Courage

The goal, if there was one at all, was to be sure I could remember what it was like living in a surreal city gripped by mysterious disease. Assuming of course we stayed alive.

If that sounds melodramatic, looking back at the photos reminded me of the life-or-death reality of early 2020 New York City in all its weirdness.

No Exit

Ground Zero

Cheat Death

It was a time of avoiding neighbors in stairwells and deciding who to let into your Covid bubble. A time of watching YouTube videos about how to wash your groceries. A time of asking what am I doing with my life? 

Wings

It all seemed so absurd. Here we are, living in the 21st century, and instead of jetpacks for everyone we get a plague.

Tumbleweed

There was no plan on these walks other than heading out the door and wandering for hours. People were fleeing the city, or hunkering down. The streets were emptying themselves of souls. What did I think future me would want to remember about that?

Looking at the photos today, a half-decade later, some of what I looked for was humor, or at least normalcy, in deeply abnormal times. 

And the surreal. A person in a rabbit mask on Fifth Avenue.

Rabbit

Seeing a tough-looking guy admiring art is always good for a smile, but what really makes the next one for me is the way he’s so casually holding his bottle of seltzer. With pinky extended, as if to say, this is normal. The pinky was all of us.

Security

On Roosevelt Island, this young couple sitting on a seawall had clearly invited each other into their Covid bubbles. 

But then, two sheriffs approached. What would the sheriffs do? 

Free

They walked up and offered the young couple pretty much the last thing they probably wanted. Face masks.

If you didn’t know those details, the mood of the photo might be something like isolation and retreat from a looming metropolis, which was certainly real. But what I really loved about the moment was the silly futility, but also the optimism, of handing face masks to lovebirds.

Stay safe out there, kids.

Garden

I met a gardener. 

She was in an empty park, kneeling between an overgrown wall and a winding footpath. She told me she loved her job, and just look at her New York City office space, who wouldn’t? Plus, social distancing is built in.

I met a guy painting graffiti. 

Standing with brush ready, he asked me what to write. Caught off-guard by the question, I said something useless, so he went with his own idea. 

But then he got tangled up in the letters and asked me, “How do you spell ‘yourself’”?

Think

What Is Essential?

I met a tennis player. 

Smashing a ball against a monolithic face seemed like a statement about everything. 

Big Face

Her name is Miebi Iyeyemi. Recently I found her again and asked what was on her mind that day. 

Today she’s a graphic designer in France, but back then she lived in New York City, feeling alone in a dark apartment and wanting to get outside and move. “I remember picking this spot with the big face,” she said. “It was like my tennis partner.”

She remembered the day well. In fact, she told me that around the time of this photo, George Floyd was murdered, a tragedy that, in an only-in-2020 twist, helped her through those early Covid times.

She joined in marches, bike rides and Juneteenth street parties, made new friends, and left behind her tennis partner (the wall). “Fighting for a cause that we all really had faith in,” she said. “My experience completely changed.” 

This was fascinating to hear. My experience remained more solitary for sure. 

There were things I simply walked past.

Time and again I saw people sitting in parked cars, crying. Photos of this don’t exist, it was just too private, but I know where I saw it, and I see it still.

One day, morbid curiosity took me past a hospital so overwhelmed with dead bodies that it had brought in refrigerated trucks to store them. I hung around the trucks quite a while that morning, looking for what I might want to remember.

Here’s the photo.

Empty City

That’s Fort Greene Park, looking solitary, timeless and sinister. Sinister because it reminds me of the day I went to see the refrigerated trucks, which were parked just down the hill and around the corner.

I made a decision to not photograph trucks full of corpses. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember things. But now, five years later, the photo I did take — a lone jogger in misty light — reminds me of trucks full of corpses.

Thanks, memory.

Voyeur

I kept up the walking for a few months. Then suddenly I needed to leave the city because of a different kind of crisis. 

Out in rural Indiana, where I grew up, my dad had suffered a cancer scare.

There’s no good time for a cancer scare but there’s certainly a bad time, and Covid was it. My sister and I were torn. Do we race out to help our parents, and risk bringing a deadly virus into the home? Or not.

We went. 

Tomorrow

That more or less wrapped up the walking-to-stay-sane period. From living alone in Brooklyn, where my companion was the wail of sirens on Flushing Avenue, I’d been teleported deep into the woods of Indiana to live with my family, to a soundtrack of frogs and birds.

I did keep walking, though. In Indiana, then again in NYC, then Indiana, as I traveled back and forth between home in New York and home in Indiana. 

What is home anyway? What’s that photo? What is a memory?

As we all know from Instagram or just from human vanity in general, photos aren’t reality, they’re more like a choice. 

You

And taking a nice long walk isn’t just about getting in your 10,000 steps. For me, for whatever reason, it clears the mind and suddenly I figure out a fix for something that never would’ve occurred to me sitting at a computer, trying to stare a problem into submission. 

But there’s another reason I went on long walks in Indiana. My parents’ place is so remote, there’s no cellphone signal in the house. However, if you walk deep enough into the woods, up through the hills, you can make a call. 

I know exactly where the cellphone signal hits. It’s near a vine-tangled tree along a rising ridge. 

Pass the tree in one direction and you’re connected to the world. You can WhatsApp with a friend in Taiwan. You can Slack your boss and reassure her that you’re hard at work, coming up with fixes. 

Pass the other way, the signal fades and you leave the drama behind, at least for the moment. 

It’s a chance to make your getaway, but only if you’re heading the right direction. I can relate to that, can’t we all? Either way I snapped a photo.