Happy Vaccination Day

A crowd of vehicles lined up to drop off their driver’s loved ones and Lyft passengers or to park for their own appointments as I approached the Oregon Convention Center, the one-million square foot mass-vaccination site that rests above the east banks of Portland’s Willamette River. The site is carved into land stolen from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, at the corner of MLK & Lloyd Blvd’s, a couple of blocks from where the Portland Trailblazers typically play basketball (when they’re not stuck in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble), and within walking distance of five Starbucks. The venue’s roof shoulders twin glass towers that stand two-hundred-feet tall and share an abstract resemblance with the syringes that have been used to vaccinate Oregonians in the facility below since January of 2021.

I’ve noticed the traffic as I passed by this site with a pang of envy most days for a few months, so I expected some chaos as I arrived for my appointment on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-April. Despite how busy as it was, no one appeared impatient as we slowly made our way toward the parking garage. We were coming to the same place for the same reason after all, out of a shared sense of humanity. I parked on the ground level of the bustling garage, walked inside, past the elevator, up a flight of stairs and to wherever the green arrows on the ground directed me.

I have a year’s worth of hypotheses, but I may never figure out why our society had such difficulty just doing the things. All year, arrows and dots like these were measured out to a true six feet, stuck to supermarket floors, sidewalks outside restaurant windows, bank lines and doctor’s offices. But for some elusive reason, we forever decided to just stand in the general vicinity of a sticker, plus or minus a foot or three, and then guess how far away six feet might be.

“Lane six please,” a volunteer said as I entered the main hall.

The open room was noticeably quiet, considering how many people were nervously shuffling into line, past staff members and volunteers, and toward their next checkpoint. The walls climb thirty feet high and easily stretch a few hundred feet wide beneath large, rectangular white light fixtures that hang like a minimalist art gallery across the sprawling ceiling. The room was divided into several sections, and would ostensibly be capable of morphing into a million different shapes if circumstances demanded it. “No Selfies,” a sign near an entrance said; it’s a HIPAA thing.

Like every other lane, six was moving quickly, so I walked straight up to the woman at the table to fill out my paperwork.

The first week into our common efforts to flatten the curve, I had pulled my copy of Albert Camus’ The Plague off the bookshelf to see if I could find any clues as to what the future might hold. I thought we might quarantine for four, maybe eight weeks if we did it wrong — my wife and I took three final trips to Costco that first month — and I wanted to gain some insight as to how humans might handle a collective trauma like this.

The woman behind the table kindly waved me in.

“Happy vaccination day,” she said, like she truly meant it. A lump appeared in the back of my throat and my eyes swelled a little.

Once the curve had appeared to flatten in May of 2020 and the accommodations for immunocompromised people had worn off and the consensus was that you will be fine since you are not one of the high-risk people, my wife returned to work in a grocery store, still connected to the insulin pump that keeps her alive. After four weeks of strict quarantine, terrified and unable to be heard, she went back to work because her job provided the kind of health insurance that she needs to cover the high cost of being born with a chronic illness in the wealthiest country in the world.

“It’s been a year, hasn’t it?” I said to the woman behind the table.

“It sure has,” she said, still meaning it. “Congratulations though, you’re here.”

“Here we are,” I said with a nod. She couldn’t see the grin behind my mask, and I couldn’t see hers, but we sensed it with our eyes — a skill we had both presumably just developed this year.

She directed me to a table to fill out my paperwork and then to the reserve Army National Guard man who was listening to music and quietly humming along at his desk. He said he’d go crazy without it, sitting in a big room like that all day in silence. In the earlier weeks of his tour here, they had yelled at him to turn it off, but he wore them down until they stopped bothering him about it. He drew a large red circle on my paperwork, a code that would pass the buck to the nearby advice nurse. I thanked him as I walked away and silently wondered if his military service had required this same man to shoot rubber bullets and teargas at me and my community in the summer of last year as we yelled in the streets for an end to police violence.

In the week between my first and second vaccine doses, Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd. From the moment he did it on May 25, 2020, everyone knew in their gut that he had done it, and that he had done it on purpose because he was a cop and George Floyd was a black man who he assumed would be forgotten. Everyone also knew that he might get away with it anyway. But after being gaslit for a year, Chauvin’s guilty verdict was proof positive for those who knew what they saw and refused to sit down in the face of it, even in the midst of a global pandemic. And there I was at the Convention Center, wondering if this National Guardsman had been sent here in the summer months to teargas and maim peaceful protestors, as if we were wrong to call murder what it is.

After talking with the advice nurse about my childhood allergy to the whooping cough vaccine, he easily convinced me I would be fine to continue to my Covid shot, so long as I had never taken some diarrhetic I am happy to say I have never heard of. He was maybe the sixth nurse I have talked to in the past year. The first three were for anxiety, although I was convinced it was an aneurism, and the fourth gave me my first and only Covid test, which, for some reason, I had to push for. When I threw myself off my bike, rolled over my fist and onto the pavement last August, the fifth nurse cleaned the scrapes but called the broken rib a “contusion” — the x-ray later showed otherwise. Breaking my rib is how I learned the importance of never leaving the house. Safety first.

I continued to move toward the line of people who were among the last to potentially infect each other with this novel coronavirus. The couple in front of me looked sweetly at each other and nodded when another volunteer asked if they’d like to get their shot together. I couldn’t see the smile underneath their masks, but I sensed it in their eyes.

I had expected my wife to become eligible for the vaccine early because she was at a high risk of Covid complications, but her eligibility came sooner because she has a job in food production. Diabetes doesn’t stimulate the economy, I suppose, and the United States doesn’t have the largest economy in the world by accident. I hadn’t expected such callousness as this, but it wasn’t a surprise either. Much of the division in this country came from whether a person believed that public health recommendations were intended to control the virus or to control the people, and our society produced some truly elaborate fiction about the latter. But one of the great side benefits of getting your shot at a mass vaccination site is that anti-vaxxers don’t show up there.

The nonfiction is gut-wrenching. A simple Google search shows that of the 3.5 million deaths worldwide, Americans accounted for roughly 585,000 lives lost in one year from coronavirus. To compare, traffic fatalities in the United States were just 14 percent of that number — 42,000 deaths in 2020 — yet few would argue that brake requirements in cars are a broad government overreach.

Before I had driven to make the short jaunt to my appointment, a dry interview on NPR about vaccine efforts in Oregon had come from my car stereo, and a tear had suddenly welled into my eyes. I hadn’t expected a tear or tried to conjure it; I was just overwhelmed. I had thought about my vaccine a lot since the pandemic began. Would it bring instant relief, or would reacclimating into normal daily life be a slow burn; the inverse of how I had slowly burned out of daily life and into what we called the “new normal” just a year before? This would be that drive I had thought about so many times. This would be one of those millions of shots the news had been talking about. But this shot would be mine.

The injection itself was painless and relieving to me, as expected. That was it. I breathed in, took the poke, thanked the nurse, and followed a man in a red shirt who reminded me of my late father-in-law past the standard 15, toward the 30-minute waiting area (due to the whooping cough thing). I asked the Adverse Reaction Observer (a God-given name, not my choice) if it was cool for me to use the restroom (maybe not yet) and then sat in front of a girl and her father who were talking with a nurse about her severe allergy to cinnamon (confirmed by the snickerdoodles one Christmas).

In 1947, Camus published The Plague, which told a story of the human condition that our society would mirror almost 75 years later. Of the early phase of his historic-fictional epidemic in Oran, he wrote, “in some houses groans could be heard. At first, when that happened, people often gathered outside and listened, prompted by curiosity or compassion.” In our time, patients groaned in hospital beds and we had to hear them through televisions and phone screens. We stayed apart, together. Banged on pots and pans for overworked nurses at 7pm. Flattened the curve. Gave away homemade masks and hand sanitizer. Protected the vulnerable. “But under the prolonged strain it seemed that hearts had toughened; people lived beside those groans or walked past them as though they had become the normal speech of men.”

Early curiosity and compassion did seem to fade quickly. Hearts did toughen. Fights and protests about masks became commonplace. But for many, myself included, this time away from the rat race was an opportunity to learn the virtue of patience and the value of grief. From the moment we learned of this approaching disease, it was as though everyone in the world had to grab our traditions, throw them into the air, and catch only the priorities we cared to keep. For some, it was homemade dinners with family. Others found relief in slow walks around the neighborhood, checking in with friends, sourdough bread, sweat pant fashion, park beers, books, new pets — mine is Ludwig, a short-haired brown tabby named after the drum kit that I was rarely able to play during lockdown. Coffee. I drank a lot of coffee this year.

The pink sticker on my shirt let the observers know that I would be in the clear at 3pm — 30 minutes after my shot. With a slight headache, a sore arm, and no worrisome reactions, I made my way to the parking lot where an exiting line of cars ran opposite of the equally long line of those entering. It was chaos, but we can operate okay in the mist of chaos now. It’s messy. Society is messy.

In the darkest of times this year, I could not have expected to find myself leaving a mass vaccination site alive, in the driver’s seat of my car with a band aid on my arm, a fresh datapoint for the woman on NPR, part of something much larger than myself, no longer paralyzed by Twitter, better at Spanish, fascinated por mi gatito, and looking forward to, someday soon, making music with friends again or a night out with my beloved, fully vaccinated and very alive partner. But here we are. It’s been a year, hasn’t it?