the tris mccall report

In March 2019, we were at Sloan-Kettering every day. I never got used to it. Every time I entered the building, I had the same stomach-ache. Every time I left, I felt the same relief. This wasn’t a reflection on the facilities, which, as doctors’ offices go, are very comfortable: no blaring televisions, no pharmaceutical advertisements, no crowded conditions, well-selected art on the walls presented MoMA style, consideration from the staff and schedulers. Waits were often long. They’d come in terrible threes: first, we’d wait in the reception area to be called into an examination room, then, we’d wait for a nurse to come in and take vitals, and then we’d have the hardest wait of all for the doctor. The surgeon was always tremendously sweet to us. Her name still makes my heart jump any time I hear it.

It’s not just anxious old me. My uncle, a celebrated doctor who has lived in the hospital district of New York for more than fifty years, admitted to me that he’s always been scared of Sloan-Kettering. Years before we ever stepped foot in the hospital, I’d get a private shiver whenever I’d seen the arrow and the three crossbars. Sometimes, during reflections, I’ve wondered whether I didn’t have a premonition that our paths would take us to Sloan. Then I realize how silly that is. Cancer is epidemic, especially in urban New Jersey. We were always running the risk of long waits in those examination rooms. They just came sooner than I’d have bet.

The doctor who first diagnosed Hilary wasn’t at Sloan-Kettering, but he’d logged time there during a long career. He didn’t exactly warn us off — he assured us we’d get the best care possible if we chose to receive treatment there — but he did describe the operation as a massive one, and hinted that the experience at the hospital could be overwhelming. Our cousin, who’d also worked there before choosing a more emotionally survivable medical specialty, echoed these sentiments. He called it a factory. Nevertheless, he, and my uncle, and everybody else in our families said the same thing: Hilary needs to go to Sloan.

We did. I worried, privately, that we’d made the wrong decision. The doctor in New Jersey had been very kind; better than that, he’d been responsive to all of Hilary’s questions. He’d called her several times to see how she was doing, and personally intervened in an insurance issue on her behalf. It seemed to me that we were trading a fruitful personal connection, one with a highly respected doctor, for a reputation. Once there, it took me months to warm up to the place, and the people, and even the aesthetic, which felt cold and aggressively Manhattanite. Eventually my misgivings were worn down by the friendliness of the support staff and the attentiveness of the doctors. Complete comfort still eludes me, and it probably always will.

The staff at the hospital would never put anything medically vital in a generic e-mail message. Nevertheless, e-mail correspondence from Sloan-Kettering sets off alarm bells, even when it’s just a confirmation of an appointment, or a health bulletin they’re surely sending to hundreds of thousands of people. Yesterday, a rare feeling of midday serenity was shattered by a message from Sloan-Kettering. It contained a link to a forty-minute phone seminar, held by doctors and nurses, about the effects of the pandemic on treatment and recovery. I didn’t want to click on it. But I’ve been worried, daily, about the status of Hilary’s immune system. Here were some answers — maybe not the ones I wanted to hear, but the ones I needed to hear in order to get through the crisis of the moment. In that way, it was not unlike a visit to the hospital’s main campus, and the doctor’s exam room.

The tone of the seminar, which you can hear right here if you’re curious, was broadly and blandly positive in the specific manner that I’ve come to expect from the hospital. The chief of their infectious-diseases unit reassured listeners that many Sloan-Kettering patients, even seriously ill ones with compromised immune systems, had recovered from the effects of coronavirus without needing hospitalization or intensive care. Another doctor talked about a test for the virus that the staff had developed, on their own, and before testing had been implemented in any widespread fashion in America. Any patient showing symptoms would be tested on the spot, and results would come back in twenty-four hours; in the meantime, they’d likely be sent home with a pulse oximeter. They made it plain, indirectly but unmistakably, that they’ve got personal protective gear, and they’re cleaning the facilities constantly. And they reaffirmed a policy change that, frankly, breaks my heart — until the hospital sounds the all-clear, visitors won’t be allowed to accompany patients to their treatments or appointments. The next time Hilary has to go to Sloan-Kettering, she’ll be on her own, in a mask, and I’ll be quaking on a park bench somewhere.

But that is a worry for another day, especially since there’s more than enough to worry about today. The message from the hospital simultaneously shook me up and settled me. I don’t want to have to think about Sloan-Kettering during a pandemic, even though I constantly do, and I’m grateful that they got in touch, even if it was via blast e-mail, even if I never want to hear their names, even if I owe them too much to quantify. I’m relieved that they’re making it through this societal crisis, and they remain focused on the thousands upon thousands of individual crises that circumstances compel them to contend with. I trust they’ll be there for us — however dispassionately, however diagnostically.

Today, the Jersey City municipal government is reopening local parks. Not all of them, but enough of them to put a small smile of relief on my face. Berry Lane Park on Garfield Avenue is the size of several city blocks. It shouldn’t be too difficult for us to practice social distancing there. The sun is supposed to come out tomorrow. Should we feel up to it, we’ll take our bicycles to Lafayette, sit on a bench, or even sprawl out in the grass.

I’ve felt for a long time that the closure of parks — Liberty State Park in particular — was ill-considered. With gyms shuttered and parks off limits, joggers and cyclists were forced to crowd on to residential streets. Others gave up on exercise, which can’t be a good thing for their immune systems. We’re fighting this virus collectively, which means we need as many of our neighbors to be healthy as they can be. Then again, I don’t have any science to back up any of my suspicions, and in the middle of a pandemic, I’m reluctant to get loud in support of any risky activity. State and municipal governments chose to shutter the parks for health reasons. They must have had models that suggested that keeping them open would cause more people to get sick. Didn’t they?

Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they’re just chucking darts at a board, blindfolded by circumstances, and hoping to get as close to the target as they can. Honestly, I’d understand that approach. Months since the breakout, we still don’t know exactly what we’re up against. We’re going to try things, and some of the things we try are going to turn out to have been bad ideas. What I wish, though, is that governments would provide rationales they’re using for the prohibitions they’re putting in place, tell us what’s working and what isn’t, and admit it when initial steps turn out to have been taken in unproductive directions.

For instance, we never learned exactly why Jersey City closed municipal parks in the first place. We were told that this was done to make it harder for people to congregate, and pass around the virus, but nothing was ever done about the spike in pedestrians and runners (and sometimes cyclists, too) on sidewalks. A similar thing happened on the waterfront. The closure of Owen Grundy Pier squeezed people on to nearby boardwalks. It shouldn’t have taken weeks for the municipal government to recognize the foot-traffic dynamic their restrictions created. I have to believe that they were aware of the consequences of a park shutdown, but chose to keep it in place anyway.

Today, some of those restrictions have been loosened. Something has changed, but the city hasn’t been forthcoming about what that might be. Perhaps we’ve refined our transmission model, and we’re less concerned about catching the coronavirus in parks than we once were. Maybe our municipal leaders believe — as some officials in other parts of the country seem to — that we’re past the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, and it’s mathematically acceptable to allow people to come into passing contact with each others’ respiration. Parks may be safer for reasons that have nothing directly to do with pathogens: thirty per cent of the Jersey City police force, we’ve learned from the mayor, were down with coronavirus-related sickness in mid-April.

Or maybe it’s arbitrary. Maybe they simply feel it’s time to get back to business, and they’re beginning with the parks, because that’s the easiest step to take. Elsewhere in the country, governors are setting re-opening dates, behaving as if the virus has a sense of time and will stand down, cooperatively, the moment the calendar turns to May. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s still incumbent upon them to explain the science behind the decisions they’re making. Right now, they’re still speaking in generalities — and that’s not going to restore public trust in institutions that are wobbling.

Hilary’s car was not made for highway driving. It’s about the size of a teacup, and it gets tossed about the street in a light breeze. Nevertheless, when the weather is right, we’re compelled by the prospect of the open road. Since the beginning of the lockdown, we hadn’t done much more than move the car around the block. We’ve been reluctant to push it any more than that: what if we couldn’t get gas, or what if we broke down in the hills, or what if it was just psychologically untenable to be far from home? But Saturday was so nice that we set our reservations aside. We put on our masks, packed hand sanitizer in our bags, and headed out to 1-9 and the Turnpike.

Our destination was an organic farm on the far side of the New York border — a main supplier of vegetables to many of our favorite restaurants on both sides of the Hudson. Those restaurants have been closed for more than a month. As many farms have, this one has adjusted by selling boxes of produce. We’d shopped at their farmstand a few times in the summer of 2019, and always had a delightful time when we did. It occurred to me that a visit during a pandemic might be tempting fate: not only would we be exposing ourselves to the outdoors, and to people we didn’t know in a place many miles away, but the actual experience of being on the farm might be uncomfortable. They might frown on city visitors.

We expected quiet roads. Instead, Tonnelle Avenue was busy as usual: people heading to work or heading home, getting groceries, hauling lumber for reconstruction projects. Many drivers wore masks. Initially I wondered why they were bothering, but at the very first traffic light, I understood. With windows down on a warm day, I was, on the passenger’s seat, much closer to the car and driver next to me than the recommended six feet. I reasoned that I had a few things working in my favor. The virus dies fast in direct sunlight, and the sun was certainly out. Air currents disperse small respiratory droplets fast, and a spring wind was certainly picking up. Cars in motion create their own currents. Nobody was talking or even looking my way. I decided to feel safe. It beat the alternative.

Electric signs suspended over Route 17 told us to stay at home and flatten the curve. Hilary asked if we were doing the right thing by traveling. We passed the white tents of the drive-through testing center on the side of the highway, and noted, to our relief, that it wasn’t busy. We knew that when they’d opened, roughly a month ago, there’d been hours of waiting for desperate people looking for a diagnosis. Many of the billboards acknowledged the crisis, either thanking doctors or advertising hospitals or assuring motorists that first responders were still on the job. Someone had painted a great thank you to essential workers on a bedsheet, and they’d hung it on a fence. The lots of the big-box shops on the retail strip were either overstuffed or completely empty: no activity by the Crate and Barrel and the Barnes & Noble and the Garden State Plaza, but cars parked on the concrete dividers of the BJ’s Wholesale and the Home Depot as people jammed into the stores. Lines of shoppers, virtually all masked, waited, six feet apart, to be allowed to enter; others pushed teetering carts back to their SUVs. A Smashburger hung a hopeful sign in the window: Yes!, we’re open. I felt great love for Jersey, for the diners and drag-racers blasting Latin music, the blind suburban sprawl and the roadside plazas, the musical instrument stores, big as airplane hangars, the banks and busted-out businesses and the rough imprint of the pharmaceutical industry, the gas stations and cloverleaf intersections and jug-handles, everything that had shaped my consciousness and made me the thorny character I am. Time after time, we’ve taken terrible hits. We’re taking another, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’d arranged a noon pickup at the farm, but the traffic in Jersey City made us late. When we pulled into the driveway, we were surprised to see it busier than we ever had before. People carried great boxes of lettuce up the hill and back to their cars; others were lined up to get pizza from the farm store. I’d expected an alleviation of the feeling that the virus was hovering above us and waiting to pounce, but the frenetic activity at the farm merely made me think I’d swapped one treacherous place for another. As I steadied myself, I heard my name called, and that seemed so improbable that at first, I thought I’d just imagined it. But no, it was our cousins, a married couple with a house on a Rockland County lake. They’d also taken the nice weather as a prompt to visit a farm. They were the first family members we’d seen in more than two months.

Not that they were easy to see: they wore masks, and sunglasses, and hats, and hugged each other to signify that they wanted to hug us but knew they couldn’t. He briefly took off his mask to let an impressively salt-and-peppered quarantine beard fly. Hilary told him he looked like a country farmer. Even underneath the protective gear, they both seemed healthy, happy to be out in the sun. This came as a great relief to me, because she’d been diagnosed with cancer in late 2019. Her case wasn’t as serious as Hilary’s, and she’d never had a terrifying prognosis, but I knew enough about the unpredictability of outcomes to worry about her daily. She’d finished her chemotherapy on March 13, right as the keys to the lockdown were beginning to turn. Radiation begins in a few weeks. Like Hilary, she chose Sloan-Kettering for her treatments, and, so far, the crisis hasn’t forced her to reschedule or delay any of the medicine she needs. I’ll take that as a positive sign — confirmation that the hospital is ready for whatever we might need from it.

The farm’s system turned out to be a manageable one: report to a makeshift desk by the barn, give a name, and wait while an assistant in a mask and gloves fetched the box. We never had to go inside the store. The whole transaction was blessedly conducted under a blue sky and the disinfectant effects of the sun. Once we’d secured our vegetables, we were in very good moods, and we were reluctant to make an immediate return to Jersey City. The day was there to be enjoyed, and the hills were Upstate green. A few months ago, there wouldn’t have been any question about it — we would have spent the afternoon exploring. We resolved to find a place to take a walk.

On the far side of the highway we’d taken to get to the farm, we found a lake, and a footpath. Masks on, we headed north. Before long, we were joined by many others: kids on scooters, bicyclists, families out for the day, and joggers, who I’d resolved to try to avoid. There was none of the furtive quality that I’ve noticed among pedestrians in Jersey City; these people were acting as they would have even if there’d been no crisis. This struck me as odd. Their county is sparser than ours is, but it has almost as many cases as we do. The virus, it occurred to me, was most certainly here: on the farm, on the footpath, in the air around us. I tried not to see the joggers as cloud-generators. That’s a terribly dehumanizing (not to mention un-Christian) way to see our fellows — as hosts, particle factories, reservoirs of lethal pathogens. Nevertheless, we’ve all watched the digital models of respiration as it happens, and the near-unavoidability of sharing air with the people around us, especially those who are breathing heavily. We, as city mice on a stroll in a part of the country where we didn’t belong, were likely occasioning the same suspicion. I want more from the farm counties than their vegetables. I want to know and love the people, too, and I want them to know and love me back. In 2019, trust was already in short supply. Where under the sun are we going to find it now?

With full awareness of the emptiness of the metaphor, I was determined to turn a corner. I was going to set aside my worries and rededicate myself to writing and music, and maybe discover a little optimism hidden in somewhere in my outlook. After examining the subject from every angle I could, I’d decided for myself that it was safe for me to get back on my bicycle; if I was going to catch the coronavirus, it wouldn’t be by taking a ride in a quiet part of town. I would arm myself and get outdoors.

But yesterday it rained, and it was Hilary’s turn to feel blue. It came on her all at once: one moment, she was struggling with the camera on her laptop, planning to make a video for her classes, and the next, she was overwhelmed. None of her worries were unreasonable. What if she needed cancer treatment and the hospital was unable to provide it?  What if our friends lost their money and had nowhere to go?  What about all of the small businesses and little enterprises that had be come so integral to our daily experience — would they get the capital to reopen, or would we never see them again?  What if institutions crumbled away, and we were faced with an economic collapse that would deny her the medications she needed? Even after the immediate threat passes (when?), how hard will survival be?  

I tried my best to be reassuring. Sloan-Kettering, I said, had made it through the first wave of the crisis; they were sufficiently well-endowed to make it through the next. Her doctors were dedicated, and they wouldn’t give up. Even if there were supply shortages, they’d find a way. New York and New Jersey had always rebuilt — we knew how to take a hit, and we’d put the pieces back together again. No matter what, we’d stay tight. I read her a chapter of Silver On The Tree aloud. I reminded her of her bravery, and told her again that she was my hero. Eventually the fears subsided. We got up, steadied ourselves, watched a bit of a Harry Potter movie. Then we both returned to work.  

Earlier in the day, with the rain rattling the windows, she’d proposed a radical plan: instead of talking about the coronavirus straight through the day, we’d wait until four o’ clock in the afternoon, limit ourselves to an hour of discussion, and then, immediately thereafter, read a book together to change our mood. We’ve spent so long coping with the immediacy of the crisis, and that couldn’t be good for us. We needed a strategy for stepping back. Other people we know who don’t live in New Jersey have disengaged from the news, or they’ve chosen to radically alter their media consumption habits; they’ve erased applications from their phones, lost themselves in video games, or conspiracy theories, held their breaths and clenched their fists, tucked themselves away in corners to ride the storm out. Could we do something — anything — like that?

It wouldn’t be easy for us. Even with the television off and our phones tucked under pillows at a safe distance away, the whistling of the virus on the wind is still audible. Yesterday I learned that my cousin, who’d been one of the first in the state to get sick, had to return to the doctor. She was told that the tightness in her chest was anxiety, which was a relief, because so many of the people who’ve fallen ill have had difficulty kicking their symptoms. After a false dawn, the health of Hilary’s friend and colleague at the University has once again deteriorated, and she’s been forced get herself an oxygen tank for home use. The trajectory of coronavirus illness is a cruelly jagged line. People believe they’re getting better, and suddenly they’ll wake up worse. We don’t yet know the long-term effects of falling ill, or whether antibodies are sufficient to rid peoples’ systems of the virus altogether. All of that makes the future difficult to model, and hard not to obsess over.

Expectations for work have changed, too. A second spike in cases may drive the fall semester online. Hilary has adapted to virtual classes, but they’re an inefficient application of her talents. Her peculiar magic requires in-person contact to work. The semester she spent sidelined because of daily radiation treatments was hard for her to endure. Straight through chemotherapy, she taught — I’d bicycle to school to pick her up, arrive early, and watch her through the window of her classroom door, scarf over her shaved head and weaker from the chemicals than she wanted to be, but always in firm command of the lesson. And this, I realized, was the only therapy for her: she’d come out of the class energized, with observations about the text, or a story about an engagement she’d had with a student, looking forward to the next day, and never backward at what she’d endured. Me, I have peeked at the weather report, and I know that it’s going to rain again tomorrow. But today, the sun is shining. We’re going to turn that corner together.

Hilary got a package of masks in the mail — three of them, hand-sewn and sold through Etsy. I chose the blue one with pink flowers on it; it’s cute, but I can’t say I wore it well. If I’m wearing a mask properly, it fogs up my glasses and makes me want to sneeze. Not a good way to be with allergy season approaching. I’m going to try my best not to sneeze directly into it. Better yet, if I have to sneeze, from pollen or from any other prompt, I’ll just stay home.

Yesterday I took a walk to Newark Avenue to post a check to the insurance company and another to the man who handles recycling for the building. I passed twenty-six people. Every one of them was masked. That included deliverymen, nannies pushing strollers, bicyclists and dog-walkers, and even some children, whose little faces were comprehensively draped, and were mainly forehead. Besides this, Jersey City was going about its day. People had places to be and things to do, and they were doing those things. If I’d passed a neighbor or a familiar shopkeeper on Monmouth St., I’d like to think I’d be able to tell who it was. But to be honest, I’m not sure I would. We may have descended into the kind of mass anonymity that cities sometimes promise, but rarely deliver.

I’ve got enough of an interest in crowd psychology to wonder whether the sympathetic identification that underpins the social contract will deteriorate now that we can’t see each others’ faces. On the street, though, I wasn’t thinking about mask semiotics. I was too busy wondering about mask effectiveness. I doubt it would protect me from a viral cloud, and I didn’t intend to get close enough to anybody to transmit pathogens of my own. No, the mask was there on my face to indicate to my neighbors that I’m taking this seriously; that their struggle is my struggle, and I’m going to do what I can to alleviate their anxiety. The block is nervous. We’ve all seen what the virus can do. Because we know, for sure, that asymptomatic people can spread the sickness, everybody is under suspicion. I don’t want to be the one to accidentally cough upwind and cause fourteen days of worry for some poor passerby.

So the mask has become an essential urban accessory. Out in Brooklyn, Megan has been distributing homemade masks to postmen, shopkeepers, and deliverypeople, along with labels explaining how to wash them properly. She brought a bag to the manager of a local grocery. After shopping for awhile, she returned to the checkout counter and discovered, to her horror, that the store had put them on sale for $6.99 apiece. She took the masks back.

The manager had a hot property on his hands. In the absence of a good transmission model, people are going to cling to whatever flimsy safeguards they think they’ve got. We’ve been waiting for more than a month for a thorough explanation of how the coronavirus spreads, and what we’ve mostly gotten is reiterations and crude refinements of the original idea: this is a respiratory disease, so try your hardest not to get sneezed on. But this raises as many questions as it answers. Is the virus present on the breeze? If I’m downwind from somebody who has it, am I going to get it? Can it come through our home ventilation systems? If I talk to somebody, or run with somebody, or kiss somebody, is that, epidemiologically speaking, all interchangeable activity?

In the absence of official guidance, we’ve applied common-sense answers to these questions. We figure that a person breathing hard, like a jogger, spells more trouble than an ordinary person with her mouth closed. Nobody wants to be caught in crowded indoor space; if there’s a window to be opened, we open it. Not every person who has tested positive knows where she picked up the virus, but many do — they caught it from their relatives, or they got it from their church choir, or they’re healthcare workers confronted with a terrifying caseload. From anecdotal accounts, we’ve cobbled together makeshift transmission models of our own. Like our homemade masks, they’re imperfect, but we’ll use what we’ve got.

At least one amateur investigator has taken it further than that. Jonathan Kay, an editor at Quillette, searched for similarities in every super-spreader story he could find. His conclusions come with caveats: he’s not an epidemiologist or a virologist, pieces in mainstream publications are loaded with journalistic bias, no one model could ever be completely comprehensive, wildly incomplete data, and so on. Nevertheless, it’s clear from his tone that he believes, wholeheartedly, in what he’s arguing — and what he’s arguing is that in super-spreader cases, most of the asymptomatic transmission can be attributed to the exchange of large respiratory droplets generated by singing, shouting, business-networking, praying, and partying hearty. Most of the super-spreader events happened at indoor get-togethers, weddings, funerals, houses of worship, and other places where social participation is meant to be full-throated. It follows from this logic that cities were right to close the concert halls and churches, but they were likely wrong to close parks.

I’d have been terrified to publish something like this. What if I’m incorrect, and I’ve encouraged my municipality to institute a policy that gets people killed? Instinctively, I want to defer to medical professionals. But it’s been more than a month of lockdown, and there’s still no consensus about whether it’s safe to walk around the block. We’ve all been forced to build private protocols, and stick to them as best as we can. I thank Jonathan Kay for having the bravery to explain the rationale behind his. Here’s mine:

• In case I am an asymptomatic spreader, I will wear a mask outdoors in order to safeguard my neighbors against chance encounters with my respiratory droplets;
• I will harbor no illusions that the mask I am wearing will protect me, and I’ll act accordingly;
• I will avoid joggers;
• I will avoid spending time in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation, and I will open windows whenever I can, even if it’s chilly out;
• I will stop worrying about the virus reaching me through the mail, and I’ll stop being afraid of delivery packages;
• That said, I will continue washing my hands vigorously after touching objects from outside of the house;
• I will stop worrying about polite conversations with neighbors, as long as we’re maintaining at least six feet of distance,
• I’ll stop worrying about persistent airborne clouds of virus in concentrations sufficient to infect me;
• I will go outside when the sun is shining, and get back on my bicycle;
• I will assume that I’ll be a survivor;
• I will reserve the right to amend or scrap this protocol when I learn more.

That’s it — at least for today.

Whenever we’ve gone to Atlanta, our first stop has always been Miller Union. Usually that means lunch, because it’s only at mid-day when the restaurant serves its homemade ice cream sandwiches, cut into squares from a great big pan and wrapped in tissue paper. For a plant-eater like me, Miller Union is an absolute delight, since there’s really no place I know in Georgia that brings out the flavor of black-eyed peas, or okra, or green farro, or grits and celery roots or any of the other delicious Southern staples with as much affection and pride as they do. I’m assured by carnivores that they’ve got one of the best burgers in town, too.

Miller Union has been closed for dinner since the start of the pandemic. But they haven’t been inactive: they’ve been providing free meals for the frontline workers at Emory Healthcare. That’s consistent with the mission of Miller Union as I’ve come to understand it — they see themselves, and rightly so, as a restaurant born from the Georgia soil. If the city is hurting, they’re hurting, too. Right now, Atlanta is in pain: more than two thousand people in Fulton County have tested positive for the coronavirus. A terrible strain has been put on those healthcare workers at Emory. I’m grateful to them for doing what they’re doing for their beautiful city, and I’m grateful to Miller Union for feeding them.

My own history with Miller Union is a funny one, and at the risk of digression, I’m going to write it down right here. The head chef is also a guitar player. He was one-fourth of a thorny, innovative dream pop group called Seely. In 1996, I’d picked up a copy of Parentha See, their first album, from the bargain bin at Tunes in Hoboken; I’m not even sure why I did, because there was nothing particularly intriguing about the cover or the band name. We brought it home, and we loved it: we played it to pieces, and any time Seely did a show in the Northeast, we were always sure to catch it. All four members of the group were extremely endearing, and we became fond of them all. When I wrote my book, I pinched the guitar player’s last name and gave it to my main character, who was a (mostly) friendly Southern kid, too.

So when we first took a chance on Miller Union, it wasn’t because of the James Beard Awards, or the restaurant’s placement on the Eater 38, or any of the local accolades they’d gotten. It wasn’t because of their commitment to locally-sourced produce and sustainable farming. No, it was because the guy at the stove had been in Seely, and we’d loved Seely, so we expected to enjoy Miller Union, too. Even so, I was shocked by the quality and creativity of the restaurant. The food is an act of culinary wizardry: everything they bring to the table simultaneously reaffirms and transcends regional cooking. In this, it’s a direct reflection of Atlanta, which is part of the Deep South, even as it’s also part of the constellation of cosmopolitan cities that stretches around the globe, and constitutes, in a way, its own nation, with its own loyalties.

Regrettably, at the moment, the Deep South maintains jurisdiction. Employees at Miller Union, and thousands of other restaurants, are about to be ordered back to work by the state government. This strikes me as a bizarre, unwise decision: testing in Georgia hasn’t been good at all, the statewide caseload continues to grow, and metro Atlanta, given its poverty rate and population density, is vulnerable to a spike in cases. The health care system is already overwhelmed. It’s worth noting that the Governor’s order contradicts the guidelines established by the White House — conditions in Georgia do not meet the liberal standards set for reopening. Nevertheless, as soon as Monday, they’re going to do it.

Miller Union won’t be doing it with them. The chef believes the back-to-work order is premature and irresponsible, and he refuses to put his staff, and his customers, in the way of a virus that is nowhere near under control. Other Atlanta restaurants are refusing to reopen, too. They’re supported, in spirit at least, by the Mayor, who was clearly stunned by the decision, and who knows she’ll be expected to clean up the mess if things deteriorate further. She’s recommending that people continue to stay home. But beyond that, it’s unclear what the municipal government can do to defy the reopening order, or if Atlanta has the resources to take care of workers who defy the Governor.

So the deterioration continues: states pulling away from the White House, major metropolitan areas attempting to wriggle away from the control of the states. Our inability to coordinate action continues to be one of the greatest hazards we face. The dream of one nation, united by science and enlightened by a collective ethical vision, seems farther away today than it ever has. Many people across the country have the saws out; they’re more than ready to chop off the West Coast and the Northeast, and fly a strategically-edited flag over the rump. But the loud resistance from Miller Union, and other businesses like it, should remind us that America’s divisions don’t end at the borders of red states and blue states. Metro Atlanta asks for a policy consistent with the one now in place in Hudson County. Parts of New York have more kinship with Oklahoma than they do with Fifth Avenue. The federal government was designed to harmonize competing claims, but in the midst of crisis, leadership has gone missing.

Me, I like Georgia, and in spite of everything, I like America. I’m not ready to give up on either one. I’m certainly not ready to give up on Miller Union. It’s exactly the sort of creative, responsible, community-first small business that governments ought to be looking to reward. I look forward, hungrily, to my next ice cream sandwich. I hope I won’t need a passport to get it.