As the calendar turned to 2020, the world’s inhabitants were for the most part playful and joyfully hopping around. Then bit by bit over two months, they turned grumpy and then scared. This current contagion started off confined to a far-off, unknown place called Wuhan. Most, if not all, of the rest of us, were sleepy and settled down. In such times, this understandable and normal human mood contagion served as an anesthetic.

The fact that we were fortunate enough to escape these early contagions of body and spirit, despite our frequent, accelerating, global, daily contacts with the disease, I later guessed was what led to how it silently spread across the planet and today’s wildly escalating contagion of fear, hoarding and panic. The disease figured us humans out faster than we figured it out.

During my Navy and island-living hurricane decades, we always had a loosely prepared Plan B that tried to foresee and counteract the worst case outcomes of an unfolding catastrophe. That meant making provisions so that we weren’t pulled into the maelstrom through contagion of destruction, disease or mood.

With my heart and soul addled by the clock’s annual pre-spring leap forward, the slow rolling Wuhan plague and the evolving global, economic and health, contagion panics, I penned this brief, Plan B, survival fantasy in verse. Or nightmare, if one is of such a mind. In this fantasy world, no big city, snowflake, Ugg shit-kicker boot wearing poseurs need apply for entry into a Novel Canaan quarantine during this Season of the Sick.

-Marlow

PS Life has shown me repeatedly that virtue, like viruses, has its seasons of contagion. When catastrophe has struck, I have seen generosity of spirit spike like a fever. Courage as well has spread in the face of looming calamity. It is during these times, I have discovered anew what love is.

Strapped the loved ones in the car
Took us a lil slug of courage vodka in a Cherry Coke
Headed out beyond Carolina Cherokee country, gotta escape season of the sick fears
It’s just beyond Uncle Peyton’s, it’s safe cause his mind’s been gone for years
You know he stopped his travels, ain’t no longer really spry
He don’t do anymore visitin’ cause he’s fearful he’s gonna get sick and die
He’s afraid they’ll be comin’ down from New York
And east from Arkansas
He said it’ll be one great big old panicked rush like you never saw
We, like Uncle P, got more than just mountain pride
Back up in them thickets it’s safe to live and hide
Got us an old Airstream trailer, bags of beans, and a Holstein cow
Gonna make us some whiskey ’cause we got still know-how
Maybe we’ll play us some mountain bingo every Friday night
We up and left the coast, didn’t say goodbye
We own a quarter section by a tree-hidden mountain lake
Lots of big ole blue cat, on driftin’ lines free for the take
Lots of hardwood timber there since the mill closed in 79
Lotsa things to eat, make us safe and have a good time
Might cook us some shine since crystal meth won’t sell
Cause we likes the whiskey, plus the meth smells like hell

Some friends gonna join us, coming up from that southernmost town
Going by way of Lake O, droppin by his Pop’s quiet “Knife and Gun Pawn”
Buy us from the backroom SKS rifles, and cases of steel core ammo
With righteous primers, from some East bloc nation, that needed the dough
And several Desert Eagles, they’re great big ole pistols
I mean .50 caliber ones, made by bad ass Hebrews
And some surplus tracers, for our dads’ old BARs
Soon as they and the darkness gets here, we’re gonna have us a time, under the stars

Copyright © 2020 From My Isle Seat