Pandemic Secrets Emerge

It might seem unlikely, but I can actually keep a secret. You have to specifically ask me to do so—it almost never occurs to me that anyone wouldn’t want anything talked about (publicly, in minute detail)—but if that’s something you’d like me to do, I will do it for you. It just requires concentration. And if you do request secret-keeping from me, please let me know if I can have a spousal exemption for Mark.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been especially share-y online and it’s been great—I love talking to you all on the internet, friends—but there’s a few stories I never shared, because I was specifically asked not to. One is that in 2020 we went to PEI for a month, and Mark’s employer asked us to be discreet about it. I did it—a few people knew, but I kept it pretty quiet and offline (if you look closely at some of my Facebook posts from that fall, you can tell that they are weird, but not why—I think). It was very vague and confusing why Mark’s office cared about our discretion about the trip, and though I would have liked to add the trip to my pandemic book when it came out three years later, it was still unclear to me whether that was permitted or not, so I didn’t. BUT NOW Mark doesn’t have that employer anymore, and even if he did the global context of the pandemic (not over but very different) has evolved so much that this small anecdote would be almost impossible to care about. Though the trip was pretty interesting (well, to me anyway—if you keep reading, you can judge for yourself) so here we go.

4.5 years on, it might seem strange that anyone EVER cared whether anyone did or did not go anywhere, or would think it would be an interesting story that they had, but this was still in deep lockdown, and actually almost no one was travelling at that point. If I told you that spring or summer that we were not going to PEI that year, I wasn’t lying—I truly didn’t think we’d get to go. If you can recall, that first year of the pandemic, PEI had no real COVID presence at all, a situation borne of being an island province with only a few points of ingress and a cooperative, helpful population. Everyone did what they could to help the whole, and thus for a long time, pretty much no one got COVID on PEI. And it was also near impossible to get there from the outside.

Finally in the fall the province came up with a complicated sort of visitor’s pass system, I forget what it was called (this is what happens when I don’t write about things—they don’t stick in my memory properly) and Mark spent weeks finding us an isolated cabin in which to do the legislated hard quarantine (14 days in an entirely separate dwelling, not just our own room or part of a home), getting his family to fill out forms saying they would be responsible for bringing us food and necessities and also were his blood relations and important reasons for his being on the island. He submitted our marriage license as the justification for bringing me.

We left in the middle of October. The pando had been going on for almost 6 months at that point so SOME people were flying, but still—not very many. Pearson wasn’t completely deserted but it was nearly deserted. The flights still weren’t cheap, since so many had been cut, to keep up the scarcity/crowding. We had struggled to get N95 masks and in the end only had a few, and I was worried about taking mine off for any reason. I remember huddling in a corner of the lounge to drink some water and shove a granola bar in my face. Everyone was masked; one guy had a full hazmat suit on—at first I thought he worked there but he was just freaking out. Nothing to eat or drink was served on the two-hour flight.

But still, it was a commercial flight, and you could just buy a ticket if you wanted one and had the money. But then you got to PEI and it was like arriving in Europe—you had to queue and go through immigration instead of just wandering past the giant ceramic cow and out into the parking lot like we usually do. Mark had all our paperwork obsessively ordered and the hard quarantine cabin confirmation all set but some people did not have a place to go and hide themselves from the island population for 14 days, which meant they could not leave the airport. I think they were going to be sent back from whence they came—we saw a few of them sitting sadly on a wooden bench in a sort of airport waiting room/jail—but maybe someone would get them a quarantine cabin somehow? I never found out.

Anyway, we got freed into the parking lot and this is how we got to the cabin without contaminating anyone: Mark’s parents drove to the airport in his mom’s car. His aunt and uncle drove there in another car. Then they all got out and hid his mom’s keys in the vehicle (although I think theft at the Charlottetown airport is very low). They were supposed to all leave in the aunt and uncle’s car but instead stayed at the far end of the parking lot so they could wave and scream at us as we crossed the lot, waved back, found the keys, and departed.

By now it was dusk and a bit sad, as when we normally arrive on the island it is a hugathon and now we were going to no one. Mark drove us to a cottage and lodge place in North Rustico overlooking the mussel beds that we had passed a million times and I had dimly thought looked nice, but of course we always stay with family. The other Sampsons had gotten in earlier in the day and stocked the place with groceries, art supplies, games, and other fun stuff to make the quarantine bearable. We wiped down the car with hand sanitizer, cracked the window so it could air out, and began our 14 day isolation. (His folks picked up the car a few days later, once they figured all the germs were dead, also with extended-fam help).

PEI public health called Mark every day to make sure we hadn’t escaped and were still quarantining. It was impressive although not an airtight system as they were calling him on a cellphone and he could have been anywhere. They also never once asked to speak to me although they did always ask about me: if I was there, if I was exhibiting any COVID symptoms. For all they knew, Mark could have been one of those guys who thinks he’s married to a crow or a woman on TV. “Yes, yes, my wife Katie Couric is doing splendidly today! She just dug something out of the ground and then flew into a tree to eat it.” Anyway, neither of us got sick but we did go a bit bonkers, there in our idyllic cabin by the water.

Our cabin was ideal to our purpose as it was set a ways away from the others, and also it was a slow season and what people there were mainly indoors. There was an outdoor pool that was closed, some firepits rarely in use, and a huge back field of unclear purpose. We used it for jogging (Mark) and wandering (me). We both tried to get in a few laps every day. It was spectacularly lonely, much more so than being isolated in the city, though I can’t precisely say why. The crows took an immediate dislike to me as I circled aimlessly in the field—crows always dislike me, they divebombed me in Tokyo. They would caw loudly at my head and by the end of the two weeks I was cawing back.

The cabin was small but nice, and we had tonnes of nice food courtesy of the Sampsons. We were still living back in St James Town at that point so we were happy to try out living with a dishwasher. Someone brought us a pumpkin and left it on the porch and we tried carving a pumpkin as a couple for the first time ever—we’d never had a porch at Hallowe’en before. It was also our first experience staying near Mark’s fam but not with them. It was funny to see how much everyone longed for each other. Family would show up around lunch time (we were working remotely in the cabin, and would take our lunchbreaks at a regularly scheduled time) with a car trunk full of lawn chairs, set them up in the yard and hold a social distance conversation at the decibel level of screaming.

It was a long strange two weeks. By the end of it, the heat had gone out in the cabin, I was convinced the crows were plotting against me, and the sun was setting by the time we finished work so Mark was jogging in the squashy field in the dark. I felt it was only a matter of time before he fell over and a crow ate him. AND THEN quarantine ended…and we rejoined society. JUST LIKE THAT.

Remember how early in the pandemic when we were all sitting in our living rooms surrounded by hoarded toilet paper, fantasizing about how soon we’d pop back out of our homes and hug each other and dance and party, but in the end, it didn’t happen like that, because it was so slow and incremental and everyone had different comfort levels, and also the whole thing went on so long many of us had forgotten how to relax in large groups? Well, except during that little interregnum in PEI, I actually got to experience that sudden change, that bolt of wonder and hugs. One moment I was locked in a freezing cold cabin in a rage because the clock I had been staring at for 2 weeks had the wrong kind of roman numeral IV on it (IIII!!!!) and the next, Mark’s dad came swooping in and embraced me and I started to weep. And as soon as we got to the Senior Sampsons’ place, everyone else started swarming in too. The thing about Mark’s family, if you’ve never met them is that they are so nice and so numerous. And they just like to all be together. One of Mark’s cousins sidled up to me and slid her baby into my arms—she had seen me staring and just did it, without a word. She wasn’t afraid—no one on the island was, because they all followed protocol, and we did too. After my 14-day hard quarantine I was pure and clean and good, and I could hold a new baby without fear. It was the most magical thing.

We stayed for two more weeks—it was sort of necessary to make the quarantine worthwhile, and also why not? There was nothing going on at home and here we could browse in stores! Go to dinner with people! Watch the kids trick or treat! Make polite conversation with people on the walking trail instead of scuttling away like raccoons! It was so lovely. There still wasn’t a lot of restaurant action and people were a little less social than normal, but for PEI there’s a lot of room to drop down before you even get to Toronto levels. It was a really nice, if long and challenging trip. We’d had to simply walk away from our houseplants—we did get the cats to a family member but it seemed impossible to take dozens of plants anywhere or expect anyone to go back and forth to water them—and in the end, they all lived. FOR A MONTH. Just a magical magical trip.

At that time, in addition to the request from Mark’s work, there was also a general feeling of judgment about travel, that it was wrong and bad to do it, though certainly, people did. That’s another reason I was a bit quiet about it, but I can’t…quite recapture that feeling now. Certainly the Sampsenblums weren’t saints during the lockdowns, but as people with shared hallways and laundry facilities who were thus unable to bubble with anyone, who lacked a yard or a car, we had really limited lives and were pretty thrilled by the trip. It was amazing to step out onto the porch without worrying about encountering a stranger, even out into the crow field. I didn’t like being in quarantine, but it had its advantages.

Thanks for reading this far, if in fact you did. I am so glad I finally got to write about this! The photo in the header is North Rustico, although on that trip we of course did not get as close to the buildings as you can see in that photo.