Pandemic Pantry

We haven't been inside a grocery store since March 13, so exactly 2 months now. We have been making it work with Instacart and what we call our "grocery angels," those neighbors who have been picking up food for us, and one wonderful food truck in town who has connected locals with some of the small farmers who are his suppliers to the benefit of both.

I didn't realize how intimate it is to share grocery lists. Most of our friends know we're vegetarian/pescetarian, but there's so much in the details. Now my delightful neighbor R. knows what we eat every week, that my junk food tastes tend toward the salty/crunchy rather than sweet, that I like a specific fancy imported Irish cheese, and that we've been drinking far too much wine.

My Facebook timeline has been filled with beautiful pictures of homemade breads and cakes that my more creative friends are making while in lockdown. I had a Zoom "high tea" last weekend with friend S. who had gone all out. She lives alone but her table was set for a gracious party -- on the little screen I saw her surrounded with candles and china and freshly-made scones on gold-rimmed serving platters.

I ... don't seem to have the emotional bandwidth to do any of those creative lovely things. So I took it in the other direction, put the cooking on autopilot and streamlined our galley. It's now something of a cross between "Chopped" (the cooking show where contestants are given a bag of mystery ingredients that they then have to turn into a dinner -- half the fun is seeing how wildly divergent the results 2 or 3 people can come up with using the same components) and a capsule wardrobe (relatively few basic pieces that you can mix and match to make a wide range of looks). We started with about a two-week rotation of some favorite meals that were comforting and at least reasonably healthy. We loosely follow a Mediterranean diet anyway, heavy on fish, fresh veggies, and beans. Social distancing gives us one unique advantage -- we can use all the garlic we want to make Spanish meals we learned on El Galeon, because no one is going to stand close enough to us to smell it!

The average grocery store, I learned researching this post, contains almost 40,000 discrete items. Forty thousand. As we learned after coming back from our trip to the Bahamas 10 years ago, too many choices can be paralyzing! My pandemic pantry list contains only about 40 basic items, not counting herbs and spices and condiments. Bell peppers and green beans, tomatoes, onions, olives and oranges and slivered almonds; eggs and fish and cheese and garbanzos and lentils. We're having a Spanish-style cod stew or blackened salmon on wilted spinach salad or cheese omelet with mushrooms and tomatoes or Peruvian beans and rice or shakshuka or moqueca (those two are as much fun to say, as they are to eat!) or just plain old pasta. The limited palette gives us room to be creative without being overwhelmed, perfect. I'll also be making a separate page here on the blog to link these recipes, and update this post when that is built.

Let's Not Go Back to Normal

I'm all about finding that silver lining ... always!

Overall, this lockdown isolation (and we are on Day 40 today as I write) feels like a long sea passage -- just the two of us on board alone together. The hiatus has given us time for thinking, talking, reflecting, just as we do at sea with only the waves, each other, and our thoughts for company. It's nicer than a long passage in that we have internet, fresh vegetables, and no night watches. It's less nice than a long passage in that when we finally arrive and get to leave the boat we won't have an interesting new country to explore. Or maybe, just maybe, we as a nation will rethink some things during this quiet time (or even, some things will die of their own accord) and we won't go back to some of the ways that weren't working so well before. If that happens then there could be a new country to explore after all.

“In a rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to,” suggested a meme that I posted a couple of weeks ago. So I have indeed been considering. There are things I miss from my old life, but perhaps fewer than I expected to. My normal life had lots of things I certainly don't miss -- the busy-ness and scurrying about; the filling every spare minute with distractions, mindless entertainment, and shopping; the indifference.

On the hurry-scurry, one of my Spanish friends said it best. The original is perhaps more lyrical than my translation but the point is so inarguable that I'm pretty sure it comes through. “Haste is dead,” he proclaimed. "Today, there is no rush to get up, there is no rush to bathe, no rush to dress and eat breakfast and drive to work. No rush to come home and make dinner and go to bed so you get enough sleep to get up tomorrow and do it all over again. Haste is dead, and time has been reborn.”

I've been pondering the distractions a lot as only essential services are allowed in our state at the moment. What is 'essential services' on the one hand, food, medicine, construction, trash, roads, gas. But almost half of what we have in our local economy … isn't essential. Most shopping isn't essential. I remember reading somewhere that the US has six times more retail space per capita on average than most of the rest of the world. An excess of stylish new clothes is certainly not essential and most of the people I know who have been cleaning and organizing while on lockdown are finding they have clothes to give away, a surplus rather than a shortage. And that goes for many other material things as well. Entertainment, tourism, museum, zoo, art, live music, even the library are all closed as non-essential. These things are also not considered 'nessessary' but they give life meaning, value, beauty. What a drab – and I daresay, brutish – existence we would have otherwise. Maybe post-lockdown we will begin to value experiences more than material things.

The indifference of the old "normal" compared to the generosity we've been offered in this time has been the most dramatic contrast of all. So yeah, that's the part of the old normal that we'll be most glad to jettison, and the thing that we will most remember from this time. Our neighbors and members of the local cruising community have been  amazing.  Grocery angels have done our shopping for us, we've had help from laundry angels, and errand angels while Dan is in strict isolation due to his injured lungs from a scuba diving accident in February. (It's been weird, learning to accept help rather than give it.) We've donated all the money we didn't spend last month on eating and drinking out, to suddenly unemployed servers and coffee shop owners and entertainers. We've learned to live slow, and to celebrate our friends via zoom and videochat, in many ways the one-on-one connections are deeper and richer than the noisy pubs we are more used to meeting friends in.

The virus still sucks, and we are still at risk, and we've lost numerous things we deeply value. I'm still wrestling a lot with my emotions around this summer's sailing season on the Galeon being cancelled. But the results of the lockdown, living slow and having time to think, that doesn't completely suck. We've found a small glitter of silver lining, and going forward, our “normal” will not be what it was before.

Feels Like Defeat (But Really Isn't)

Confusingly, having a car is both liberating, and confining, when you live and travel on a boat.

We haven't owned a car since we left Annapolis in 2013. We've just relied on public transportation or rented when we needed, because really, when you're as mobile as we are in the boat, or spending summers sailing with El Galeon or Santa Maria, owning a car is a bit of a liability. It needs to be moved while we move the boat from one city (or island!) to another, and stored and maintained while we're off adventuring. So instead, we rent while we're in a new area, to explore and to do basic maintenance like provisioning or getting boat parts.

Not having a car, especially in a historic downtown like St Aug, has always felt a bit freeing and European... until now. With so many things in unsettled circumstances, and Dan's lungs so fragile that we don't dare put him in a taxi, uber, or bus, we needed a long-term rental.

The good folks at our local Enterprise office know us and our preferences well. They lined us up with an almost-new Chevy Spark -- simple, small and agile, perfect for the narrow streets of the ancient town. It was delightfully reminiscent of the kind of cars we generally rent on Aruba. Unpretentious, youthful, and fun. Unfortunately, with Dan so isolated and fragile, there weren't many places we could take it! Storage unit, pharmacy, once or twice to parks where we could go for a walk until those closed down as well, and that was about it. All dressed up with no where to go; we couldn't even buy our own groceries and had to rely on favors from neighbors. (There turns out to be something surprisingly intimate about sharing grocery lists, but that's a story for another time.)

As the weeks went on it became apparent that we were in this for the long haul. We went online to extend our car rental, only to see that our local office had closed, though there was another one 15 minutes away that could serve our area. That, I think, was when we realized it was time to buy (gasp) our own car.

If not owning a car feels like a defining feature of a lifestyle of traveling on a sailboat and open to any adventure that comes along, then what does buying a car imply? The beginning of the end of our floating lifestyle? A commitment to stay in one area for a while? Having a much more predictable life, where the boat is just a floating condo? Was it the first step to moving ashore? Committing to buying a car just felt like accepting defeat.

It felt like the virus had ended our cruising dream, and maybe for others as well, as we see the fragility of this lifestyle. All over the Caribbean, Bahamas, and East Coast, our friends who were traveling on boats were reporting weird situations. They were trapped, couldn't move freely or get back north before hurricane season; marinas and ports and borders were closed or closing. I'm not sure what we want either. Early on, when we realized the Spanish ships and tall ship festivals were out for us this summer, as was our plan B of playing in the Chesapeake, we decided that St Aug was a smart place for us to be. We had a great infrastructure here, and many people who could help. We were known, and we knew the area.

The good news is that we had the money available, and were quickly able to find a vehicle that met our needs and wasn't too expensive. With the practical logistics solved, settling our heads was more challenging. Owning a car again simultaneously symbolizes freedom and an anchor or tether. We can go anywhere we want, independently, road trips!; and we're not traveling by boat any time soon, we're staying in this area for probably the next year.

Carnaval!!

It was only six weeks ago, but the world is so much darker right now. But six weeks ago was exuberance, feathers, sequins. Loud music, dancing in the streets. Laughter. Crowds, kids, sparkles. Family groups. Friends.

The people who participate spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on their costumes (sometimes more!) And walk/dance for hours in the sun; it seems everyone on the island is either in the parade, or watching the parade cheering from the sidelines. All the splendour is a gift to their neighbors -- and has been one of our favourite things to do witness Aruba, every spring.

This year was a "small" carnaval. It "only" took a few hours for the parade to pass the spot we were standing. So here are just a few pictures of the faces of random folks who stopped for photos, happily displaying their artwork. I found the secret of getting those photos, by the way: gesture politely with the camera that you'd like a photo. They'll pause and smile. Click the shutter. Look at the camera to check the image, make eye contact and a thumbs-up or other gesture indicating the photo came out okay and gesture thanks. Then they'll give you the real smile -- the one that is simultaneously "you're welcome" and "thanks for appreciating my art and our island tradition." That's when you take the photo that will become the keeper.

And a few of the "shoulder pieces." Imagine carrying this on your shoulders as you walk 4 or more kilometers in the sun -- then doing it again tomorrow! And paying for the privilege, for bragging rights but mostly just as a gift to your neighbors.

Building a Community

Burgees with the group's logo, the outline of the Castillo that is a symbol of the town and has never been taken in battle.

In late January 2012, a small group of cruisers who before this had only known each other on line met in a pub in town to match faces to screen names. We tried to develop a strategy to help people make real life connections and create a sailing community.  Different than a yacht club, we wanted to focus on cruisers who would be passing through, staying a day or a month or a season, and then in this nomadic lifestyle, moving on to explore new places.

With physical gatherings, virtual gatherings, happy hours and educational lectures and a morning VHF net (like a conference call that covers weather, winds, tides, welcomes newcomers and provides information about local services, general assistance, and fun events), the group now has a robust membership of over 2,000 people. What makes it feel totally different to me than any other sailing group I'm in, is that this one doesn't just include boaters although there are plenty of those. Marina managers, local marine trades and shop owners, even the local SeaTow operators and local law enforcement, marine sheriff and fire department, are all members. The community isn't just the people who play and live on boats, it's the entire breadth of maritime support people and industries coming together with the common interest in making the town a good place for boating.

I wish I understood how we made this happen, because I'd love to replicate it in other places as we travel. But even though I was there from the beginning, I have no idea how we got so lucky as to make this community coalesce. Must be some ancient St Aug city magic, I guess.

That first meeting in 2012 had only nine people -- plus an idea!

And look at us now, 8 years later! (photo from Mark & Suzanne Einstein)

Are We Done? Not Exactly the End of Cruising

Great blue herons remind me of Maryland. And also of patience, which they have and I do not.

There's a truism in cruising, that you make plans written in the sand at low tide, or plans are firmly cast in jello. Two summers ago, after an interesting but horribly hot stay in a lovely marina in Jacksonville while Dan healed from hip replacement surgery, we promised ourselves that we'd never again voluntarily spend a summer aboard in north Florida. Plan A for summer 2020 was to work another season on El Galeon; Plan B was to sail Cinderella to the Chesapeake; Plan C was to buy a van, fit it out for camping, and do a western US road trip.

But here we were, the word "voluntarily" in that vow came up thanx to the virus and quite suddenly all those options evaporated and it looked like we were going to be spending another summer aboard in north Florida after all. El Galeon was out -- we certainly weren't going to be attending lots of crowded tall ship festivals this summer. Sailing back to the Chesapeake was out too -- too many marinas are closing or closed, and we have too much uncertainty, to sail north, not to mention needing to be in a stable place where we have solid infrastructure while Dan continues to heal from his scuba diving accident. Not really game for a road trip, either, under the current circumstances, long distance travel just isn't in the offing. It looks to be an active hurricane season coming up, and Plans A, B, and C won't be available.

I had a bit of a meltdown last week, without thinking blurted out, "I want to go home!" And then, stunned -- what truth had I spoken?  I can't remember when I've had so much fun, or met so many people I liked all in one place, as St Aug. And the community we have here has been tremendous -- the fabulous people who've been helping us during Dan's recovery, and the support of the marine community in town is like nothing else I've ever known. But still, I realized "home" was not here. (Or, necessarily, anywhere.)

"Home" in the truest sense, is Cinderella, wherever she is docked. We still want to live on the boat -- but maybe not do the lengthy East Coast snowbird slog twice a year with the seasons. We've done the southeast coast 4 times south and 3 times north on Cinderella, and 3 times each way on El Galeon. Time for something different. I doubt that we're done with cruising, and definitely not done with living on the boat. The Chesapeake is calling; I want to try a place where we can sail more locally, just few hours sail and you can anchor in a different small town or deserted cove every day.  To get there faster, maybe we'll fly or drive to fun places for vacations. So, when things are stable again, probably next year, we're northbound again.

(image from here)

Hadn't Expected THIS at All!

These flamingos are not social distancing!

Right? No one here did. After we got back to the States we were going to spend a few days in southern Florida before returning to Cinderella. I suspected, rightly, that those days were going to be my last feeling of normalcy for, how long?

There were a few days in a grimy hotel outside of Fort Lauderdale where we did our income tax paperwork and took cellphone photos of the resulting documents to email to our accountant. Dinner at a Thai restaurant with recently-engaged friends Phil and Kay. Overpriced pizza and nice microbrewed beer. A much nicer hotel, this time with a bar where the bartender poured extremely stiff rum drinks, and after we'd had our limit a stereotypical big spender who had done well in Vegas bought another round. A visit to our dermatologist. Then, because the boat was completely empty, a big stock-up shopping trip to Trader Joe's.

Back in St Augustine, we early-voted, bought more groceries, wine, dropped our things off at our storage unit ... and dropped off the planet, it seemed, into total isolation as the scale of the crisis became apparent. We were just slightly ahead of the curve; as events started being cancelled and pubs shut down the following week. The weather was beautiful, we had a rental car, but couldn't go anywhere, do anything, or visit anyone!

In a sense, the isolation is no different than a long sea passage. As long term liveaboards and cruisers, we're better prepared for it than most. We've had lots of experience entertaining ourselves and keeping our relationship harmonious, just the two of us in our tiny fiberglass bubble on the big empty ocean. We started discussing how to get some purpose to our days, otherwise we'd end the isolation as experts in nothing but playing computer games, overweight and alcoholic. The original plan was to commit to one hour each day doing: something practical, something physical, something educational, something creative. We deep cleaned the boat, went for isolated walks, sorted photos and music. Dan studied sign language and Jaye studied meteorology. We spent a lot of time reading the news and social-media-ing with friends. We read a lot, and went for drives to nowhere in our little rented Spark.

For me the most surreal was a comment my friend H made on Facebook. She was watching a movie and a character came into a crowded party and hugged another character. "Only a week ago," my friend mused, "this seemed normal; now it's impossibly quaint."

Our friends and neighbors have been awesome, buying our groceries and running errands and other favors to keep Dan's contact with the outside world as minimal as possible while his lungs continue to heal from the diving accident. And I'm enjoying the quiet, unpressured and unstructured time. I don't know how long this will continue, but we'll get through it, together -- separately.

Grocery Carts

This bit of social engineering just fascinated me. A very simple way to keep from stray grocery carts scattered around the parking lot when lazy people don't bother to return them to the cart corrals.

Rows of grocery carts, neatly organized and returned to the cart corral. How do they do it?

Simple, but elegant. See that little dangle hanging in front of the cart? The carts are effectively chained together. To get the cart out, you put a coin in the handle (a quarter, or an Arubian florin which is about the same size.) That pushes out the chain holding your cart to the next one, so you can take it shopping. But don't worry, you get your coin back when you're finished. All you have to do is return the cart to the corral, then use the dangling key on the cart in front of yours to push out your coin and lock your cart to the next one. You've effectively put a 25-cent deposit on the cart, which is returned when you return the cart. Elegantly simple, and simply elegant. Remarkably effective, too!

Putting a coin in the slot releases the cart for your use

When you're finished, returning it and inserting the key to lock your cart to the stack, returns your coin.

This was my favourite store on the island anyway because I like their products so much, but even if that weren't the case, I would shop there just for this!

Road Signs

There's lots of micro-scale cultural differences that remind me that even though we're in a European-style First World country here in the southeastern Caribbean, and the streets are safe and you can drink the water, we're still living island style. Check out these road signs: 

In some cases, the meaning is fairly intuitive:

It's a pedestrian crosswalk, yes?

Others, less so:

Rocket launch area? (Actually, this signals that the road you are on is the one that has the right of way; side roads are subsidiary and must yield.)

I got pretty darn good at roundabouts. I like them, they are self-adjusting and use intersections more efficiently than traffic lights; hence, less congestion. But there's one by the airport that is 3 lanes. I tried it a couple of times when traffic was very light to see if I could learn it. That made it better but once I did change lanes wrong and heard tires squeal behind me as I forced an oncoming vehicle to brake hard. Another time I ended up trapped and going around the circle 2-1/2 times until I finally got in the correct lane to exit!

Roundabout ahead! But at least the road directions are clearly labelled. 

But sometimes, they are just plain weird. I've never before been in a place where there's an actual road to "other directions." Must be an island thing.

Not Exactly What I Had In Mind

Okay, I did say I was hoping to do new and different things, and have more adventures, in 2020 but "unexpected encounters with the health care system overseas" wasn't exactly what I had in mind!

It started out like an ordinary dive. Pretty day, and a favourite reef we have visited before. Dan was looking forward to diving in his new wetsuit, warmer and more comfortable fit than his previous one. It was the one he'd worn during our manatee encounter, and we had already gone for one dive just the previous week, and he had been very happy with its performance.

Dan is an experienced diver; here celebrating his 100th trip a few years ago.

About halfway through the dive, things began to go wrong and he was unable to keep control of his buoyancy. Perfect storm, a combination of stronger than usual current, unfamiliar equipment (not the wetsuit, but the rented BCD and weights), and just plain bad luck, and quite suddenly he was at the surface with a lot of seawater in his lungs.

There's a gap in both of our memories and things were a blur, but an ambulance ride was involved, and for me, hours by his side in a very air conditioned hospital emergency room while wearing a t shirt and shorts over a wet swimsuit.

Really high-tech health support

The hospital and staff were excellent. Language wasn’t a problem as almost everyone had English (fortunately, because while we can get by in Spanish we can’t have conversations on complex or technical subjects). He was on a positive pressure breathing machine with 100% oxygen for about 12 hours, which helped drive the water back out of his lungs and reabsorbed by his body. This was followed by canned oxygen for another 24 hours. They kept saying his blood saturation was too low, and were getting worried. But they were measuring saturation at his fingertips and he has terrible circulation and cold hands so the reading was artificially low. Clever doctor measured it again at his earlobe and learned that his recovery had been going much better than the fingertip measurements led them to believe! He had been fine for quite some time.

There was one disorienting but delightful moment when a man I met in a hallway looked at me, stared at me, and then said, "Why are you here?" Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out if I knew him ... turned out I did! He had rented us an apartment several years ago. So after I told him why I was there, I got to ask him why he was there -- he and his wife had sold the building and left the island after the winter we stayed with them. Turned out he was back doing a temporary stint at the hospital, so it was nice seeing a familiar face.

One other thing that struck me was that visiting hours were kept pretty strict, especially in ICU where he was the first 24 hours, but also in the general ward where he was the second day once he was out of immediate danger. I was given a lot more flexibility than most of the local folks, however. The explanation was that he was far from home and the situation would be far more stressful for him. While that was probably true, I'm sure everyone is stressed when a loved one is in the hospital. I was simultaneously grateful for the VIP treatment, and a bit embarrassed by my privilege as I walked past the other waiting people.

The afternoon shift in A-2 really liked him ... and really liked sending him home!

Two days later, Dan was home and feeling quite well. We rested for a day, then the next day went for a hike at our favourite spot, Ayo Rocks. We walked slowly but he had no shortness of breath. He was also able to go for a snorkel at a very calm beach (kinda like getting back on the horse) and no problems there either. We know he’s still weak; he gets shivery chills in late afternoon or early evening if he’s tired but less so every day. He’ll be fragile for a couple of months. Very thankfully no decompression injuries or lung expansion injuries or they would have airlifted him to Curaçao or Miami. As is it was bad but not that bad.

Follow up visit with the pulmonologist occurred a few days later. Dan had no permanent damage and his lungs sounded excellent. After the medical details were covered, the conversation meandered a bit. We talked about universal medical coverage (more on that below; our doctor was involved in its implementation here); about politics (we both shared a disdain for Trump and a fondness for BBC News); about Amsterdam's history of pirates and prostitutes. Diving is off the table for a long time, maybe forever, but that's sort of okay -- at least we can say "forever" again.

= = = = =
From a U.S. perspective it was interesting to see the health care differences. Here on Aruba, universal health care came about for economic advantages, but also for social reasons. The former system had a combination of private insurance for the rich, and the equivalent of Medicaid for everyone else, and the difference in quality of care was very very major. Now, people pay for their health care by a small percent deduction from their paychecks (3%, compared to, when we were working, 7% for Medicare); employers pay another 9% of payroll, and another 3% of sales tax on goods and services, all support health care. Total 15%. For staggering comparison, we pay about 15% of our income for health care now, in other words the same percentage, but that is just our portion, with my former employer, and Medicare, both picking up the greater portion of the total cost.  It totally brought home to me that statistic I read several years ago, that we spend an amazing 42 cents of every health care dollar on non-health things, mostly administrative like figuring out insurance billing codes, but also advertising and profit. The total hospital bill, for ambulance, ER, a day in ICU and a day in a regular ward, xrays, blood tests and medication, was about half what the deductible alone would have been for a similar stay in the US.