March 4, 2020, we returned from a long trip with our daughter and granddaughter and assorted family members. We'd also been to San Francisco to visit our son and his two kids. Early US COVID deaths were happening at Seattle area nursing homes. Our daughter was concerned enough to give us each an N-95 mask and drove us all the way out to the airport. (We usually just caught a train out after the ferry to downtown Seattle.) After a few days I had mild COVID symptoms, but even though I could check off three symptoms and being the right age group and coming from a COVID outbreak area and testing negative for the flu, I couldn't get tested.
I was near the end of Michael Lewis'
The Premonition on the plane today, a story of 'outlaw' doctors
who on their own came up with a plan for what to do when there's a pandemic. About that time there just weren't enough tests available. I wasn't sick enough to get tested. They were saving tests for people in the hospital.
Premontion tells of a UCSF lab that created, with lots of volunteer help (Post-Phd grad volunteers) a way to provide free tests, but Kaiser said no because they were afraid they'd lose their contract with their regular supplier (according to the book) and a non-profit said no because they couldn't put $0 for cost in their accounting system.
In any case. there was over a foot of snow in some places in my driveway when I shoveled at 8am. We watched the cab drive by looking for an address. We couldn't catch his attention, but he stopped down the block and asked someone who was out. We caught that guy's attention.
There was a lot of snow. Wednesday afternoon there hadn't been any.
Getting through security at 8:45am wasn't bad. It felt both odd and familiar as we walked through the airport to our gate. Soon we were on the plane. We had an empty middle seat, though the pilot kept saying it was full. Finally at the very end, someone showed up and I moved to the middle seat as a barrier for J. (Usually I'm at the window with my camera, but it's COVID. But my neighbor had a good mask on and I saw a Providence screen, then a UAA screen on her computer, so I'm assuming she has a good understanding of the virus. But still being that close to so many strangers can be uncomfortable. But I just dismissed the anxiety - I was on the plane and I could either enjoy the ride or have a miserable trip. I chose option A.
But we weren't leaving that fast. We had snow on the wings and had to be deiced first. But another plane was ahead of us.
Here's our snowy wing. And it was really a low cloud cover.
Finally our deicer is on the way. Our window wasn't very clear.
Our turn.
We got to the 10,000 foot level still shrouded in flat opaque gray clouds. It was a full ten minutes before we emerged above it and saw blue again.
It turned out that our seat mate had missed her 6:30 flight to Portland because the security line was so long. So she'd had to wait around for our 10:30 flight which was delayed over an hour and still had to get to Portland. Which I guess explains why she showed up at the last minute - they had to see how many empty seats there were.
I'd semi decided that we'd skip the train - we'd been cooped up in a plane full of masked, but potential COVID spreaders, and I didn't need more of that. And we were an hour late. And it was raining pretty hard, so we took a cab which we'd never done before. The cab driver asked what time our ferry left. It was 4:18 at that point. "We won't make it - it's at 4:45." The cab driver assured us we'd make it, and we did. After eating another of the sandwiches we'd brought along (the food service on the ferry was shut down), I needed to get outside. But it was raining hard and the wind was blowing. But I found a protected spot in the back. (As I typed that I thought do ferries have a front and back - since cars come in one end in Seattle and they leave out the other end on Bainbridge Island? So, I checked with you know who and got this answer to the same question someone asked at
sailnet in 2013:
"Washington State Ferries have a pilothouse at each end, so when the boat is ready to leave the dock, the crew moves to the new front of the boat. Sometimes they do turn around or back in, but that is because they loaded cars at the end of the load that need to be offloaded first. That mostly happens on Lopez, Shaw, and Orcas islands and sometimes on Vashon island. Most of the routes are point A to point B though."
Well, here's the view from the back (for that trip anyway) of the ferry looking towards downtown Seattle.
What a pleasure to be met by our daughter and granddaughter after all this time. My son-in-law is off on a business trip in Nairobi,
but he's due back before Thanksgiving.
