An Oregonian Vaccination Odyssey
On the Salem Fairgrounds, In-N-Out red, post-vaxx blues, and hope for a post-pandemic era.
The way my shots worked is a few weeks ago I got a text from my friend who has his ear to the ground and he claimed I could get vaccinated at the Oregon State Fairgrounds, easy. He added a link to the sign-up page at Salem Health. Every single time slot was open. I scheduled a visit the following day.
The next morning, I left Lana to school herself and drove south, relishing the short solo trip. After hurtling down I-5 aways, I was pleased to find the entrance to the vaxx site at Silverton Road and Lana Avenue. I followed a line of cars through a field then into the Livestock Pavilion, where ID was checked and we were told to keep going, then the line lead out between the historic Poultry Building and Horse Stadium, and into the parking lot by the Amphitheater. I followed signs under the fair lift to join a host of fellow Oregonians lined up under large tents in front of the Jackman Long Building.
We stood in line for a while and temps were chilly so I reminded myself to bring a jacket. Inside were a mixture of National Guardsmen and medical workers. I checked in at a computer station, impressed at how smoothly the process moved and how cheery most everyone was. More meaningful than the DMV and less fun than a Disney ride is how I’d describe the queue, except at the end a kindly old woman stabbed a little steel needle into my arm and pushed something into my blood. I hope it was the vaccine!
All in all, I was at the fairgrounds for an hour or so. On the way back, I stopped at In-N-Out and later that day The Oregonian reported how simple it was for Portlanders to get vaccinated at the state capital.
Call it fear, I guess. I don’t want to catch Covid-19.
Let’s set aside the 570,000+ American death toll (3m worldwide) for a moment and just look at the common symptoms: chest tightness, extreme fatigue, head and body aches, loss of smell and taste, prolonged brain fog, shortness of breath, permanent lung scarring, etc. These sound deeply unpleasant! Most everyone I know who caught the virus, even folks younger than me, described the effects as something I should definitely avoid. Less the sort of Let’s curl up with chicken soup and Sprite and watch TV sort of sick, and more like a dragged-out mutant chest cold that could do permanent damage. I’m a solo dad with a household that barely functions when I’m 100%. To be out for weeks is a fate I pray to avoid.
Now let’s bring that death toll back into focus—570k Americans, 3m worldwide—and recognize, at least conceptually, that every single life in those towering stats is a person whose loss ripples like a blast wave through everyone they know. A pandemic death is unique in that it’s often both deeply personal (the method of transmission is likely intimate) and especially lonely (in that sufferers die isolated away in medical wards). This sort of death means the standard grief process writ large, plus lingering guilt at passing a virus on or of not being there for a loved one at the end.
I recognize these are fearful times and Christians are called to live courageously, yet caution and due diligence are not exactly a Spirit of Fear. I’m not afraid to die. I believe my life is secure in Christ, and God will take me when and where God deems, just as every human being has gone before me. I don’t hold particular anxiety over dying beyond recognizing I’ve never personally faced it down and my death will cause deep pain for friends and family.
Still, I’d prefer to pass away in a relatively dignified manner and hopefully not in the open ocean and preferably not of Covid-19 if that can be at all avoided.
I returned to the fairgrounds last Thursday for my second dose. The line was much longer this time, starting outside the big top, but still progressing efficiently, with large groups being gulped into the building at a time. Temperatures were cool and I was glad I remembered a jacket. The crowd was a little more talkative this time, a little more widely varied.
The gentleman behind me lined up too close, maybe 3-4 feet away, and this irked me a little since we were less than a 30 minutes out from our last shot, but I didn’t plan to say anything and hoped he’d picked up on how much space I was leaving the woman in front of me. And the space everyone else was leaving each other everywhere all around us.
Even irked, I wasn’t unfriendly, and at a switchback in the line we got to talking and he mentioned right away the shot line reminded him of basic training and I recognized this as a very military thing to do, to mention you are/were in the military, and I told him I agreed and asked where he served and he named a unit I recognized because my friend Dave was assigned to them when he was killed in Iraq. I asked if the man knew Dave, and he did, and I told him Dave was one of the guys who inspired me to enlist. (See?) I asked him how many soldiers their unit lost and he said nine. That was too many men dead, and sad. We talked more about the Oregon Guard and places we served. He told me his rank, which was higher than mine.
Then the gentleman got to talking about Iraq and how he hated Media because of how they wrote bad stuff about the military all day but still needed their protection, and how they’d see Media riding the elevator up to the hotel bar for cocktails. Being upset or pleased about who can and can’t drink is another very military thing. I listened and remembered the Proverb about reliable reporters being a healing presence and wondered if those reporters were reliable.
Of course, as we talked, the man moved closer, inching toward me in little steps even as I leaned away and took microsteps back. He outpaced me though and eventually we were standing side by side, maybe a foot apart. Then, at the last switchback, he coughed, and a few beats after that the line surged ahead and I held out my hand.
“Could we please keep that six feet?” I asked, and gestured gently toward the building we were mere yards from entering. “We’re so close here.”
He looked at me, a bit affronted. He seemed unused to being asked to alter his behavior in this way, yet he did step back about four feet or so and I must admit to a pleasant shiver at a non-commissioned officer obeying my request. I didn’t intend to shame him, though, so we quickly got back to chatting.
I get the lapse. My guard is also slipping as time stretches on and the rescue of medicine seems tantalizingly near. I felt tenderness toward the gentleman. Maybe he just wanted to have me hear him better! We all want to be free of these times. Still, the case numbers in Oregon are rising. Other nations are in crisis. Vaccines or not, we are not yet through these deadly times.
Eventually I reached the final table. The shot administer this time was a young National Guard medic with an old Tarzan paperback on the table next to him, which made me like him because I appreciate the soldiers who carry books. He asked me to tell him a joke while he punched in Shot #2.
I wondered a lot over the last year how Mindy would’ve weathered these times. I think she would’ve enjoyed time at home, though the isolation might’ve been brutal for a woman who so extoverted.
I think she would’ve been socially active and vocal and optimistically pro-medicine. She knew the hours and diligence and brilliance it takes to work in medicine, and she would’ve certainly trusted the expertise of her colleagues over a handful of detractors who conveniently believed whatever made life easiest. I know she was only one person, yet part of me believes the whole country would’ve been less confused with a doctor like Mindy around.
Mostly, I wanted to honor her by listening to and supporting the medical community, and to obey God by loving and caring for my neighbors. I hoped to be adaptable, yet hold boundaries. Sometimes I took overly extreme safety measures and sometimes I let folks too close because they were a risk worth taking. Sometimes my quarantine porridge was just right. I will say this, though: between the two polemic Covid-19 camps, the overly cautious folks are a lot easier to navigate, yet it was the deniers who raised some good questions. We needed them, too.
I stopped at the northernmost In-N-Out again on the way home, forgoing the 90 minute drive-thru wait for the 40 minute inside pickup. I wanted to see the convertible red and California sun interior, to go back to a place I knew best with Mindy. The restaurant was packed, and I wondered if I was foolishly risking exposure.
After pounding two Animal-style Singles in the van, I returned home and followed my neighbor Linda’s advice to drink lots of water. The day after the shot, I felt functional yet achy. There was a low-grade headache pang every so often, and soreness in my hamstrings. For that night, and two days after, I felt low and went to sleep sooner than usual.
Two weeks later, my interior is newly shielded, and I can be with people. These are good feelings indeed. This evening, I’ll have beer with my similarly shielded friend who has his ear to the ground, and we’ll toast to surviving the last year and whatever happens next.
Before 2020, the last drop in American life expectancy was 100 years ago, when that statistic fell to 53.2 in the wake of World War I and the last life-altering flu pandemic. American life spans have risen steadily ever since, buoyed and spoiled by amazing medical advances earlier in the 20th century. Almost no one alive is old enough to remember what pandemics can cost, which is one reason I look to experts and historians and stories from the past.
Here’s one of those stories: Mindy’s great-grandmother Mildred was 31 years old, living in Denver sometime early in 1919. She was pregnant with her second child, and the world was reeling from the final wave of a crushing epidemic which killed tens of millions worldwide. (This was after four years of World War I, during which 40 million civilians and combatants were killed.) One week, Mildred was writing a letter mentioning her husband was sick in bed. The next, she and her baby were dead. Her husband, Ivory, was left to raise Mindy’s grandmother, Betty, who was only two at the time. He died just 16 years later. Fortunately, Betty lived a full life and had a family.
One night a few months after Betty’s granddaughter died in her 30s, I was outside on the back deck of our house in Garden Home, looking up at the stars, and I had an impression of a third-person perspective of my life. I saw myself as a 33 year-old man with a dim cone of vision swiveling up from the Earth’s surface to catch a few photons beamed across a time and distance I couldn’t fathom, from a star whose size and scope I couldn’t dream, then that cone swinging down again to the arborvitae and bluegrass bordering the yard. This is all you can see, I felt. This is one reason I bow to God.
We are a brief-lived species whose collective memory is short and whose existence depends on a unique blend of individual inspiration, collective effort, and reliance on powers much greater than our own to move forward. Relative to the timeframe of forests, oceans, tectonic plates, and viruses, we are total noobs. Yet it’s our job to tend to all that creation and each other. One lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic so far is we need each other to thrive. So let us work toward doing so. Amen.
This is a long post. And fascinating. People should pay you to write.