The New Yorker Radio Hour - Looking Back at an Unimaginable Year

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

It’s a cliché now, but by no means an overstatement, that the past twelve months have been unimaginable. This week, we’ll hear four short reflections on the events of 2020. Dhruv Khullar describes the early days of the pandemic, when he was taking care of patients in a COVID-19 ward. Anna Wiener visits California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which burned during the catastrophic West Coast fire season that destroyed acreage close to the area of Massachusetts. Simon Parkin waxes nostalgic—already!—for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a video game that occupied untold hours of families at home together. And Kevin Young, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, picks two poems that stand as monuments to what we have lived through: “George Floyd,” by Terrance Hayes, and “The End of Poetry,” by Ada Limón, both of which were read by the authors. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. So I'm on Bear Creek Road. It's a really windy road that, you know, feels like it would be a death trap or like a slip and slide in the rain. I'm going to Big Basin. It's a state park. It's one of, I believe, it's one of, if not the oldest state park in California. It's home to, a lot of old growth ancient redwoods. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Our contributor, Anna Weiner, lives in California where she writes mostly about the tech industry, and she called us recently on her way up to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, where some redwood trees are so old that they predate the fall of Rome. Here at the end of what's been an unbelievably difficult year in so many ways,

Anna went to look at the damage from last summer's wildfires. Those fires were some of the most destructive on record, and Big Basin was squarely in their path. I haven't been to Big Basin in maybe a year or two, and I certainly haven't been since the fires this summer. The park has been closed, and I don't know how long it will remain closed. I think that they're expecting about 10% of these trees to die,

I just turned around the bend and it took my breath away. There are three cars, one of which is totally flipped over and they're all burnt out. Just like husks of three sedans, I guess. Maybe one was an SUV. And I'm going to keep driving now that I've seen that. But it's really, I think it's shocking in part because, oh, did I lose you? Oregon and Washington all burned last summer, and the devastated areas together were larger than the state of Massachusetts. The CZU Lightning Complex was one of the largest fires in California history, and it basically tore through Big Basin in a day.

The fire started in late August, and Big Basin actually was burning for about a month. or the fires overall were burning for about a month. I'm in the picnic area of Big Basin. I'm here today with Ranger Phil Bergman, who has very generously offered to give me a tour of Big Basin, at least the parts that are still safe, to walk through. What are all these nails on the ground from? Well, they all came from, there were benches and picnic tables here.

Oh, God. table and you can see the bolts that we're holding the fake new table together and if we look inside a couple of spots here there were like right here see all these lag bolts going through there's some you know it's sort of funny to see what has been what survives a fire there's a little green water fountain that looks pretty much like it probably always has um in the debris around the store there were some white coffee cups that seemed you know broken but identifiable. I hate this.

I've had a couple of months to let it soak in, but it was hard. First few times I came up here, and it was still burning when I was up here. And it was just like the upside down. If you watch stranger things, it was just like, what is this place? Yeah, this is like we're walking into the, there's this little redwood trail right at the entrance to the park. So I think I first visited Big Basin, I think the first year that I lived here, I went with my partner. And there's a reason why everyone always uses the word majestic to describe Redwoods.

They're unbelievably mysterious and domineering in a way. And there's this feeling that I often have when I'm at a place like Big Basin and around Redwoods in California. which is just that time kind of stops, and it's incredibly peaceful. It feels like a privilege to be around them because, you know, in part because only 5% of the country's redwoods are still standing because of really aggressive logging. So, you know, it's like this intense somatic experience where, you know, your heart rate drops and the air feels almost intoxicatingly. clear. So visiting Big Bay said now is a really different experience. One of the most striking differences to me is that when you look up, there really isn't much of a canopy anymore. And

these are trees that are famously green year-round. And to look up and see sky is sort of shocking. I mean the trees are obviously still here and the trunks are still here and the trunks are largely black it's really unusual to see this color palette to see the leaves a kind of sienna orange to see them burnt now we are sort of climbing through debris it's just oh what appears to have been a squirrel um

so this is the buzz that was right now I'm beneath a tree that was at one point maybe 200, 250 feet tall. And during the fires, it chimed, which is when fire gets in somewhere usually, or I think in this case. Fire gets in through some sort of breach, most likely at ground level, and that it just burns its way right up through the tree, just like smoke going out of a chimney. Often this can result in the trees just... popping their tops off. But what's interesting is that at the top,

there is some new growth or recent growth. There's still some green coming out of it. Yeah. Yeah, we're actually on the road. The trail went down that way, I think. Oh, we got a little bit off the trail. Yeah, again, my landmarts are all gone. Yeah.

I think this year provoked a lot of conversations among people who live in the Bay Area and who live in California more generally about whether how long they can stay, whether this is a sustainable place to live and seeing the effects and the ravages of climate change

come to people's front doors. I have sort of made my peace with California being a volatile place to live. I think a lot of people have made their peace with that. But something about seeing these ancient trees, some of the oldest living things in the world. And something about seeing them damaged by the sort of effects of climate change or the consequences of climate change.

Yeah, it's really quite something to take stock of this. It's hard for me to absorb that it won't return to the way it looked probably ever in my lifetime. Not exactly the same, but it'll return. Even five years from now, it's going to be green again and it's going to be lush again. and it's just not going to be as the same. I sort of love this one with the mushroom-looking base. Blooming mushroom spores or something. What it is is it's dormant cells.

Hardly scientific, but they're sort of called into action when there's a disaster. If there's a fire or if the tree tips over, they kind of come to life. Oh, wow. And then they start to see that. That's very reassuring. Yeah, that's part of the process at Rickwood. Anna Weena reports for the New Yorker. and we also heard from Ranger Phil Bergman at Big Basin Redwood State Park.

The last 12 months have been, and it's a cliche by now, but by no means an overstatement, unimaginable. The wildfires throughout the West, hundreds of thousands of people marching for racial justice, the impeachment trial of the president at the beginning of the year, and toward the end of campaign to overturn the election that might even be called a failed coup d'etat. But above all, for just about every day, every person on the planet, there was the fear and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the spring, when the first terrible wave of the pandemic made New York its epicenter,

we started publishing dispatches from Drew Kular. He's a doctor at the Wild Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. And every day, Drew went into the heart of things, the COVID ward. Here's Drew Kular, remembering those first days in March. I wake up before the sun is out. I put my scrubs on and I call an Uber. And it's the first time I see plastic barriers between the passenger and the driver. We're both wearing masks.

We cruise up Manhattan's east side on the FDR. I look out the window. I see the sun starting to rise over the East River. we get near the hospital. There's a few people scattered here and there, but mostly the streets are empty. All the stores are closed. Many of them have signs take to the window saying that they are not open for business for the foreseeable future due to the pandemic.

I've never seen Manhattan look like that before. I get in the elevator and go up to the medical floors. Outside, you can still hear the endless flow of sirens, new patients that are arriving. Many of them are struggling to breathe. Most need to be admitted. Some need to be intubated immediately, if not after a few days. Before I go into a patient's room, I make sure that I have my N95 respirator on. I have a surgical mask on top of that, gown, gloves, shoe covers, and I have a,

I have a face shield. My clinical service fills with essential workers, bus drivers, bus drivers, police officers, delivery guys. Many of them don't speak English as their first language, and so on some days I organize my rounds by the language that patients speak. I take the interpreter from one room to the next and then switch to a new language. The other day, I went to see a man. who spoke only Spanish. He was wearing an oxygen mask to breathe. Each day that I saw him,

his breathing got worse, more rapid, more labored. His oxygen level was steadily declining. So I took a phone interpreter into the room with me. I said, your oxygen levels are now at a dangerously low level. We're getting to the point where we don't have a lot of more options. The next step, would be intubation, a tube down your throat connected to the ventilator. I spoke in short paragraphs so the interpreter could convey the message over the hiss of oxygen in his room. About 30 seconds later, slowly, my message starts to register. His shoulders tensed up. I saw tears in his eyes. I told him, I hope it's temporary.

I hope it's short. But right now, it's impossible to say. He started to cry. With most diseases, we have a playbook. We know how it starts, how it evolves, and how it can end. With coronavirus, there are so many unknowns. Doctors gather around offices. We're on Zoom calls.

We're reading Twitter. Trying to figure out what the virus does to the lungs and other organs of the body. The uncertainty. is both exciting and scary. We as doctors and scientists get to figure out a new disease and potentially how to conquer it. At the same time, you never quite know whether you're doing the right thing or not. At any moment, you feel like you might make a mistake that could hurt someone. When I walk out of the hospital, the sun is starting to set. I hear the cheers of people from across the city who have come to their windows, come out to their balconies, they're banging cowbells.

I hear New Yorkers cheering for health care workers. I hear them cheering for us. I get home and I log onto my computer. It's time for a weekly Zoom call with my friends from medical school or scattered across the country. One of them is sitting on a couch. He's still in his scrubs. He's eating a sandwich that doesn't look very appetizing. Another has a gray hoodie on. He's wearing a red hoodie on. He's wearing his Harry Potter glasses, and he could really use a haircut. We talk about how there's a strange way in which the pandemic has made medicine what we always wanted it to be. We're exhausted, but we're content. All the frustrations of billing and documentation and prior authorization and electronic medical

records, for the moment, they're all gone. When we're in the hospital, the mission is so clear. We're doing everything we can to save everyone who we can. I hang up the Zoom call. I open up a word document and stare at the blank screen. I start writing. It's a chance to at least start to process everything that's happening. I know that tomorrow I'll wake up and have to do it all over again. Drew Kular is a physician at Weil Cornell Medical Center and a contributing writer for the New Yorker. and you can read everything he's written from the front lines of the pandemic at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We're spending part of this hour saying farewell and good riddance to 2020. Many of us have spent this year at home to a degree we never would have thought imaginable. Safe, relatively speaking, but struggling to fill the days and nights and not go nuts. And for a lot of us, I'm not going to shame anybody here. That's meant hours upon hours of video games. On March 20th, the very day of New York's lockdown order, Nintendo released a game called Animal Crossing, New Horizons. Here's Simon Parkin, who writes about gaming and technology for the New Yorker.

So Animal Crossing New Horizons came out pretty much just as the world was going into lockdown. It's sort of like a digital doll's house. I suppose, but not as tragic as that sounds maybe for a 40-year-old man to be playing. Basically, you move on to an island, which is sort of barren, a bit of a wasteland. You essentially, you know, forage, clit, wood, rocks, things like that, and slowly build up your island house by house. And there's an added incentive as well to do this because you can, fight friends from around the world once your island and then give them a tour.

And obviously, like, you know, when you get to your house, you want them to come in and for all to be lovely. And also for it, you know, I guess if we're honest, to be slightly better than their islands that they've been working on. And so for a few sweet weeks, it just was the thing that obsessed everyone on the internet. Just that everyone, you know, we were all sort of shying off photographs or stills of our island, how it was coming along. And yeah, it was just a lovely moment, I suppose, when it was difficult to get outside. It was a game that allowed us to sort of frolic around in the countryside and sniff flowers without that being controversial. Okay, this is my island.

It is called Willtown. Okay, let me take you up here. So this is over here on the left, we've got a large area of ground, fenced. in. This is my wife's industrialized rose growing outfit. You buy seeds for different varieties of flowers, and then by sewing those seeds, you can in time germinate a new colour. And that's something that she's spent a lot of time on. I assure you, this was like a popular thing. It's not just us. The game was invented by a Nintendo employee called Katsuya Eguchi

who found that he was just spending all his time at the office and not getting to see his children as much as he wanted. So he sort of made this game as a way for them to work on a project together and in that way they were able to connect. And I think that's been true for the parking household as well. was nice to be playing a game altogether sort of as a family that we were all involved in and all contributing to that that felt good and certainly animal crossing has enough scope to accommodate all kinds of different interests and different player types and for me the thing that

and it drives my family nuts is I've got whatever the gene is that turns people into collectors and completionists and so I just spend a lot of my time fishing at different times of the day trying to find that elusive fish that that you know is going to fill that that space and you know I know for my daughter she plays it in quite a different way so she is definitely more into the social aspect of interacting with the different animals on the island and she spent a lot of time trying to convince the animals she didn't like to move out and the way you do this is just by sort of being mean to them, you shun them.

And so sometimes I'd be playing the game and it would look like I was running to go and have a conversation with one of the animals. And she would just scream at me, don't know, whatever you do, do not talk to the hippo because I want him out. I suppose, yeah, she just wanted to nurture the perfect village and have it just so.

And that's really what the game is. game encourages. Well, she's got her house. We should go and see that. This is her house. She's got a beach house which she picked out. And if you come down here just to the sort of sandy area in front of her front door, she's arranged like a load of different teddy bears and panders having a picnic. It looks like they're eating sushi, which seems unlikely. But I mean, this is a game all about diaramas and this is the diorama that she's chosen to make there. And I think, you know, I may have thrown in a teddy bear there to help her out. I wonder whether it was so special this year, just the timing with the lockdown,

that I wonder if it will ever be the same again for, you know, for that generation who has now played Animal Crossing when the whole world it felt like was playing Animal Crossing. You know, there will be animal crossings again in the future. I don't know if it will ever be quite like it was this year. Okay, let's come over to the... Oh, hang on, we've got to go up here, sorry. We've got to cross over. And, yeah, here's just a...

We've got an outdoor sleeping bag. A little campfire and a telescope on the rocks on the northeastern most point of the island. I don't know. Just a little idea that there's... I guess to extend the universe, there's more out there. Simon Parkin. You can find his writing on technology.

at New Yorker.com. Now, to close the show today, our last show of 2020, I've invited Kevin Young to join us. Kevin is about to start a new job as director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. But thankfully, he'll continue on as the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

And so I've asked Kevin to pick a poem to end the year. And given everything that's happened this year, it wasn't really possible to pick just one. As poetry editor, I've really come to see the ways that poetry can speak to the moment. People are writing about the pandemic quite directly. They're writing about the pandemic of racism quite directly. I think that witnessing is really important, and it's become all the more important this year. And a poem like Terrence Hayes's George Floyd acts as a kind of monument to him and a monument to a moment.

And I think poems often are that. This is George Floyd by Terrence Hayes. George Floyd You can be a bother Who dyes his hair Dennis Rodman Blue in the face of the man Kneeling in blue in the face

The music of his wrist Watch your mouth is little more Than a door being knocked Out of the ring of fire Around the afternoon Came evening's bell Of the ball and chain Around the neck of the unarmed brother

Ground down to gunpowder dirt Can be inhaled like a puff The magic bullet point of transformation Both kills and fires the life of the party like its 1999 bottles of beer on the Wall Street. People who sleep in the streets do not sleep without counting yourself lucky rabbits' foot of the mountain lion. Do not sleep without making your bed of the river boat gambling. There will be no stormy weather on the water bored to death. Any means of killing time is on your side of the bed of the truck transporting until the break of day.

Emmett till the river runs, dry your face, the music of the spheres. Emmett till the end of time. This year has reminded us in many different ways of our humanity, of our frailty, but also our connectedness in the ways that we are connected in ways we don't even know. And poetry is a big part of that. The end of poetry by Aida Limon, which was published at the end of April, helped us feel connected because it captured feelings we were all experiencing. I mean, frustration, desperation, desire, distance.

And Ada has this wonderful turn at the end that returns us to the body and the physical connection, the thing we were missing all spring. I'm getting chills just thinking about it. I think the end of poetry, through the power of poetry, shows a kind of almost protest against what poetry can do and what poetry can't do. And it turns out it can do a lot. Here's Ada Lemone, reading The End of Poetry. Enough of Aseus and Chickadee and sunflower and snow shoes, maple and apple and and seeds, Samara and shoot. Enough Kiyaskuro, enough of thus and prophecy, and the stoic farmer and faith, and our father, and tis of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin, and God not forgetting, and starbodies

and frozen birds, enough of the will to go on and not go on, or how a certain light does a certain thing. Enough of the kneeling and the rising and the looking inward and the looking up. Enough of the gun, the drama, and the acquaintances suicide, the long lost letter on the dresser. Enough of the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego. Enough of the mother and the child and the father and the child and enough of the pointing to the world, weary and desperate. Enough of the brutal and the border. Enough of, can you see me? Can you hear me?

Enough I am human. Enough I am alone and I am desperate. Enough of the animal saving me. Enough of the high water. Enough sorrow. Enough of the air and its ease. I am asking you to touch me. Ada Limone, reading the end of poetry.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour. today. Thank you as ever for listening. Have a wonderful Christmas. Wherever you are, I hope you're safe, warm, and well. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-Corbie, Calla-Lia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

With additional help from Kyle Lawrence. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.