Outdoors

Outdoors

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels as if we have all been released from some protracted burden. Being able to shed masks has been the least of it, even if the most symbolic. But after fifteen months of avoiding people, staying at home, worrying about family health and hoping the government would finally get things right, it is a great relief to come out from behind the sheltered existence we have had to live and enjoy life again. Especially the outdoors. My wife, Jane, and I were reminded of this the other day during a glorious tour of Elizabeth Park, the 102-acre municipal retreat on the west side of Hartford, CT. The city has its economic troubles, but among its many considerable assets is an extensive park system whose character dates to the late-19th/early 20th century design work of the famed Olmsted Bros. landscape architecture firm. Not the handiwork of Frederick Law Olmsted himself but of his son and son-in-law. Like their father, they had an impressive knack for creating sylvan public spaces, mixing up broad meadows, formal gardens, dense copses, trails, ponds and small streams as well attractive buildings properly scaled for recreational use. Elizabeth Park’s big...Read more
Future

Future

No society can exist without a sense of where it’s going. Not that everyone has to be on board with the same vision. But human beings need a sense of doing things for a reason. Without it we’re in a big stall. That’s how it feels right now. The immediate future is very unclear because of the adaptive nature of the coronavirus. It travels invisibly and silently through the air. To a lesser extent it adheres to surfaces and gets passed on through a touchpoint that goes unwashed. A refusal by a certain percentage of the populace to wear masks that would reduce the likelihood of passing it on is, in effect, a collective declaration of mass stupidity and willful ignorance of basic science. The result is that we are no closer now to resolving the pandemic than we were three months ago.  Back then it seemed like there was a purpose to the quarantining and the self-imposed isolation:  to flatten the curve, develop herd immunity and make it more likely that we could return to normal. Good luck with that. Turns out we don’t even know if this virus respects herd immunity. There is no conclusive evidence that prior...Read more