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Like the cold settles here in the Midwest, as do the uncertainties of navigating a new pandemic season. My wife and I had barely gotten past the back-to-school mental gymnastics and debated whether our children could cheat or treat, when it dawned on us that our Thanksgiving plans, too, would probably need to change. I suggested to my family that we ditch our usual dinner, get our warmer jackets out of our storage, gather around my parents’ fireplace and eat turkey soup instead. I was only half kidding.
The lack of a national response in the United States has gotten us to this point, trying to manage the risks of an unchecked pandemic while maintaining, where we can, our social ties. It is becoming clear to my family that if we cannot adapt our holiday traditions to the great outdoors and the cold, we cannot safely share them in person at all. The alternative would be to share a meal on Zoom.
Or FaceTime. Or Google Meet. Or Slack. (Are Slack vacation channels still a thing?) Since the start of the pandemic, Americans have turned to technology to help us maintain our social worlds while promoting social distancing. Silicon Valley has capitalized on this need, expanding the already prominent role of digital devices and platforms in our lives. But when I think of the tools that have made me feel the most “connected” over the past six months, most of them aren’t computers. They are made of fabric.
Masks, lawn chairs, picnic blankets, tents, and weather-appropriate clothing have all become essential amenities during the summer. They allowed us to meet people outside of our homes and in the relative safety of the outdoors. Now, as winter approaches, these simple technologies have taken on new importance as social connectivity devices. If we are lucky, they could help us maintain a physical co-presence that even our most advanced innovations cannot.
The cloth mask, not Zoom, was the disruptive technology of 2020. While it has become ubiquitous and in many places mandatory, it was not at the start of the pandemic. The United States has missed key opportunities to make this low-cost tool available and communicate its importance. The Trump administration downplayed the usefulness of the masks and rolled back a plan to ship a reusable five-pack to every household in April. When public health officials started recommending masks, my family got our first masks from neighborhood volunteers, who ran brightly colored scraps of fabric through their sewing machines to make sure our community Ohio was covered.
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If masks allowed us to leave the house to do essential groceries, it was our folding camping chairs, pulled from the basement, that took us into the next phase of face-to-face interactions. These lightweight polyester chairs, which I bought a few years ago for $ 8 from the discount supermarket chain ALDI, have become a must have this summer. We found friends – sitting over 6 feet apart – in parks and walkways. A picnic blanket that we used to roll out once or twice a year became our mobile table, allowing us to enjoy home-cooked meals and take-out at local outdoor restaurants. Tents have become essential equipment for medical centers that operate outdoor Covid testing sites; Soon, office workers, fitness instructors, and school administrators scrambled to pitch their own tents. During the forest fires in California this summer, tents were used as evacuation centers, an attempt to protect people from the double crisis of the fires and a deadly virus.
In the college town where I teach, tents and weather-appropriate clothing made the difference between reopening schools and closing schools. The public school district, like many around the country, has decided to start the school year online. The district distributed laptops to each student. The local private school, on the other hand, has learned a lesson from past epidemics. He’s committed to outdoor education, erecting tents in his schoolyard, and sending parents lists of supplies that include masks, sun hats and rain suits. Today, at the quarter of the school year, the school is still open for in-person and full-time instruction, with no cases of Covid-19 having been reported to date. Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol researcher, recently wrote for Time that it is “mind-boggling that the US National Guard is not busy setting up open canopy tents in every school across the country.”
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