Part 1

Maybe it’s because our father loved mountains — and hiking — that I do, too. Growing up in a national park probably helped. You can climb Hot Springs Mountain from right behind the Fordyce Bathhouse on Central Avenue. On some Sundays, we’d take the scenic drive home over West Mountain, up Whittington Avenue from Dad’s church. Every now and then, he’d take us further into the Ouachita Mountains to hike. We’d camp in an old canvas tent and play cards by lantern light. He’d fry fish for breakfast. We’d find box turtles and tarantulas.

Dad once told me he hoped that, if he ever got old and crotchety, he’d just run up a mountain until his heart stopped. His heart stopped without that, but he hiked right up until the end.

If Dad and Hot Springs got me started, why has hiking remained so important to me? I was telling a friend about our recent trip hiking New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, and I found her looking puzzled. “Why do you like hiking so much?” she asked.

Part of it, of course, is the beauty. Hikes are almost always in lovely places.

I spent a summer during college as a salad girl in Glacier National Park. Six days in a row slopping together blue cheese dressing and stashing little glasses of tomato juice into ice chips for waiters to pick up, then off in a Red Jammer to Grinnell Glacier or Gunsight, the Garden Wall or Granite Park. Heart-stirringly beautiful, all of it. In grad school, I wrote to newspapers all over the Rockies, hoping to land a job amid mountains. As a cub reporter in Colorado Springs, I joined in the griping about our $110/week paychecks: “Do they think we can EAT Pikes Peak?” But I loved living alongside its majestic immensity.

The Rockies were my “local” range in those years: the San Juans and the Sangre de Cristos, the Gore and Collegiate ranges. The ghost towns and the sheepherders, high in their silent reaches. Later, living in D.C., it was the Blue Ridge we’d turn to. L.A. offered a magnificent array, from the Santa Monica mountains to the San Gabriels to the Eastern Sierra. Now, in New York, it’s the Catskills we hike each spring and fall, and Acadia in the summer — thanks to my sister, who has climbed every peak in the park.

Just the presence of mountains nearby — knowing they’ll be there when you can find the time to go to them — is heartening. The promise of a lift up out of the dailiness of life. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. The silence — and the creak of a giant tree, the scrunch of pine needles underfoot. Day hikes in our local ranges have fed our souls, soothed our worries, strengthened us.

The big hikes add other elements: The uncertainty, sometimes fear, about the degree of challenge. The grit-your-teeth dedication as you keep on going at it, even as your goal seems to recede into the distance. The relief and satisfaction when you’ve done it.

For years, “I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro” was my go-to offering when a meeting leader asked that we “tell something surprising about yourself.”

I was 26 when I made that five-day trip on Kilimanjaro. Three of our small group were teenaged boys; they were the ones who didn’t make it to the top. I think they didn’t want it badly enough. You have to believe it’s your only chance. Otherwise, the headaches, the exhaustion, the vomiting, and the scree at the top that robs each stride of half its gain, will prevail.

After I hiked Kilimanjaro, Dad wrote me, “I have news for you: If you climbed Kilimanjaro because it’s there, it still is.” Grandmother wrote, “I don’t understand why anyone would want to walk up a huge mountain.”

Part 2

April 1, 2020

Feeling very odd, yesterday and today.  That stoned feeling you get when a bad cold is coming on.  Not unpleasant.  A little floaty and blurred.  I’ve been coughing and sniffling – but honestly I’ve done that, to various degrees, ever since we came back from India.  

Then last evening, I had that bit of fever.  I could tell from how hot my eyes felt in the back.  It was very low – not even 100 degrees.  I went to bed early and slept a long time – woke up with considerable muscle pain and took an aspirin, went back to sleep.  The muscle pain seems very like what I’ve had in my hip previously, especially when I’ve sat on the couch too long.

This morning, reading our breakfast poem, I felt short of breath.

So if I add all this up it could freak me out. And yet each of these things has various possible explanations.  Including perhaps fantasy, right?  Being scared is enough to make you short of breath, after all.  This is what Nell talked about – all the mind games as you try to assess your symptoms and their “progress.”

No diarrhea.  A cough that is sometimes dry but often not – often productive.  Nasal stuff.  All of those are atypical for the dreaded thing.  

We got our exercise bike yesterday, and assembled it.  Fits perfectly in the spot in the kitchen/DR where D’s desk had been.  Took the little (my former) glass desk apart and put it under our bed.  Put Diane’s plants in the living room.  Hoping they can withstand the radiator heat.  Trying to keep them off the most direct spots.  

Had a lovely little FaceTime near dinnertime, with James.  He sat alone and didn’t fiddle with the phone.  Didn’t even have a copy of the book we were reading him – the one we’d sent along for us to read together. And though we’d only read it once, he remembered it, and when we’d come across the goose, he’d honk, the goat, he’d maaa.  Then we sang Old MacDonald, and he was wonderfully boisterous.  It was such a treat. Such a gift.  

April 2

Email to Laurisa:

Well, thanks to you, I had a videoconference with my doc this AM.  I’m so grateful!  It just happened all off a sudden, there she was, signaling me to pick up for a videoconference.  “Tell me your symptoms,” she said in her brisk New Yawk way, “too much email back and forth wastes time.”  I told her my symptoms: 100 degree fever in the afternoons for three days, coughing, muscle aches at night and a weird floaty/zingy/disoriented/not unpleasant feeling.  And tired.  Very tired. She said, well it sounds like you may have the virus.  If all goes well, you’ll have a mild case.  It takes about 14 days.  You’re doing the right thing.  Get lots of rest, drink lots of water, Tylenol when your muscles ache.  Try to stay away from David.  Carry on.

That was essentially it.  

Email to family and friends:

Dear ones,

I have been having some mild symptoms for a few days, and figured I had a cold. Out of an abundance of caution, as we say these days, I had a video conference with my doctor this morning.  She listened to what I’ve been experiencing, and said I may well have the virus.  She was not at all alarmed. We agreed that it sounds like a mild case.  She recommends I continue doing what I have been — resting a lot and drinking lots of water.  Staying inside. Take Tylenol for muscle aches. Might last 14 days, she said. I had a good long sleep last night. If anything I think I may have had the thing for several days and won’t have too many more to go.  

Please don’t worry overmuch about this.  I am sure I am going to be okay.  

Love,

Geneva

April 3

Email to Laurisa:

My symptoms are SO mild.  It’s almost embarrassing.  I think we all had this notion that — you got this, you die!!!!!  I mean, we read about people feeling no symptoms, or people with mild to moderate cases, but I didn’t picture this. That I, a 72-year-old, could just feel exceedingly tired, cough a bit, have low fevers, feel a bit floaty and blurred.

I am mostly just so so tired.  I just want to lie (or sit) and read.  I do have a kind of shallowness of breathing.  Hard to say a whole sentence without taking a breath.

Anyway, I think I must be able to count at least six days in, so maybe not much more than a week more.  My fever has been getting less and less already.

Thank you for having me talk to my doc. I feel reassured that she was so quickly responsive.  I’ll never forget the look of her there, all white-robed and brisk, barking at me from the screen!

Tell me how you are.  I am going to be absolutely fine.

Later on April 3, another email to Laurisa:

I think the smell thing freaked me out, but then I reasoned that you lose your smell with colds.  I definitely seemed to be having a cold.  And sometimes you get fevers.  It sounds sillier than it felt.  I surely didn’t imagine this is what the dreaded virus would feel like!  I still can’t wrap my head around it, though I wouldn’t say I have any doubts now that I have it.

But I really do clearly have a mild/moderate case.  I just sleep and sleep.  I have a low fever every now and then.  I’m not very hungry but David feeds me good soups and the like.  He leaves them at our bedroom door. He is very loving and I am loving not having to think about anything but getting well. He gets back to everyone to let them know how I’m doing. I had to miss the O sibs Zoom today.  I just couldn’t do it.  It actually frightened me to think of having to summon up the energy to do that!  I don’t want to Zoom with anyone now for a while.

Nell is SO MUCH better!!! That heartens me, since it was just a week ago that she had the test.  For now I’m just keeping my head down (literally, most of the time) and devoting myself to beating this thing.  I think my body is doing a really good job of it.  David is doing well, no signs so far.  I really don’t want him to get it.

April 4

David, bless his heart, is playing “For Geneva” on the piano, and I’m having a “lime rickey.” He brings me this sweetened lime and fizzy water to cheer me in the afternoons

Nobody seems to know what to make of this virus. I had no idea that having such difficulty digesting things was part of it.  Though for others, it’s diarrhea.  It seems to rear its head in so many different unwanted ways, and the only clear mutual signal is absolute slam-the-head-to-the-bed exhaustion.  I’ve never felt so wasted.  

That first feeling of horror when I couldn’t smell the hand cream?  And then, when Nell got sick? I thought the world was over.  That’s what the message is.  Until it isn’t.  For the lucky ones of us.  You get it, you get through it.  God willing.  I just told David that, if a man could love me as much as to write a song like that for me, I had to live.

And Lord knows, it’s the truth. So much to live for. Watching Ben’s video of hide and seek (gawd, I wrote “sick”) — that moment when James shoots up from behind a chair, shouting: “Don’t find us, Daddy, don’t find us, Daddy!”  “James didn’t think that through thoroughly,” David said as we guffawed. And Petra, trying on all the voices and special effects available on Marco Polo to cheer us all up. Oh my goodness, I’m a lucky girl.

I know it.

But this is trying, trying stuff. To feel so depleted. And to wonder – surely this can’t be all? To wonder if, still, for all the relative moderation of your symptoms — if somehow it will turn to the horror that robs so many of their very breath.

I don’t think so for a moment.  Not now.

PS: But I am mindful, often when I can’t sleep, sometimes in the night, that I want this to be me:

“Often, the virus doesn’t start out feeling deadly, said Katrina Hawkins, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University Hospital in the District. Many patients experience mild symptoms for about a week, then recover.”

And not this:

“But in a small fraction of cases, the disease takes a sudden, dramatic turn. A dry cough and shortness of breath will give way to acute respiratory issues and dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. The body’s immune system unleashes a storm of protective cells and other molecules that can overwhelm vital organs, sometimes causing more damage than the virus itself.”

The same story says some 60 percent of deaths in New York are men.  I am even more mindful that I do not not not not  want to give this to David.

April 6, 2020

Another day, another…dilemma.  The sore eye is not pinkeye. It’s uveitis, come back to haunt my right eye, this time.  Good news is I know what to do, so the drops resume.  Let’s hope they work.  I’ll talk to Dr. Llop again in two or three days, she said at our teleconference.

Had more energy today, marginally.  But cough seems a little stickier, voice gookier.  Maybe a touch more breathless, but who’s to say.

Nell has been the essence of sweetness.  Sending me pictures of turtles. A kind of honey I should order.  Podcasts I might like.  And videos and photos of her sweet children.  What a lovely woman she is. What a loving daughter.

It’s a strange thing to be this sick but to have it mostly be about just being so dang tired.  Lethargic.  Listless.  Not moved to do anything. ANYthing.  But I realize I’m lucky if that’s the worst of it. My fevers seem mostly to have gone away. Lots of aches last night, but the Tylenol takes care of them.  Actually, I’m not sure about the fevers.  Both the last two nights I woke up in great sweats.  I thought I was too warm, but I don’t think that was it.  So maybe the fevers come in the night.  I sort of hope that’s right, since I read somewhere that it’s the fevers that really work the body up to resist the virus. 

It’s odd how little is agreed upon about it.  My doc didn’t seem to know that red eyes, pain in the eye – this is sometimes a symptom.  I found quite a bit about it once I started having it. 

Oh well. Back to listlessness, not all bad.

April 8, 2020

I didn’t write yesterday, and I’m not writing today.  But I finished “Middlemarch.” And I determined that all those sirens are not coming for me, thank the good lord. (Next up to reread: Anna Karenina.)

April 9, 2020

I want so badly to be able to size this thing up.  I fall so far short of doing it, even to myself, in moments of quiet reflection.  It seems one of the hardest things that has happened to me – to us.  It also seems preposterous that I could be getting away so easily if this is indeed COVID-19, and I am indeed 72.  Which both seem to be true.

There are moments when the terror of it pushes through the fatigue and listlessness. One afternoon in particular, when the weight on my chest seemed to be strengthening and I lay in the gloomy room on (yet another) rainy day and listened to the sirens, feeling the pain in my eye:  I thought hard about what really would happen, if this seemingly mild to moderate case of mine turned suddenly wrong.  All the normal ready-for-the-hospital notions seem ridiculous in  the harshness of this virus.  Who needs books or chargers or extra underwear when the question is whether you can breathe?  David would not be able to come with me in the ambulance, no one could visit me. All my normal “I’ve been so lucky in my life, I’d go now with regret but no feelings of having been robbed of a wonderful life” – all of them came up against “please not like this, not all alone, struggling to breathe,” hooked (if I was lucky) to a machine that would suck as much life out of me as it put in.

Pause here to rassle with CVS to get them to home-deliver my uveitis medication.

But even that quotidian detail shows how right the other part is – the getting away so easy.  800 people died in this city yesterday alone from this ghastly plague.  The black and brown died in far greater numbers – the people with less protection, shelter, ability to distance;  the people who are doing the essential work (alongside the health workers) so that the rest of us can stay cozy-safe and get our groceries and our exercise bicycles and our crossword puzzles delivered.

I almost always knew that I was going to be okay.  The moment when I couldn’t smell the Vicks VapoRub – that was the first moment of fear.  A couple of days later, the three days in a row of a fever. That was another. By the time Laurisa told me to contact my doctor, it seemed logical enough. Just get the facts on the record, whatever this is. When the doctor called me the next morning and said, well, sounds like you have it, sounds like it’s mild to moderate. Go to bed, drink a lot of water, and Tylenol for the aches and pains. 

Then when my eye began to hurt, and we researched it and it seemed a lot of people had red eyes in connection with the virus. But mine felt disturbingly like the uveitis I’d had so recently in the other eye.  So thank goodness I could start the drops. It was a huge relief because I didn’t lie there and think that I’d be in the hospital going blind at the same time I couldn’t breathe.  Although, I know, why care about blindness then?  Except of course that you hope you’ll be one of the few who comes out of the hospital.

And the sheer torpor. Lassitude. Inability to care about anything, not wanting to eat, listen to anything, write anything. Being actually terrified, that first Friday of the O sib Zoom, of the notion that I’d have to go on and act normal.  So far from attainable, that state of normal.  In a way all of that was the easy part.  The inability to do anything was so crushing a fact that there was no castigating myself for not doing anything. For once.

But honestly most of the time I had no doubt I’d be okay.  My fever never went frighteningly high.  My coughs were occasionally annoying but never terrifying, as Nell’s had been.  I was able to read and read and read.  I devoured Middlemarch. It delivered me from evil those four or five days, drew me like a barge along a canal. There was no doing anything but that, and it was such deliciousness to have it.

Wish I could tell George Eliot. 

April 11, Happy Birthday sweet Laura Grace!

I think I failed us yesterday – no writing.  

It was my best day yet.  Woke up feeling remarkably well.  Sat up quite a bit, a brief Zoom chat with the O sibs. Some good laughs and warm talks with D, with whom I am now actually sitting in the LR, albeit a good long ways away. TWO episodes of Broadchurch.  It was a turning point, an “I’ve surely got this sucker beat now” moment.

And, as such things go, of course I’m much tireder again today.  This thing like torpor. I’ve sought the right word.  Lassitude. Exhaustion. Fatigue is the usual choice, but it’s far too weak. They all need “utter” in front of them.  Arthur laughed when David said “robust fatigue,” but it’s a good phrase for it.  (D said he thought saying “extreme” would have scared them too much.)  Robust is right.  It’s so STRONG, this total sapping of your strength.  It takes over everything.  Even your mind.  Your usual tussle to quit worrying about this or that niggling thing, to replace that with thoughts about what you look forward to or what gave you joy that day: None of that goes on.  Complete takeover:  It was me, Middlemarch and the bed – sometimes sleep, often just lying there.  And the occasional terror. Not often, though. Even that couldn’t push through the robustness of the fatigue very often.

Today I still know I’ll be okay, but the day when I begin really to delve into anything is further off than I’d pictured yesterday.

Tomorrow is Easter. Imagine.  The parade will be “virtual” — along with all the Easter services. 

We’ll “tune in” to Jeff’s service, though I’d love to hear some glorious music.  But can anyone have choirs? I guess not.  But they can have organs.  We’ll listen to Jeff (10:30) then tune into Washington National Cathedral (11:15) to hear “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”  We’ll play it here, too.  Glory, hallelujah.  I am so grateful myself to have risen from my little tributary of the valley of the shadow of death.

April 12, 2020, Easter morning!

For long I lay in bed in great dismay

We thought that I would surely pass away

But now we have arrived at Easter Day

And – hallelujah! — I am here to stay!

Haha!  This ridiculous ditty came to me immediately upon awakening this morning (only I thought “decay” rather than “dismay.” Decided on a rewrite!). 

I got my first hug this morning.  It went right in to my little heart and soul.

April 18, 2020

I posted this article on Facebook:

There will be no quick return to our previous lives, according to nearly two dozen experts. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term.

I added this comment: 

“This otherwise helpful article, like so much COVID-19 reporting, falls far short of acknowledging how woefully inadequate is our current testing. I began my own bout with the virus on March 30. Eleven straight days in bed, fever, aches, indigestion, loss of smell and utter inability to do anything but lie there. My doctor, with whom I had a video consultation at the outset, told me I likely had a mild-to-moderate case of the virus. I later wrote to ask her how I could be tested. You aren’t eligible, she said. Why? I asked. You aren’t sick enough. I have since heard personally of a dozen people who had the same experience. One woman was told that, unless you go to the ER, you aren’t sick enough to be tested. As for the value of the blood donation after having the virus, the form I filled out in my attempt to donate said I was not eligible unless I had tested positive. Now we hear repeatedly that widespread testing is essential to our attempted recovery as a nation. How did we fall this far behind? Who is in charge of seeing that we move forward? If we don’t even understand just how short we’ve fallen, we are truly screwed.”

Scores of comments showed how many share this concern about our government’s failing response.

April 20, 2020

Today I went to rest in the guest room for the first time in a looooong time.  I squeezed out some of the hand cream on the bedside table – the stuff I used almost exactly three weeks ago today.  I smelled it.  It was awful.

Thank goodness.

On March 4, 2020, Geneva Overholser spoke at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics on the topic, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” She was interviewed by Charles Overby, the center’s chairman, and Greg Brock, a senior fellow there. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Charles Overby: Welcome to the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. I’m Charles Overby. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to what I know is going to be an interesting and informative evening. I’m joined by my colleague Greg Brock, who’s a senior fellow at the center with a distinguished career in journalism. And we both have the privilege of having a conversation with Geneva Overholser. Geneva was an editor at Gannett, and she has done so many things in journalism. For all the distinguished people that we’ve had here, I can’t think of another person who has done more different things in an excellent way in the field of journalism.

Geneva was editor of the Des Moines Register when it won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for Public Service. She was on the editorial board of the New York Times. She was ombudsman for the Washington Post. You know, any one of these things would probably be a capstone for anybody else.  She was director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. She was chairman of the board of the Pulitzer Prize. She’s really done it all in journalism, and the fact that she and her husband David Westphal, who’s here with us tonight and also was a distinguished journalist. But they’ve come here to Oxford and Ole Miss to share insights with us. It’s a terrific thing Geneva has been spending time, after you’ve had such a distinguished career, thinking about some of the major issues before us. And we titled this program tonight, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” Sometimes, titles can be overhyped and so, Geneva, I would ask you just to get started; is there in fact a crisis in journalism and democracy and if so are they related?

Geneva Overholser:  Thank you, Charles, and thank you for that lovely introduction. I think what it really means is I’m old but I’m glad to be here. And I do think this is not one statement that is overhyped. We do have a crisis and I bet most of us would agree that these two crises are related. There is no question that good journalism is good for democracy. It helps people understand their communities and helps people come together. Healthy communities have often gotten that way in substantial part because they had good newspapers and there’s no question that the demise — it’s  way too strong a word — but the enormous weakening of journalism that we have seen particularly locally has contributed to a sense that people are not confident about what they know. Many people are divided because the sources of information have fractionalized.

The evidence has been building for weeks – no, for months – but in the past few days it has struck me with a thrilling clarity: The New York Times is giving us news – good and bad, soft and hard — about a richly representative array of Americans. That hoary presumption that all the news that’s fit to print is male (and white) seems at long last to be under serious challenge.

Last Friday’s Weekend Arts II section, and yesterday’s Sunday Business section ( I read the paper online AND in print, and I sense that this shift may be more evident in print) provided delicious examples. Arts (April 20, 2018) had a lead story on the artist Adrian Piper and her new show at the Museum of Modern Art. Also on the cover was a conversation with the U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jacqueline Woodson, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Inside, the riches continued: a wonderful gathering of faces (and topics) from all over the American spectrum. Continue reading Our most important news organization is quietly pulling off a revolution →

Boy, is this ever a moment: Sexual harassment has come out of the dark.  That’s a great thing. But it’s worrisome. too. The conversations – and the events – are raging like wildfire on terrain that is utterly unfamiliar. Could we think about some guidelines to keep things as fair and truthful as possible? Some considerations to help us generate more light and less heat?

Here are four possibilities:

1. Accusations should not be anonymous. We should do everything we can (I’m looking at you, fellow journalists) to encourage the people who make sexual harassment accusations to do so under their own names. This honors a longtime journalistic commitment to render information verifiable and to prevent people from harming others with impunity. It’s a good rule for society to follow more broadly. There will be exceptions on this difficult topic (several women making credible claims together anonymously against a very powerful public man?) but the fewer the exceptions, the more progress we’ll make. The fact that so many women have been willing to go on the record lately is an enormous part of why we are where we are today.

2. Not all sins are equivalent. The term sexual harassment seems to be stretching to cover an awful lot of ground: From a wink and a whistle, through an uncomfortable conversation or an unwelcome kiss, to an erection pressed against you, having your breasts grabbed or a hand thrown under your skirt – all the way up to sexual assault. Throwing all offenders together is unfair and inaccurate. It is essential that we get as close as we can to the truth of each report, uncomfortable as the details may be.

Continue reading Can we have a better sexual-harassment conversation? →