The supernatural life of plants in a pandemic
The first night the hum of the freeway died. When you live as close to the road as I do, the sound of traffic is a sign of life. With it comes work, and travel, and connection.
Everyday, when I sit down to work in my little home office, I look out over the bay. On a good day I can see the Bay Bridge and The Golden Gate, and one giant pool of glistening blue between us. I can see tiny cars full of people pouring into the city like blood pumping through an artery. San Francisco, with its shiny skyline in miniature is like an eternally beating heart and the freeways are its life source.
The morning after they told us to stay home, the world was eerily still. If it weren’t for my dogs begging to be walked and the line of cars inching their way toward the Costco across the freeway, I would have sworn I was the sole survivor of the apocalypse.
The bridges were empty, the city’s arteries atrophied. With the flow of traffic, so goes the flow of dollars. Without it millions will lose their jobs. In the coming months, the slow trickle of traffic will become not so much a sign of life but of destruction and uncertainty. It will signify much more than commerce or connection, it will become a symbol of a new way of life.
The night the freeway died, the silence brought a sense of isolation, but it also offered an absence, soon filled by the previously muffled sounds of nature. As we stored away in our homes, abandoning the freeways, and banks, and offices, and malls, wildlife thrived. Goats ran free in the streets in Wales, coyotes roamed the city of San Francisco, and the rats came out in droves.
The next morning, as I walked my dogs around a seemingly deserted neighborhood at an unusually slow pace, my mind was racing. Housewives fighting for toilet paper; nursing homes transformed into morgues; empty offices and shuttered storefronts. The scenes threatened to consume my consciousness.
It didn’t happen overnight, but as the days progressed, I started to sense signs of life beyond the freeway. Every chirping bird and rustling leaf beckoned me out of my head and into my immediate surroundings. I was here. In the moment. And life was everywhere. My thoughts shifted from armageddon to microcosm. I was no longer overwhelmed by the inevitable, but consumed by the unseeable.
There’s nothing more frightening or fascinating to me now than the vastness of everything. Above me is a universe I can’t imagine, below me, a million I can’t see.
My walks were journeys into the unknown, where contemplation, not panic ruled. I wondered at the power of a single cell and the enormity of the universe. I contemplated reincarnation and our individual responsibility, not to other humans, but to the world we inhabit.
A flower ceased to be a flower. It was a universe, a second life, a portal to another dimension. I considered picking them, but what destruction would I bring? What collateral damage? There would, no doubt, be fatalities beyond a single flower.
So I captured them on my phone and took them home, to bring the supernatural to life. I made poppies with peepers, a smoking rose, and tiger daisy with actual tiger eyes. It’s never been so crystal clear to me how interconnected we all are. Not just us. Not just humans. ALL. OF. US.
If each of us has 8.4 million potential lives to live, like the Padama Purana says, how many will be lived in miniature? There’s nothing more frightening or fascinating to me now than the vastness of everything. Above me is a universe I can’t imagine, below me, a million I can’t see.
There’s a giant echium bush around the corner from my house. It has a deformity that turns its conical purple blooms into bright green, undulating paddles, speckled with tiny flowers. It could be fasciation, a super trippy condition that turns otherwise normal plants into psychedelic mutants, or maybe it’s a tear in the space-time continuum. Either way, the echium looks like it got stuck coming back from another dimension. Like those alien blossoms are perpetually adrift in cosmic limbo. I’d always found it fascinating, but it wasn’t until the hum of the freeway died that I saw the echium for the intergalactic wanderer it might be.
It’s been 38 days since they told us to stay home. The death toll has skyrocketed and the price of oil has taken a nosedive. As the cars have left the road and the wheels of capitalism have ground to a halt, something miraculous has happened. Signs of life – WILD LIFE – have returned to our cities.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if life never went back to “normal”.
Would the freeway become a plant bed? Would the tigers stalk Wall Street? Would the holes in the ozone slowly close? Would my echium give birth to a new breed of multidimensional alien life form?
It sounds to me like we may never know.
It’s night again, and I hear the hum of the freeway building.