Heading North

The last time I wrote a blog was back in 2012-2013 when I lived in Africa for 8 months, first in Tanzania and then in Zambia.  While British Columbia is a less exotic location to be writing from, the world as a whole is in much greater turmoil than it was back then.  And the U.S., in particular, is one of the countries struggling the most to contain the COVID19 pandemic and to deal with a range of other underlying problems that the pandemic and the current administration have exacerbated.

Therefore, I thought it might be interesting for me to chronicle my experiences and impressions living outside the US for several months, both to sharpen my own thinking about what is going on and to keep any family or friends who might be interested abreast of my experiences and how the distance from my country is affecting my thinking about what is happening there.

But first, why are we heading to Canada?  Well, there are a host of reasons and it’s not just the virus, though that is probably a sufficient impetus.  For one thing, John hasn’t seen his son, Anders, since March so that is top of mind.  
I’ve also become rather disillusioned with the Bay Area and the USA.  Locally, the homelessness, garbage, and grime that surrounds us increasingly upsets me. My understanding of some of its causes, from Reagan’s drastic cuts to federal funding for public housing, the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill without fulfilling the promise of community based care that was to replace it, rampant and public drug use in cities with local governments that are unwilling to police it, and an influx of population due to the tech boom, does little to make it feel more tolerable.  To the contrary, the fact that many of the causes have been building for 40 years makes me even more upset that our society is unwilling or unable to tackle them.

Add to that the national hate-fest led by our “Divider-in-Chief” and his white supremacist base and I decided I could use a break.  John, my Canadian-British-American triple-passport husband, is fed up with the US and has been itching to leave for months.  But while I am happy for a change of scene, I feel I have work to do as an American right now.  Since George Floyd’s killing and subsequent protests, I’ve realized I need to further my education on the history of racial oppression in the US.  Therefore, I’ve embarked on a reading, watching, and listening program to educate myself (and John) about that history and where we are now.

Based on my progress so far, I have to say I’m shocked to realize just how ignorant I’ve been.  Having grown up in Berkeley and been bussed to a black neighborhood starting in 4th grade where we studied the history of the US with black teachers who drove home the cost of slavery and white supremacy, I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat enlightened.  I mean the Black Panthers were in full swing right down the street from me in Oakland while I was a child (we recently watched The Black Panthers: Vanguard of The Revolution on the PBS channel – highly recommended!).  I had no idea what was going on, sheltered by my well-meaning, progressive parents who nonetheless didn’t spend a lot of time talking about racism despite it being one of the main reasons my mother left Alabama.  They may have figured we were getting enough education on it in the Berkeley public schools.

However, what I’ve realized is that having had that experience in my early years (at a school that started off as the Lincoln School when I arrived and was renamed Malcolm-X School by the time I left 2 years later), an experience that was not very positive either educationally or socially, I’ve avoided any focus on race since, leaving me with a 5th grade level of knowledge and awareness (ok, slight exaggeration but not much).  Therefore, my further education is long overdue and, happily, there is a plethora of sources, many of them written or produced in the last few years, to choose from.

As we left Berkeley on Friday, June 26th, with our e-mountain bikes on the back of my old Prius that we are bringing to BC for Anders, I was reading White Fragility, a book recommended by my daughter Kelsey and also on the Justice in June resource list that I am using.  I finished the book by the time we reached Washington state a couple days later and I highly recommend it. I’d had a negative reaction to its title before knowing what it referred to but, having read the book, the title now makes sense as it eloquently describes the state so many white people live in around the topic of race.  One of the author’s main points, that stating one is “color blind” is neither true nor helpful, speaks directly to the approach so many parents, including mine, took in attempting to raise their white children in what they hoped would be a post-racial society (Ha!)

After leaving Berkeley, John and I spent four days making our way North through Oregon and Washington.  While on the road, we listened to CodeSwitch and Small Doses with Amanda Seales podcasts (suggestions from Justice in June list) and also started listening to Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist.

We spent a night in Klamath Falls, OR, and then visited Crater Lake, only my second time there.  So stunning! 

Then we drove by all those amazing snow capped peaks 

on the way up to Mosier to stay with friends in their gorgeous new home overlooking the Columbia river gorge.

After a quick mountain bike ride the next morning, we continued North to stay with a middle school friend of mine who lives with her husband in West Seattle with a stunning view of Puget Sound.  

Finally, we made it to Bellingham, WA, near the Canadian border and spent our last US night in a spiffy, upgraded motel before heading to the Canadian border the next morning.

Though the Canadian border is closed to all non-essential travel, Canadian citizens and landed immigrants are allowed to cross with family members, even if the family member is not a citizen or landed immigrant, which I’m not at this time.  However, before we left John had sponsored my application to become a landed immigrant in Canada.  We had no problem getting across the border but the agent did ask to see our marriage license and questioned us extensively to get contact information and to make sure we understood that we’d need to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, knew how to get food and necessities without going to stores, and that we should not stop on our way to our quarantine location, John’s house in Vernon.

By late that afternoon, we’d made it to John’s home where we toasted to our successful Northern Escape with gin and tonics on John’s deck.

Within a day of our arrival, we’d gotten a call from the Canadian public health officials to make sure we were self-isolating as promised.  BC is extremely cautious about folks who have come across the border and I’ve read about Americans who crossed the border and did not immediately self-isolate being fined $1,000 (at the border they told us they can fine up to $1 million and 6 months in jail). So they are not fooling around! 

John and I had gotten COVID tests two days before leaving Berkeley out of an abundance of caution, figuring we did not want to head to Canada and stay with friends on the way if we were asymptomatic carriers, which we thought was extremely unlikely given we both felt fine and had been wearing masks and being careful, but still a good idea to confirm.  Optum, the private company offering the nasal swab tests that we had on 6/24, promised to have results back to us in 48-72 hours which would have been within a day of having left Berkeley.  As we made our way up the coast, we wondered what had happened to our test results as we heard nothing.

We arrived Vernon on Tuesday and on Thursday morning, 8 days after our tests, John got his result and it was positive.  We were more than a little alarmed, especially since we had stayed with two friends on the way up.  My result came in that evening and was negative.  We immediately did a timeline of everyone we had had contact with since a week before and ever since those tests and emailed them the news suggesting they get tested and be extra careful.

The BC public health officer that we reported John’s case to on Friday requested that we both get retested which we did that afternoon, and on Sunday we learned that we were both negative, meaning John had already cleared the virus.  Since then, I’ve had extensive conversations with both the City of Berkeley contact tracer who called today and the BC contact tracer who has been calling, and have learned that false positive tests are almost nonexistent (“the test identifies genetic material so a false positive would be like seeing a zebra and mistaking it for a horse”) so John very likely did have the virus but was largely asymptomatic (intermittent slight sore throat and hangover-like headache), all of which is now gone.

Both tracers emphasized that anyone who had contact with John between Monday, June 22, and Saturday, July 4, should quarantine themselves for 14 days.  They said that while getting a test is fine, because the virus takes 5-8 days to accumulate in the back of the nose sufficiently to render a positive test result, the 14-day quarantine is more important than the test as there are lots of false-negatives.

So now we are becoming experts on this virus, to the extent that is possible given how little it is actually understood.  Because they believe that John could have been contagious until July 4th, I now have to extend my quarantine to July 18th, 14 days after his last possible contagious date.  But once we’re through that period, he is likely immune, at least for awhile, and I may be too, though who knows.  The way I look at it, this extra quarantine time provides me with even more opportunity to read, listen, and watch my way toward becoming an anti-racist.

Last night, we watched I Am Not Your Negro, an elegant documentary based on an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript that explores the history of racism in the US, chronicles the different worlds lived in by black and white Americans, and remembers three black leaders, Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, each of whom whom were murdered in the ’60’s.

So, it’s been an exciting, somewhat alarming, educational 12 days since leaving Berkeley.  I’ve written more than enough for now and hope to continue my chronicle approximately weekly.  Next time: What does one have to do to pass as Canadian?

Stay safe down there!