BEROWRA CREEK, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020 was a terrible year for Australia, and in such dark times, humor helps us cope. The triple-whammy began with an apocalypse of smoke and fire. Megafires that created their own weather converged to become the most extensive conflagration ever recorded on any continent, destroying 20 percent of the nation’s forested land. They were finally extinguished in February—by deadly flooding. Then, as the floodwaters were still receding, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived.
I’m not a great reader of the Old Testament, but after our three plagues, I consulted Exodus on the nature of the fourth disaster inflicted on the ancient Egyptians. It was an outbreak of wild animals or flies. Australia’s wildlife being what it is, this fourth plague seems to me to be just a character of our country. So I’m now on the lookout for plague five: diseases of livestock.
Australia’s bushfire crisis was supercharged by climate change, and as chief councillor of Climate Council Australia, it had me working through the holidays. The floods, however, brought a different challenge.
I have a small holiday house on a creek near Sydney. It’s accessible only by boat, and my vessel was already within an inch of going under the floodwaters by the time I reached her. We bailed and bailed until I could get in and turn the key. When the outboard fired up, it felt like a miracle. Then, in conditions reminiscent of the storm in John Huston’s Key Largo, we took her the eleven miles to our house, dodging whole trees that were being carried by the flood.
Covid-19 began to stalk us. Our family had decided to retreat to the holiday house if things worsened, and we started to stock it with essential supplies. I’m glad I got onto the toilet-paper purchase early, for, in an early and strange response to the threat (though not one unique to Australians, apparently), Australians plunged into a toilet-paper buying mania that saw supermarkets stripped of this essential.
The great toilet-paper drought of 2020 was not Australia’s proudest moment: several shoppers were charged with affray after they fell to fighting over the last roll, and toilet-paper thieves have been caught red-handed by CCTV at some stores. Now there are rumors that “the good stuff” can be had, if the price is right, at certain online marketplaces.
Last week, my wife, two sons, and my elder son’s partner decided to retreat to our house on the river. Our first thought was to try to extend our food supply by fishing, but the flood had brought down so much food that the large specimens gambolling around our pontoon ignored our tastiest baits. But we needed a project to occupy us, and our minds turned to a long-deferred one: renovating an old, termite-riddled shed behind the house. With building supplies hard to come by, we decided to see what we could scrounge locally first.
An inspection of the nearby mangrove glades yielded, among other flotsam, a handsome picnic table and benches, much structural timber and planking, a sturdy staircase, a refrigerator in good condition, a tool rack, a forty-four gallon drum full of lubricating oil, and a trash can, miraculously delivered by the waters complete with lid and plastic liner. It was as if the flood had scoured a hardware store and delivered everything we needed at no cost.
As I write, all is well in our isolated retreat. The termites are banished, and we have enough building materials to recreate a habitable scale model of the Taj Mahal should we wish. We and many other Australians seem to be slipping into a new and more organic routine. I just hope that whatever the eventual outcome of the pandemic, we can all find some joy amid the constraints that Covid-19 has placed on us.
Tim Flannery’s Europe: A Natural History was published last year. (March 2020)
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I spent the first five weeks of the coronavirus lockdown in Beijing, walking and walking and walking, as if by circumambulating the city I could open it up.
I wasn’t in one of the radically controlled parts of China, where residents became virtual prisoners, able to leave their apartment blocks or villages only with government permission. But friends quickly withdrew to the confines of family life, and their absence eliminated everything that made Beijing home.
I couldn’t keep from walking, and slipped out every day for hours at a time, like a widower mourning the sites of a past love. I regularly walked by the Forbidden City, where I had spent many hours with a friend who researched the immense palace’s geomancy. Usually bustling with tourists, it was now empty and locked tight toward outsiders, as it might have been before imperial China collapsed in 1911.
I entered some of the parks that were still open, such as Beihai. In the past, I had visited it with groups of friends who were believers in folk religion. Every Chinese New Year they would perform martial arts routines here, attracting huge crowds. But on New Year’s Eve this past January, the park was empty and on each visit it seemed sadder and sadder: the banners and flags welcoming the Year of the Rat were still up but the ice on the lake was slowly melting, as if humans had lost control of time.
Each visit was increasingly disorienting. I took pictures but didn’t post them on Chinese social media; it felt as if witnessing the city’s self-induced coma was unseemly.
One day, a friend broke ranks. He lived at the edge of the Western Mountains that mark the end of the basin around Beijing and the start of the Mongolian Foothills. He posted a picture of the old pilgrimage trail that led to Beijing’s holiest site, Miaofengshan—the Mountain of the Miraculous Peak, home to Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, or bixia yuanjun, a Daoist deity who blessed families with children and good health.
The photo was left uncommented upon, but it was clear there was a way to walk the old pilgrimage trail. I immediately booked a rental car and drove over the next day, but the entrance was locked. I turned to go, unsure if I should call my friend, when a guard came out of a hut.
“It’s closed due to the virus.”
“Don’t you remember me?” I said to him. “I made the pilgrimage to Miaofengshan last year by foot. I walked the whole way from the center of the city”—more than forty kilometers away. That part was true, although I didn’t actually recognize this guard.
“My gate is closed,” he said. “You cannot get in this way.”
I caught the hint.
“But other gates…”
“There are three other gates. They are all closed.”
“But a friend was on the trail yesterday.”
“Who can close a mountain?”
I bade him farewell and drove down a side road, stopping at a field before the next village. I could see broken corn husks but it was clear the land hadn’t been planted in years—typical for much of mountainous rural China, which the government was trying to reforest. But toward the back, as in every Chinese field, I still found a trail leading to the next field. It was overgrown but still passable, mainly because it was so rocky.
I ascended along a ridge, through brambles, past another abandoned terraced field, and finally my path joined the main pilgrimage route. An hour later, I was at the peak of this first hill, looking over a valley to Miaofengshan. The temple was tiny under the overcast sky, just a speck on the first of an endless string of ridges that ran to the horizon.
I turned and looked down at Beijing, low, gray, and quiet. Pious people believe that the goddess controls the fate of those down in the city, and maybe that was true. But whether the temple would open and the goddess worshipped—that depended on what went on down below me in China’s cities and towns.
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who lives in Beijing, his home for more than twenty years. His most recent book is The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. (March 2020)