I immediately flashback to decades ago. I’m ten-years-old, and I’m refusing to keep walking on this exact hike with my parents. My dad carried a bag of cherry-flavored throat lozenges in his pocket and told me they were energy medicine. “Each lozenge will move you for exactly one hour,” he said authoritatively. He was a doctor–I believed him and kept walking, excited for the zippy cherry flavor that once-upon-a-time made for a decent substitute for candy when nothing else was available. He did it again at the hospital nine years later. I had a tumor in my abdomen. He gave me a lozenge the night before my surgery, with a wink. “This will move you for one day,” he said. He looked pale; he couldn’t cry–he was a doctor, for crying out loud. But I could sense his tears were just beneath his eyelids. I loved him for that.

Today in this jungle-heat, I dig out my handy towel and tie it into a papoose around my shoulder so that I can carry the dog. She seems very pleased. There is no waterfall when we get there, just a stagnant pool and twenty other disappointed campers who were hoping for something better.

When we get back to the camp, another family has moved in nearby. They each appear to have brought a personal fan and are setting up a surround sound speaker system. Their cooler is the size of my first car. Ignoring them, we cook kabobs on the grill and play a board game on our picnic table. As we are settling in for the night, I read in the New York Times that the Russian Government has been offering bounties on the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan, and that Trump knew about it.[1]  Nowhere in any of the news reports do they note the irony of this moment. After all, the United States offered bounties on Russian lives in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Everyone is aghast at the possibility that we are just as vulnerable as everyone else, that America doesn’t get to be the bully in the sandbox everywhere, all the time.   

My musings are cut short when someone in the neighboring camp starts to cough. Huge, unending, racking coughs. The kind that would wake the dead, followed by gasps for air and more coughing. We don’t sleep. We stew in our sleeping bags. I can almost hear the worried breathing in our tent–they must have COVID, you can almost hear each of us thinking. “Who goes camping when they sound like that?!” my daughter whispers after a solid five minutes of listening to this racking cough in the dead of night. “Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous.”

Note

[1] “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says,” The New York Times, June 26, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html.