by government fiat, and robots are prying us apart. This couldn’t be more wrong. We are voluntarily taking steps to avoid hurting our neighbors. For us, it’s never been a question of individual liberties. Nobody has had to twist our arms. We’ve just needed to be properly informed. We’ve taken the initiative to protect what we’ve got, and we’ll continue to do so, even if the authorities attempt to reopen prematurely. We would like to get back to the life we knew as soon as we can, because it was one well worth living. Even as my embarrassment about being an American has grown, I feel a great upwelling of New Jersey pride. I didn’t think we’d show as much dignity and restraint as we have. I was wrong to doubt my neighbors. Mill Creek Marsh Trail was not policed, but we all knew what to do, and what not to do.

We were there to take in the scenery, and nobody was going to be the ruin of anybody else’s day. Imagine a latticework of narrow, tree-lined paths through mud flats dotted with dried tree stumps; then, imagine the New Jersey Turnpike right over the barrier of reeds. Parts of the landscape were flat and greasy as a cookie sheet, while other parts were undulations of grass and moss. The trails and footbridges aren’t the maze that they seem to be at first, so even if a visitor couldn’t orient herself by the highway, she’d never get lost. Birds were general. I saw, among other little fellows, a finch so yellow I thought it had been spray-painted, a few egrets with their webbed feet in the shallows, and a mother duck leading a line of ducklings from the mud to a brackish rivulet. They all looked happier in the water.

On the way back, signs on 1-9 continued to warn us off the road. Flatten the curve, not your tire, we were told, and that seemed like a bit more of a threat than I wanted to encounter. We get the picture. We’ll take our excursions sparingly, and maybe even responsibly. At the big box restaurants, patrons queued up in the parking lots, six feet apart, to pick up Mother’s Day dinner. Scores of masked people waited in their cars in front of the Olive Garden for their names to be called; they’d go and get what they came for, as gingerly as they could, and return home to their families. Everybody still needs to celebrate. We’re doing it as cautiously as we can. But we’re doing it.

The last time I pressed the flesh, it was March 6. That was a Jersey City Friday, there was fear in the air, and arts events happening all over town. It was a cold and rainy night, but we went out anyway: we’d arrive at a gallery, greet the artist and the owner, shake hands, and apply sanitizer liberally afterward. We were still acting on the popular assumption that the main form of transmission was unwashed hands. It occurred to me that what we were doing was a risk, but I couldn’t see the full measure of what was coming. I figured if I smeared us both in Purell, we’d be able to continue going to shows all spring.

By March 10, that assumption looked dubious. A week later, the doors to the galleries and clubs were closed, and reality began to bite. It occurred to all of us that that Jersey City Friday might be the last of its kind for a long time. I’ve tried to hang on to the memory of that night, and given the circumstances, it’s remained sharp in my mind — like my recollection of the contours of the calm on the morning before the planes hit the towers. I can pinpoint the exact locations of each painting on the wall at the Hamlet Manzueta retrospective show at the Art House; I remember the specific hors d’oeuvres they were serving in the atrium of the Majestic Condominiums; I can reconstitute my footwork as I tried to squeeze into a crowded Village West Gallery for a poetry reading. I remember the streetlight streaks in the puddles of rain on the Newark Avenue sidewalks. I remember the unmasked faces of my neighbors.

Mostly, though, I remember a show at the SMUSH Gallery in McGinley Square. “īîìïíinches” felt like it was primarily motivated by a desire to express an idiosyncratic personality — in this case, the personality of a woman named Myssi Robinson, who is a dancer as well as a painter and a weird-object-designer. Robinson struck me as quintessential Hudson County artist working in the local post-industrial style, gluing together paper and rope and painted what-is-its at funny, aesthetically-pleasing angles, sprinkling glitter liberally, but leaving plenty of serrated edges. SMUSH gave her the entire space to decorate, and she made the most of that latitude. She covered one wall with black-and-white triangles as ready for business as any saw-teeth; on another, she draped bunting made of yellow plastic sheets. Right in the middle of the room, Robinson hung a portal (her word) to another dimension, or at least an experience uncommon on a wet, cold Jersey City night. This was a circle of floor to ceiling plastic tubes with a mirror on top. We were invited to walk in to the ring of darkness, look up, and allow the artist to take our picture.

Estranged by distance, distorted by the quick change in perception, the occupant of the portal was confronted by an image of herself. Like so much of “īîìïíinches”, it seemed to be a playful comment on vanity — one made by a person accustomed to being watched. Many of the objects in the show, on closer inspection, evoked women’s fashion: a polka-dot pattern with a loop in the shape of a handbag handle, waves of plastic suggestive of a party dress, smeared smiley-faces, some scribbled over with nail polish, beaming back like girls’ reflections in the too-bright circles at the cosmetics counter. Myssi Robinson wrought a hat from photocopies and braided industrial rope, and cupped plastic mirrored squares in red netting. These all felt like shards of feminine experience, strips torn from Glamour and reassembled, the residue of the immense energy that self-presentation requires. Everything in the show was pretty but barbed, lively, smart, exciting and impertinent, like an outfit held together by the confidence of its wearer.

The immersive quality of the “īîìïíinches” show can’t be translated to the Internet. But Myssi Robinson, and Katelyn Halpern, the curator and owner of SMUSH, want you to see the artworks anyway. Halpern, who is always very theorized about everything she does, was skeptical of online presentation at first; she felt that the whole point of a space like SMUSH is in-person interaction. Necessity has forced her to adjust. “īîìïíinches” is, I think, the first online exhibit she’s ever put together, and I’m glad she’s done it. Taken one at a time in a slideshow, Myssi Robinson’s objects still have plenty of stories to tell. The voice may not be as loud as it would have been if you’d encountered it on the first of March, but you can still hear the artist talking, and I’m grateful to Katelyn Halpern for putting aside her reservations and giving Myssi Robinson the amplification.

This page has been pretty grim. I understand why a few people who check it every day were surprised by yesterday’s post. One very good friend of mine even accused me of optimism. I told him that he knew me better than that. Nothing fundamental has changed: I still believe that American authorities have been unwise and inattentive. Sending people back to work feels greedy and premature to me. There are many scary miles to travel.

Yet the optimism is real, and it’s been growing ever since the calendar turned to May. My brightened outlook doesn’t have much to do with what’s happening in America: it’s based on the qualified success of other countries that have managed to slow the advance of the coronavirus. The equilibrium they’ve reached in Brisbane and Taipei might fall apart, but the mere fact that they’ve been able to hold the monster at bay suggests to me that the fight can be won. We don’t need to put our entire population at risk in a chase for herd immunity that might be a fantasy anyway. We can figure out how the pathogen spreads, and proceed accordingly; we can discover what not to do, and we can try not to do those things.

To achieve that sort of operational clarity, we need to work with a real transmission model. For eight frustrating weeks of shutdown, we haven’t had one. This has forced every individual to cobble together a private model based on anecdotes, prejudices, common sense, and superstition. Should I go to a show? Can I sit in the park? Do I need to disinfect my mail? Could I get it from my neighbor’s children? When they cough upstairs, will the virus work its way down through the vents? Is it so pervasive that there’s no way to stop it; should we resign ourselves to the inevitability of infection? In the absence of guidance, we fended for ourselves. Public decisionmakers did too. Their initial containment strategies were motivated by panic, precedent, and guesswork. Lockdowns were a crude means of coping with our mass ignorance: we don’t know how this is getting around, but it certainly is, so we’d better prohibit as much as possible.

Part of the reason why we haven’t been able to get a reliable transmission model together was our uncertainly about the size and concentration of the infectious dose. This remains true: we still don’t know how much coronavirus we’d need to be exposed to in order to become carriers. Scare articles about virus particles found tucked away in corners, or persisting on cardboard boxes, or hanging in the air after a jogger runs by are stupendously unhelpful. What we really need to know is whether those stray particles are present in sufficient quantities to infect us; if they aren’t, they’re just part of the microbial background noise that our systems encounter daily. There’s been reason to suspect that higher concentrations of virus — like those that healthcare workers have been coping with — prompt a more severe version of the sickness. Some people have guessed that chance encounters with low levels of virus lead to asymptomatic cases. Without contact tracing, there’s no way to know.

Our uncertainty has led directly to the circulation of shaky models. Among the most popular — and I know you’ve seen them — are the great animated, colored billows of cloud-particles from the lungs of passersby in stores, on bicycles, at parties, in offices. Because these images conflate the dynamics of respiration with the trajectory of infection, they’re misleading. We can’t be afraid of sharing air with other beings, because it’s all one planet, and no private supply is possible. We need to know how to exist in the biosphere, and how to interact with our fellow creatures, without worrying about getting them sick.

After too long in the dark, a preliminary transmission model is beginning to coalesce. We’re starting to get a picture of how this pathogen gets around, and how we might reorganize our activities to lessen a lethal threat that we’re going to be living with for a long time. The twenty-two threaded tweets by Dr. Cevik contain links to studies that all point in the same direction: in order to thrive, this virus requires close and prolonged contact between humans. This research reinforces the hypothetical models put together by some amateurs, including Quillette editor Jonathan Kay. We’re getting a profile of a serious and highly infectious respiratory illness, that, despite its ferocity, can be slowed down if we wear masks in public to block large droplets, maintain social distance, ventilate indoor spaces, reimagine workplaces before reopening them, get out in the sunshine when we can, and behave responsibly while we’re there.

No contact tracing strategy can ever be complete, and no model of transmission can account for every vector. The best we can do is get a sense of probabilities, and behave accordingly. My protocol isn’t changing: I’m less worried about runners than I was a week ago, and that’s a relief, but I’m still going to cross the street when I see one coming. I won’t be going anywhere without a mask and a plan to dodge crowds and close contact. Basically, I’ll pretend that I’m Taiwanese, and I encourage all Americans, and particularly American leaders, to do likewise. In Taiwan, they’ve taken the pathogen for what it is, rather than fear it for what it isn’t, and their application of prudent science to a biological problem has led to dramatically better outcomes than what we’ve been getting in the States. What prudent science tells us is that we aren’t helpless. We don’t have to build our policy around the lethal misconception that the virus will get us and there’s nothing to be done, so we may as well send everybody back to the meat-packing plant. There are ameliorative options for us, and those remain on the table, no matter how many Americans have been infected. The more tracing we do, the clearer those options become. And that is, I fear, why certain foolish Americans don’t want us to do the tracing.

I hate to encourage anybody to visit a social media site. But unless you’ve completely given up on Twitter, I believe you ought to unroll a thread posted there on May 4 by a virologist working in Scotland. Dr. Muge Cevik’s twenty-two tweets apply preliminary contact tracing results to the dynamics of transmission in an effort to answer the biggest question of all: how do people catch the virus? What can we do to slow down the spread? So far, most recommendations by authorities — even medical authorities — have been either been based on common sense, viral precedent, or superstition. These have been helpful (even superstition has, because superstition tends to lean toward caution) but woefully incomplete. The doctor tries to fill in some yawning blanks with charts and graphs and hard counts, and even a little advice of her own.

Her tweets broadly reinforce the conclusions drawn by Quillette editor and non-scientist Jonathan Kay in his self-researched piece on coronavirus superspreader events. Before anybody else in the media, Kay went out on a limb and argued that transmission of this pathogen was, primarily, an indoor phenomenon. You might well catch the virus at choir practice, or at a bar, or a crowded club where people had to shout in order to be heard; unless you were unbelievably unlucky, you weren’t going to get it from a runner on the street. To spread, this pathogen needed ballistic droplet flight: ejected from the mouth of an infected person by a cough or a sneeze, or singing, or loud and protracted conversation. Given the virus-dispersing effects of sunlight and air currents, it’s not at all likely that it will happen outside.

Dr. Cevik goes farther, and unlike Kay, who drew his conclusions from anecdotal evidence reported in the press, she’s got medical studies to back her up. In tweet number fifteen, she spells out the implications of her research in language so bold that I’ve read it twenty times just to be sure it says what it says: close and prolonged contact is required for transmission. Not a breath taken in the wake of a passerby, not a brief exchange of pleasantries on the street, not an accidental stroll through an airborne toxic event, but genuine interaction with an infected person, most likely in a cramped quarters where the ventilation isn’t what it ought to be. Her list of places where you’re more likely to get it is remarkably similar to Kay’s, and she also agrees with him about where, and how, you probably won’t get it — all of which feels like a vindication of citizen epidemiology. Dr. Cevik also suggests that your chances of getting it from a chance encounter with a child are slim, which may be a relief for those of us (me) who see children as mobile germ containers.

The thread from Dr. Cevik is, I think, the best news I’ve gotten in eight weeks — news so good that it’s actually taken a few days for its implications to sink in. Her findings are the loudest rattle yet from the hinges of the cage door we’ve been banging on for weeks. If we keep our masks on, and steer clear of protracted interactions with strangers, we ought to be able to get out to parks, and pedal our bicycles, and roll around in the grass without worrying that we’re going to kill our neighbors. For a few weeks, it looked like the summer would be canceled outright; now, I believe that we’re going to have one after all. It’ll be shaky, and awkward, and weird, but it’ll happen. Meanwhile, we can follow the prescription that some other incisive Scots gave us two decades ago: get out of the office and into the springtime.

We may be able to take some action on behalf of those required to remain inside. Workplaces can be reimagined, airflow can be improved, class can be held outdoors. Someone can open up a window. None of that is going to stop the pandemic, but I’ve become convinced that it’ll slow its acceleration. A real model of transmission is finally beginning to take shape, and, with it, we’re finding that we’re not quite as stuck in the murk as we worried we were. This is why contact tracing is so critical for public mental health: darkness makes us feel powerless, and illumination allows us to recognize the chinks in the armor of the horseman of the apocalypse we’re facing. Fears tend to proliferate, imaginations take us on long and tortured detours, and platitudes and folk wisdom can only reverse so much of the damage we’re doing to our own minds. Science is our only reassurance. Thank you, Dr. Cevik, for providing some.

Hilary thinks I’ve been misleading about the size and poshness of our flat. It’s neither big nor posh. In these dispatches, I’ve referred to our “deck” a few times, but we don’t really have a deck. We’ve got a fire escape attached to a kitchen door and ten feet of metal runway before the steps begin. Hilary has done so much to make those ten feet a pleasant place for her to be that I’ve come to see it as a balcony lovely enough for any Rapunzel. She’s floored it with mats and ringed it with flowering plants and herbs, and set up a beach chair in the direct sunlight. I always encourage her to sit there. I do that because she’s cute as a button in the sunshine. I also do it because I know that it’s a good way for her to get Vitamin D.

When my sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, doctors suggested that she begin taking supplemental D in high doses. I was encouraged to take it, too. Even our physician uncle, who is medicine-averse in the way that only certain doctors seem to be, recommended Vitamin D. Sloan-Kettering doesn’t like to assume too much about supplements, but the prevailing attitude we’ve found there about Vitamin D hasn’t been discouraging. Dr. John Campbell, the nurse and teacher whose measured but compassionate videos have been a lifeline for me through this crisis, strongly recommends taking Vitamin D as a preventative measure against the effects of the coronavirus.

It’s hard to get a sufficient amount of Vitamin D from food. Ninety per cent of Vitamin D comes directly from the sun. During the winter, we’re inside, and we’re shielded from rays by thick walls and heavy clothes. Consequently, we who live at northern latitudes are likely to be deficient. Human immune systems, beleaguered by stress and sugars and various pathogens, are strongly supported by Vitamin D. I’ve been taking two thousand international units of the vitamin every day, which is quite a bit, but it still isn’t as much as some enthusiasts are recommending. My hope is that it’ll reverse any deficiency I’ve acquired over the winter, and put me on firmer footing during my next encounter with a pathogen. Besides the social-distancing and hygiene techniques that we all know well by now, this is the only prophylactic measure I’m taking against the coronavirus. It also helps that it comes in gummy form. The strawberry ones are my favorite.

Do I believe that, by this act alone, I will ward off the virus? Ha, no. I often wonder whether it has any benefit at all. I’m the guy who won’t take an aspirin when I have a headache; I don’t drink or smoke, and I distrust all drugs. But I’ve got to acknowledge that some of the early reports have been encouraging. Campbell points to a recent large-sample study done in Indonesia that found that coronavirus patients with Vitamin D deficiency were ten times more likely to die than those whose vitamin levels were within a healthy range. That paper hasn’t been peer reviewed. But if it’s even partially true, that’s a remarkable discovery, and one that we might even call a breakthrough. It means that hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by a reasonably priced supplement. Hydroxychlorine is generic and unreliable at best, remdesivir is expensive to manufacture; Vitamin D, by contrast, is there on the shelves of the Duane Reade. Authorities ought to be encouraging us to take it.

Yesterday morning, Politico reported that fifty-eight per cent of those who’ve died from the coronavirus deaths in the United States are African-American. This might be the saddest statistic in the whole two-month landslide of regrettable numbers. This is more than just a powerful indictment of social inequality. It’s a grim reinforcement of the foundational cruelty that is America’s original sin. We know that African-Americans are, on the whole, more likely to be working jobs that require them to come into contact with pathogens, and less likely to be able to afford quality healthcare. We know about risk factors and underlying conditions common among African-Americans. We also know that it’s harder for people with dark skin to manufacture a sufficient amount of Vitamin D than it is for those of us with lighter skin. The Cooper Institute, for instance, reports that seventy-six per cent of African-Americans fall short of the recommended amount of the vitamin. A sane and competent government would be rushing supplements to African-American neighborhoods. If the Indonesian study is right, an act like that could save many lives. Even if it’s wrong, we’d still be providing people with a vitamin, which is a healthy thing to do — morally as well as physically.

If we ever had to subsist on the money I’ve made as a musician, we wouldn’t be living in a pretty little jewel box of an apartment in Downtown Jersey City. We wouldn’t be in an apartment at all. We’d be dodging raindrops in an alley behind the Pathmark. This does not distinguish me. Musicians with a far higher profile than mine don’t manage to make money from it, either. Music is a delightful pursuit but a brutal business. Technically, I have been professional since the nineties: you’ve often had to pay some money if you want to see me play. But if you really want a song from me, all you have to do is tap me on the shoulder.

Not so long ago, we were planning to make my shoulders available for those taps. We had an album ready, and we were talking about all the topics and logistics that accompany the release of new music: tours, practices, videos, umbrella concepts that might make songs that aren’t, to be frank, earmarked for the Top of the Pops a little more accessible for listeners. Mostly, we imagined concerts. How we could make them a thrilling experience for those ensnared in my web of words and sound? Over the years, I’ve recorded quite a lot of songs. Some of them came out on my own albums, some of them are preserved on projects helmed by my friends, and some of them I thought twice about, and will never release. Every one of them was meant for the stage. No matter how silly a song of mine is, you can be certain that I fantasized about singing it to a crowded house. In the fantasy, that house was always Maxwell’s, and, sadly, and unimaginatively, that’s remained true, even as Maxwell’s is no longer around to rock.

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if the long period of my life organized around applause is over, too. It’s hard to imagine standing on the floor of a packed club in the future; honestly, it’s hard to imagine returning to a club at all. I have no interest in performing on the Internet — to me, that’s as empty as being on TV. Social-media likes and digital hearts and virtual hugs leave me cold. Only a real connection with a real audience will do.

This summer, creative people are going to attempt solutions. They’ll launch drive-in festivals, and social-distanced concerts on rooftops, and Zoomapaloozas. Bless them: they’ll be doing what they can to keep a flame burning that has kept us warm for all the decades of our lives. I’ve written many times that I believe that music is what human beings do best, and I’ve always tried to make my small daily contribution to the ongoing story that justifies the existence of our species better than anything else does. I will always love music, and live music in particular. I just don’t see myself as a participant, or even an observer, any time in the foreseeable future.

This is hard for me to write. Many of the greatest thrills I’ve ever experienced have come from making music with my friends. Sometimes, that’s happened onstage in front of an appreciative audience, and sometimes, it’s happened in living rooms and stuffy rehearsal spaces and cramped Williamsburg basements. Playing music is an intimate act: you’re sharing waves, and ideas, and melodies and rhythms, and you’re most certainly sharing air. Models of coronavirus transmission weigh risks differently, but they’re unanimous in their condemnation of the sort of behavior that happens in the concert hall, or at band practice. Everybody heard the terrible story about the collective infection of the Mount Vernon church choir. Whatever they did, I’m sure it was nothing compared to the microbe-swapping stuff that we normally get up to at a pop concert.

Most of the people we know are, in one way or another, show people. Steven manages bands and runs festivals, and he’s been booking a new room on the Lower East Side. Early in 2020, that was all going nicely. Today it’s on ice. Brad was forced to scrap the summertime activities at the theater he runs in Upstate New York; he was pretty blue about that. With theaters closed in the city, neither he nor Megan have been performing or directing. I haven’t been able to sing, or slam a piano, or do goofy Cars covers with George, or Sarah, or Matt, in months. We could record at home, and post the mixes to a website, or make remixes, or scrap together a music video from old footage and share it with friends. But without the promise of a show, and the specific interaction with a live audience that music occasions, it’s tough to find the motivation.

It’s likely that this post is premature. We aren’t even through the worst of the crisis yet. I should be thinking about the welfare of my family, not the next time I’m going to express myself with my organ. Yet I know that show business in New York and New Jersey will be altered by the crisis, maybe irrevocably, and I can’t help but wonder if there’ll be a place for me, or any of the people whose projects are important to me, once the ground has stopped shaking. I know: get there first, and then worry about the specifics later. I could always turn on the electric piano and run some scales. That might even soothe my nerves, and ready me for re-entry, in whatever shape it takes.

Yesterday the lockdown lifted. The state government helped. But even if they had chosen not to reopen the parks, that decision would’ve been overridden by the authority of the spring sun. If local greenspaces had been barricaded, people would have been out on sidewalks, in intersections, in vacant lots. Some traditions go too deep to be disrupted, even by a global crisis, and the first seventy degree day of the year is never ignored in New Jersey. Six days from now, the weather is supposed to be much worse. By then, the whole town may have developed a cough. We’ll know why: Liberty State Park was hopping.

We went by bicycle, which felt safer than walking. We could swerve away from clusters of people, we figured, and speed from crowded parts of the park to emptier ones. I’ve always felt bulletproof on a bicycle, which is probably why I write about bike rides as often as I do. All of the insecurity and vulnerability that I feel while doing every other activity?, it all falls away the moment I begin pedaling. There is no pathogen I cannot outpace, and no particle I can’t swerve around. On my bicycle I reach a clear and intoxicating strata of air, inaccessible to those with no wheels, or with (God help them) four. Usually these are productive illusions: they help me exercise, and they give me an artificial boost of physical confidence. During a pandemic, these beliefs are dangerous. I became scared of my own courage. I put on my mask, packed sanitizer, tied a string around my finger, told myself to stay vigilant. There’d be daylight, and people, and velocity; it’ll feel wonderful. Don’t get carried away.

Visitors to the park were encouraged, but not required, to mask themselves. Not everybody did. I was encouraged to see that most of the cyclists were masked. Many of the joggers weren’t. I’ve never been a runner, but I imagine that it makes very different respiratory demands of its practitioners than bicycling does. It may be difficult to run while masked. Joggers have taken a lot of abuse over the past few weeks: there’s a widespread belief that they’re generating and spewing the sort of large particles that could contain the virus. Pass a jogger who is breathing heavily, and you might just be courting infection. But there’s been no support yet for the theory that joggers are vectors for the coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that what the joggers are doing — exercising in the sun — is a public health good. My sense is that we’re throwing stones at an easy target, focusing our fears of asymptomatic spread on a class of people who the sedentary have always found suspicious.

We’ll know in a few days. We certainly shared the air with more than a few unmasked runners who, if infected, had to have been shedding virus. Everybody in the park did. But a particle-dispersing wind was blowing, and a UV-zapping sun was out, and, at least at 11 a.m., Jersey City people were doing their best to comply with social distancing suggestions. The park was busy, but people refrained from congregating in clusters. It’s scary to acknowledge that we’re the guinea pigs in our own experiments, but the awful truth is that the state of New Jersey has been a great petri dish for the better part of 2020. Without a definitive transmission model from scientists, we’ve had to draw our own conclusions, and we’ve decided that if we keep our distance, catching the virus outside is unlikely. That’s just a theory, but it’s one that’s backed up by eight weeks of lived experience at the epicenter of the global pandemic. The rat, if he could talk, may well have more to say about the maze than the observer does. It may well turn out that the reason that the virus hasn’t transferred all that successfully outdoors is because we’ve all been indoors. That’d be logical, and disappointing. But eventually, we’ve got to put our guesses to the test; otherwise, we’re never going to re-learn how to live.

Once off my bicycle and back at home, paranoia descended: did I touch anything?, were my airlock procedures before entering the basement sufficient?, was my little blue mask with the pink flowers saturated with viral particles from somebody’s slipstream? We left the masks on the fire escape to roast in the midday sun, and I retreated to the computer to catalog my regrets and brace myself for the coming symptoms. After awhile, I recognized that it was pointless. We need exercise. It isn’t healthy for either one of us to remain in the house for weeks. We court a risk by going out; we also court a risk by staying home. Either way, I’m going to be agitated. When we were out on our bikes on the verge of the park, Hilary asked me if I could stop looking back at her every second. Perhaps I could do it every five seconds instead. She was teasing me: she knows that years of worry have made me a head case. I tried; really I did. But I kept on looking back.

Modern life makes skeptics out of us all. No doubt you were skeptical about a hundred things before breakfast, and a hundred more since; if you put on the news, you can double that count. So many official stories feel inadequate, or messily manipulated for popular consumption, or just downright implausible. When you hear them, you cross your arms, angle your head, and give a suspicious look. This is the stance you’ve been forced to adopt as you’re saturated with sales messages of different sorts. If we all followed along everywhere we were pushed, we’d all be victims of overconsumption. Incredulity is the only way to make it through the day.

Yet this crisis is different. It has demanded compliance with strict recommendations passed down by medical experts who we don’t know, and who, on a sunnier day, we’d probably tune out. Given the way that infectious diseases spread, general adherence to these rules is mandatory: if fifty per cent of the country opts out of what the other fifty per cent is doing, it doesn’t matter how well the cooperative half sticks to the rules. The whole thing will fall apart — and people will die — unless we all listen.

This is exactly the sort of thing that we’ve gotten very bad at. Before we follow the suggestion of an expert, we want to know who he worked for, and voted for, and which side he’s on in the great game that has absorbed our national attention since the turn of the millennium. Should that expert be aligned, in any way, with a political figure we distrust, we simply tune him out. This has made it virtually impossible for our society to take action against a common inhuman adversary, and it goes a long way toward explaining why America leads the world in cases, and hospitalizations, and fatalities. The coronavirus found us fighting, quite desperately, with each other, and it’s exploited that division.

In order to stop the global pandemic, humanity must achieve herd immunity. There’s an ugly means to this end: everybody on the planet can get infected. Our best, and likely only, means of avoiding this awful outcome is a vaccine. Yet a substantial percentage of Americans — way bigger than you think — will not touch the vaccine if Bill Gates’s name is on it, or anywhere near it. They’ve convinced themselves that Gates is engaged in a global depopulation effort, or he’s angling to inject microchips into our bloodstreams, or he’s teamed up with China, and the W.H.O., and the 5G industry to weaken and sicken Americans, or he’s cruelly hoarding patents and wants to soak us all. Should we be lucky enough to develop a vaccine, these people are absolutely going to refuse to get the shot. Since the success of an inoculation program is dependent upon widespread compliance, this presents an enormous problem, and it’s one that we’re not taking seriously enough. We’re underestimating the ferocity of the resistance that’s bound to come if the state mandates vaccination. This is going to undermine our containment efforts. It might undo them altogether.

The theories about Bill Gates are negative ones, and therefore impossible to dispel. Just as there’s no way for us to disprove the belief that Hillary Clinton is sacrificing babies to feed her adrenochrome addiction, we’ll never be able to say for sure that Gates’s intentions aren’t diabolical. He might be concerned about the welfare of the planet, or he might be an evil orchestrator bent on population control; we’re not inside Bill Gates’s psyche, so his motivations will always be opaque to us. It is natural to harbor suspicions about rich and powerful people, and wonder about how they accumulated that power, and whether it’s wise for humanity to devise systems that allow so much influence to come into the hands of so few.

But rather than dismiss the medicine because we don’t like the messenger, it’s worth remembering a few things about Bill Gates. Gates is not an immunologist, or a virologist, or a physician. It’s arguable whether he’s even a scientist. He’s associated with vaccination because of his foundation, which has been supplying shots to poor people all over the world for many years. Those shots did not come directly from Bill Gates. They came from the laboratories of infectious disease experts whose work Gates has facilitated. The coronavirus vaccine, if and when it arrives, won’t have been whipped up by Gates in a Wuhan clinic; he won’t be wringing his hands, cackling over the brew, and salt-and-peppering it with silicon tracking devices. He’d have no idea how to do that even if he wanted to. In order for him to accomplish the heinous things that he’s been accused of desiring, he’d have to corrupt the entire medical system, and turn doctors who’ve devoted their lives to stopping the spread of disease into idiotic stooges. Out of necessity, I’ve become acquainted with some of these doctors, and I feel their bewilderment at widespread American recalcitrance, and our inaction in the face of a lethal threat. They’re not dupes. They know what they’re up against. We ought to listen to them.

That’s not always easy. One of the major drawbacks of capitalism is that it wrests the podium from scientists and hands it to their financiers. I’m not particularly interested in what Bill Gates, or Elon Musk, or Mark Cuban, or any other wealthy figurehead has to say about the coronavirus. Yet we’ve built a communications system that amplifies rich people and other celebrities, rewards them for adopting dramatic language, and drowns out more rational and measured actors. This has placed us at a terrible disadvantage, and it has also distorted our perception of medicine and how it works. That millions of Americans see vaccines as an expression of Bill Gates’s desires — whether altruistic or pernicious — demonstrates how far gone we are, and how detached from reality we’ve become. Gates isn’t going to pipe down, because billionaires never do. It’s up to the rest of us to listen carefully, apply some common sense, and understand that our collective problem can only be solved through collective action. A skeptical nation must develop a little faith in science. Our survival depends upon it.