Alone in Albuquerque: Walking through the Covid-19 Isolation

Part 1: The Isolation

Social distancing is what we do when shopping in person. It's keeping six feet from other shoppers, wearing face covering, and, for me, it is also avoiding certain store aisles. Those are the junk food aisle, with its myriad of temptations, and the first aid aisle, for hand sanitizer and isopropyl alcohol, not to forget toilet paper, have long since been hoarded away by our neighbors. With sufficient public compliance, social distancing will slow the viral spread. This I believe. But social distancing is hardly the whole story.

Social isolation, a harsher term less frequently heard, is the daily reality of those of us who live alone and are without jobs deemed "essential". It is the other face of covid-19 illness. In the last month, I estimate that I have averaged, per week, no more than 20 minutes of face-to-face, person-to-person conversation. My most sustained conversation came when donating blood two weeks ago. Not only did I answer important questions about my medical history and verify the spelling of my name and the date of my birth, I also exchanged tone of voice, body gesture, facial expression, and other nonverbal cues with the nurse, a fellow human, seated only a few feet from me. With a hemoglobin count testing out to 15.6, I was cleared to donate. She nodded and smiled at me in approval. This was a physical interaction that, until a month ago, I took for granted and rarely noticed.

Initially I expected New Mexico Governor Lujan-Grisham's wise stay-at-home order against coronavirus spread to be a boon. That solitude I cherish would become even more abundant! Instantly I would become less distracted and more productive. This blog would be receiving new posts daily!

It has not turned out that way. Solitude now maroons me. Sure, there is the internet and online classes mediated by Zoom. I use them, and they do help, but only in the way that aspirin helps when one has a toothache. In this virtual stand-in community of ours, something significant is absent.

What has helped -- indeed, what has become essential to me -- is the rigid routine of my afternoon walk, taken six days a week, always the same route, always 14 miles in length, typically taking three and a half hours. West down Lomas to UNM, north and then east along the spillways, passing by the Big-I, finally south down Pennsylvania, and soon back at home. Maybe it is the mindless routine or the repetition, but whatever it is it assuages my isolation. In it, something significant is present.

Superficially, each day's ramble is predictable. Day to day the scenery changes little, and yet, like the weather, every walk, in its details, is different. It is those details and how they link to the land, the sky, the wind, and the weather that I want to write about. They are what connects this post, and ones to come, to this blog's theme of geology and the human condition.


Part 2: The Walk

Spring afternoons here commonly take on a brightness leaving me squinting like Charles Bronson in a Spaghetti Western. Sunscreen clogs the pores of my face, returning them to the state of my adolescence. Lip balm likewise leaves a waxiness on my lips, and a taste of peppermint in my mouth. The hat I wear is broad-brimmed to shade my face and neck. Its once-shapely contours have slowly dissolved away by the Florida downpours it has endured. It too protects against the elements, until I have carry it in hand against the unrelenting winds of this first Albuquerque spring. Those winds, how they desiccate, stripping moisture, rendering this land upon which I walk a thirsty tan and yellow, domed by deepest blue and meandering white wisps of clouds. Beside me barren tumbleweeds roll along in their breeze, spewing seeds upon the poured concrete that will wait and wait until rain at last comes. "Sirocco" and "Santa Ana" -- winds elsewhere in the world have names. Surely these must be named as well.

Last week, afternoon relative humidity fell to about 15 percent. Compared to an air temperature of 73 F, the dew point temperature was just 12 F. Is it any wonder that the cracking and chapping of my skin extends from my lips down to my feet? All of this is unprecedented in my life. Last July I escaped a home on the hot, humid, and hurricane-prone Gulf Coast of Florida. I came here seeking change, a geologically dynamic landscape, and, most of all, relief from humidity. Evidently I have succeeded.

As I walk past the Big-I, that is, the interchange of Interstates 25 and 40, the dire state of our economy, free falling now into recession, is nowhere heard. Instead, what I hear is a ceaseless low drone of traffic steadily flowing, a parade, without beginning or end, of tractor trailer rigs, emblazoned with names and logos like C.R. England and Saia LTL, hauling freight -- toilet paper even -- to empty store shelves across the Southwest. "Keep Calm and Carry On", the Brits say, and they, the truckers, do. One need only listen. It is the lull that I like. I keep pace with it, as if it were a metronome, and I, too, carry on and walk on. Fourteen miles is too far to tarry long.

For miles I follow the North Diversion Channel. It is an engineered spillway of enormous volume, said to dispose of as much as two Olympic-sized swimming pools of water per second. Within a city receiving only nine inches of rain per year, such a beast might seem unusual. But it, like the other spillways crisscrossing the city, is not. The Sandia Mountains immediately to the east receive two to three times that precipitation near the summit. Albuquerque is built on an incline, falling about 1200 feet from the Sandia foothills down to the Rio Grande. For the urban pedestrian that I am, spillways are the alternative to the streets. Most come with paved bike paths. Passing behind junk yards and back lots, spillways are home to feral cats, liquor-swilling vagrants, and daredevil skateboarders. Here, in these channels, collects the city's graffiti and detritus, its cast-off clothing, like a single sneaker still in good shape, its Circle K and 7-Eleven fountain drink plastic cups that never decompose, and its broken, derelict furniture. If the urging of my bladder is strong enough, I can seek relief beside a skimpy, windblown bush, unafraid of being collared by a cop for urinating in public. Here resides the wildlife I know: pigeons roosting beneath the interstate overpass, trilling road runners pecking the hardened soil for lizards, and the occasional coyote prowling for backyard chickens.

Thus, this land that I walk is my wilderness, an Arcadia for those of us confined -- not by law but simply by lack of a car -- to the city for the duration of the pandemic. Walden Pond it is not, nor is it the virgin wilderness portrayed in Ansel Adams calendar photos. I leave that world to the ecological purists, those who, in their dedication, will drive for days on end questing after the pristine, in the process converting untold gallons of Permian petroleum into heat-trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide.

As this city is my place of exile, it is also, when the wind blows right, my paradise upon the earth. Down the channel sometimes blows, from the General Mills plant at Paseo del Norte, the luscious aroma of coffee cake baking, of cereal grain, and of crusty, flaky shortening sweetened with caramelized sugar, and adorned with pieces of walnut. It is something to die for.


Part 3: The Self of Flesh and Blood

What is that significant thing absent in this isolation? And what is that other significant thing present during my walks? These are the questions motivating this essay. A single answers suffices for both: it is my body. It is my physical self, that self of 129 pounds that is moving, metabolizing, and mortal. Maybe too this self is manufacturing malign coronavirus particles, though, surely, the marrow of my bones is readily replacing my recently donated blood. It is also a sensual self that knows the world by sensing it, and a carnal self acting in and on the world. I smell the coffee cake, I salivate, and I want some. Desire drives me. Are you any different?

Eastern gurus, old time Bible preachers, and New Age metaphysical celebrities lecture us instead about the spiritual. It is claimed to be immortal, uncorrupted, free of desire, and all the rest. Well, at least it is in theory and in our hopes. In contrast, I celebrate the opposite: the physical self that I know because I live through it. This life, threatened as it is by viral infection, and this earth, with its trash in the spillways, are enough for me. It is the world that inhabits me.

posted 2020-04-14, updated 2020-04-14