I. March 2020: Quarantined on a Canadian Island
Shelter in place. It’s like we’re in a slow-moving disaster movie, the type of numbing horror shown on Boston’s Creature Double Features on Saturday afternoons. Now I know the numb is fear in overdrive. It’s been a frightfully long go. And this has just begun, surely to linger, leaving our lives forever altered. In the blink of an eye. Or, in this case, a cough from the throat. Still, I wake in the morning joyful, excited, grateful, looking forward to … but then I remember. And like those salmon I was once so keen on catching, I’m gutted. Minutes pass without thinking about it. But only a couple.
Thousands of miles away from our Northern California home, our place of shelter is a farmhouse in rural Canada, rented on the fly in late February 2020 when shit began to get real and visions of scheduled business meetings in Montreal evaporated. We navigated to Prince Edward County, an island in southern Ontario, on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario, knowing only that a friend of a friend had a summer house there. My only experience of Canada is a long-ago tryst with a boss who whispered expressions of adoration. Now the words uttered are cluster, transmission, and pandemic, batted around like Satan’s tennis balls.
As the pandemic worsened, ripping through Ottawa and Montreal to the north and New York to our south, many islanders appeared Covid-unconcerned. My wife and I vowed we wouldn’t step foot into stores to shop; the final nails in the traditional retail coffin were cups of coffee served to us in a café, the unmasked barista’s fingers on the lips of our mugs.
One suitcase each, a yoga mat, and a few road staples don’t make a home. But a box arrived with wind chimes and Japanese incense, and the house has a functional kitchen, Wi-Fi for work, a big bed with a decent mattress, and good light for reading. Touchstones in various time zones and a steady delivery of local whisky help blur the ghosts come the rural blackness of evening, the only illumination the waxing and waning moon.
Having sold our home in Napa, California the year prior, we were renting a cottage in Berkeley, where my wife could visit her elderly folks nearby and work on an ag-tech business she’d been developing. In the meantime, we were slowly building a little stone house on a piece of land in northern Italy, purchased in 2015. I could envision us later in life, two old ladies pulling our wheelie shopping basket over cobblestone streets to the farmers’ markets, arguing about how much cheese to buy. We agreed to remain in California while the walls went up on the Piedmontese house. Two years tops.
But now, far from anywhere resembling home, in need of grounding, and having just a handful of locked-down Canuck friends, we did the only thing that felt right: we sought out local farmers who grow good, clean food. A nearby farm offers eggs from an on-your-honor fridge; another sells Red Fife flour from his field. Vineyards and orchards produce wine and cider; beekeepers bottle honey and roll candles; cheesemakers and bread bakers leave their wares at backdoors for pick-up. Buckets hang from maple trees to catch sap while chimneys attached to centenarian barns smolder as syrup reduces, creating an elixir best drizzled on morning yogurt. For sure, it’s easier to score dope than fresh greens in the cold of a Canadian winter. But find them we did: arugula and kale and cabbage, spinach and carrots and garlic proffered from hippy farmers, soon to be socially-distanced friends.
Sandpaper hands are kept away from itchy noses, and sleeping sands remain in untouched eyes now manic and wide with worry. But there is work to be done, people to be helped, meditations to be practiced, birds to be watched, books to be read, Canadian whiskey to be nipped, hills to be hiked, and thankfully, good food to be cooked.
All we have is today.
Every town has its small-mindedness, and that’s especially true in small towns. A glimpse into the area’s psyche through social media reveals the locals to be extremely agitated by outsiders’ incursion onto this rural island. Walking most afternoons on an unpaved road through the woods, we encounter more ducks than people. However, a worrying anti-outsider fever seems to be reaching a pitch. Up and down the east coast of North America, year-rounders on Cape Cod, Long Island, islands off Maine and Maryland, Florida, and various parts of Canada are upset, using petitions and checkpoints aimed at the early arrival of summer residents or people escaping the cities. Our salt-crusted wagon with California plates has drawn prickly comments and raised brows, so we bought license plate frames (I❤️Canada!) and then rented a car. Enterprise does indeed deliver. While the area is reputed to be a relatively liberal area with a large gay community, it’s still rural and removed, and we are decidedly outsiders. Our only foray into the world at the moment is a once-weekly visit to a couple of on-your-honor farm stands to procure greens and eggs and garlic, aiming to avoid entanglements with angry locals. So, we assimilate and hope for the best, eh?
This old farmhouse sits on a rural county road on the edge of a forest, the wildlife who live there saving me from deep melancholy. Our evening show is the sunset on a finger of the lake, a natural serotonin boost. Trying not to project too far into the future is a hardship for a planner like myself, but the lack of projection does help to ground me into the moment.
Our strings are loosely tied. As an unapologetic non-breeder, and with the passing of the final member of our four-legged family months prior, we were relatively free. With decent Wi-Fi connections and a good bed, we can work from anywhere.
Italy is getting hammered by the pandemic, the northern part of the country completely shutting down, its response tailored like a buttoned-up Armani blouse. Boarding a plane for a long flight to Europe, or anywhere for that matter, seems risky. A friend in the Italian government strongly advised we wait to return to the country until the spring of next year, as they are expecting another big wave of the virus in the autumn and winter. Winter’s a thing in northern Italy, for which to be planned and prepared. I’m not yet fluent in the language, we have no producing garden, only a half-finished home, and a raging pandemic. Climbing on board a plane in such a climate is an act of hardheadedness, which I may have done in my 20s or even in my 30s, but I’m less willing at this point in my life to jump into raging waters, the current running in directions unknown. We’ve been wanting to make the switch to a life spent in Italy, but until there is a closed shell of a house and a handle on the virus, we’ll wait it out on this island.
California is quite astonishing. Like a lover you never want to cease exploring with your fingertips, we gasped at every nook of her and succumbed to every cranny of her mountain ranges, beaches and deserts, cities, foods, vineyards. The state’s innovation in arts and architecture, tech, and design make it the fifth-largest economy on the planet. And with her youthful hippy vibe, Mediterranean climate, and preoccupation with food and beverage, Northern California was a good pairing for my years working with fine wine. I had citrus trees in the backyard and fished for salmon in the nearby Pacific. I worked on farms and in fancy dining rooms and traipsed old-growth redwood forests, searching for mushrooms. It was bliss. Reared in New England, formed in Manhattan, and sculpted through travel, California always felt home.
But more and more often, returning to California from trips outside the country, I went into a deep funk. Beyond the borders of the states, the froth of US news was white noise. Arriving home was to be strapped into a chair on The Whip Amusement Park Ride, loud and head-jerking and seemingly without end, leaving me to stagger off nauseated. Knuckle-dragging through an increasingly belligerent border patrol was followed by the interminable car ride home, hours spent in snarling traffic, inching past billboards for tech companies silhouetted against taller and taller buildings demanding higher and higher rents. The ridiculous expense of living in the Bay Area, the unnerving inequality of California’s 40 million citizens, and the risible sense of entitlement and wealth contributed to my re-entry dread. Adding to that burgeoning list is an earlier and earlier ‘wildfire season’ consuming more and more land, evacuating us from houses while poisoning the air, water, and food supply. Our garden, abundant with zealously tended fruits and vegetables and beehives, at the height of its loveliness in August and September, was covered in toxic ash. Autumn became a game of Russian roulette, the gun loaded by climate change deniers, the trigger pulled by shocking environmental rollbacks. It was no longer if, but when the hungry wildfires would dine on land and homes, belching out the noxious breath of incinerated consumerism. Rolling back-outs have become SOP from a fiscally and morally bankrupt electric company that paid shareholders handsomely but neglected to update the state’s grid. The company’s responsibility for enormous wildfires of incalculable loss has insurance companies weighing whether to continue to issue California policies.
Prince Edward County reminds me of West Marin in California, the area just north of San Francisco on the Pacific coast along mouth-agape Highway One. Bolinas, Inverness, Point Reyes, Marshall, and Stinson Beach are magical towns. Both Prince Edward County and West Marin lean against an ever-present body of water with fingers of fog, small organic farms, forests, beaches, and wildlife. Living in Northern California, we went to the coast every chance we could, renting cabins and houses for a few stolen days of hiking, reading, and photography. We looked for a place to buy for many years, even securing spots at the dinky Inverness Yacht Club for this old lady to finally learn to sail. We checked listings, talked to brokers, went to open houses. The endless dollars from Silicon Valley drove prices into the stratosphere for old cottages and ranches in need of updating, prospective buyers often in bidding wars. Nothing ever clicked.
Oddly, we had the opposite experience in Italy.
We searched for a little house on a big piece of land in rural Piemonte in Italy’s northwest corner. The life there profoundly resonates with me: a small, tight house with a little farm to grow our food with land for dogs and cinghale and mushrooms, and a hard four seasons with southern Italy and beyond to explore in winter. Provincial yet sophisticated, Piemonte is famous for its wine and food, and as a Sommelier, I’d explored the region many times. A friend of a friend knew of a little, falling down house in a canyon that might be for sale. It was uninhabited. Would we like to take a look?
Fourteen families had to come together to agree to sell us their little slices of land, 20 people sitting around the Notaio’s desk to sign papers and receive checks. Common in Europe, the land is carved into small pieces and distributed to the heirs, not shockingly, mostly the males. We hired a cat-wrangler named Renato, and for $1,000 and a good bottle of grappa, he found each owner and inquired if they wanted to sell their tiny share. They all agreed.
The border between Canada and the United States closed today. We can go back to the states, but we cannot return to Canada. Hospitals in the states are begging for protective gear, widespread testing is non-existent, and an international race for a vaccine has begun. I pray this effort will be collaborative instead of being used as a political needle prick. Refrigerated trucks are parked outside hospitals in northern Italy, serving as make-shift morgues.
Outside the kitchen window, a murder of crows lands in the morning, and then again before dusk. They come in rain; they come in snow. Squawking and screeching, their presence is not to be denied. The crows’ late afternoon arrival prompts thoughts of suffering and a fervent hope this unseen dread will grant Mother Nature the reprieve she desperately needs and provide us the wisdom to understand we earthlings are all interconnected beings, our borders extending to the very edges of Earth’s atmosphere.
Our dwindling Canadian whisky supply limits us to a split shot in advance of evening. My impertinence once tagged this brown liquor déclassé, but now its mystical powers are sought. One sip of its smoky burn lifts the elephant’s foot from my chest and bars the crows’ shiny black foreboding from entering my dreams.
It’s not spring here. Inching up the thermometer towards 50F degrees, midday is just slightly warmer than a cold brew, but not a bud on the trees. It’s northern New England on steroids. Since we arrived with very little, I ordered in a few staples. Far from California and even farther from Italy, I’ve been relatively unhinged, even more so than usual (says my long-suffering wife). Knowing we have good foods to cook grounds me to the Earth and helps me to be grateful and present to tasks at hand: baking apples with maple syrup, making custardy yogurt, simmering bird stock from chickens scored from a small neighboring farm (“my husband raises ’em right. Feeds ’em healthy. Doesn’t kick ’em or nothin’”).
A local we encountered said Prince Edward County has become too much of a destination for city dwellers from Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, and Toronto. In summer months, she continued onto say, traffic is horrific and public services overwhelmed. Visitors come for the vineyards and wineries, cider houses, cheesemakers, and beekeepers, which offer their wares next door to organic farms and the studios of potters and painters. Hip-hick-ick.
My kinda scene.
The island’s Sandbanks Provincial Park, the world’s largest bay mouth barrier dune formation, draws people from throughout Canada and across the border, its three expansive sandy beaches jutting into Lake Ontario. PEC, or The County, is a 390-mile island community with 310-miles of shoreline. I’ve made a mental note to come back in a different season and photograph all of the fabulous barns, maybe in black and white? Canadian barns are classified as Pennsylvania, Dutch, or English. The larger barns dotting the Ontario province date from the 1870s-1880s with a gambrel or gable roof. Their silhouettes against the stark grey of late spring comfort me.
Italy reported 11,591 deaths, many times more than the US and more than Spain and China combined. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been infected. The US administration has been forced to purchase more ventilators after having gutted the pandemic preparedness programs. Where will this end?
