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I’ve never taken many summer vacations because there was always an Olympics or a World Cup that seemed more compelling. However, after choosing the buyout last December, I decided it was time to learn to relax.
Part of our family rented a complex in the woods on Cape Cod for last week. Then I started getting ominous news about wild life on the Cape. In June a black bear was spotted roaming the narrow spit of land where nobody had ever seen a black bear before. When they knocked him out, they decided he had been able to swim over from the mainland, possibly in search of a mate. The authorities deported him to the woods in central Massachusetts, but my theory was if one lovelorn bear could make it across, there must be others. The next frightening sign was a poster in the library saying an expert would be giving a talk about the expanding coyote population of Cape Cod. Who knew? A real-estate agent said a coyote and pups had been sighted in the woods outside a house he was showing. One of the hobbies of Cape Cod appears to be makng videos of foxes, frolicking. . What was next? I found an item on line saying Cape Cod residents are being warned about ticks and Lyme Disease. So much for the woods. We would head for the beach. Then I heard that sea lions off the New England coast have been showing signs of influenza not unlike the bird flu that has begun impacting humans in the last generation. On that charming note, we arrived on Cape Cod. The first news to greet us was that a man had been bitten on both legs in the ocean right off Truro and a great white shark had apparently been sighted. The man was treated and eventually released, and swimmers were reassuring themselves that sharks do not single out humans but more likely are attracted by the numerous sea lions in the area. I was starting to get flashbacks of Australia in 2000 during the Olympics, when visitors were warned of killer sharks and killer flora and killer fauna, including poisonous puffballs in the earth that could kill you if you happened to scuff one with your foot. Could the Cape be as lethal as Australia? The first day of vacation, we decided to swim on the bay side. We decamped at a lovely beach with warm and gentle salt water and I inflated the kayak and my grown son and I paddled out a few hundred yards. Then I noticed a head bobbing 50 feet away. The head disappeared. “I could have sworn I saw something in the water,” I said. The head popped up again. “It’s a sea lion,” my son said. “Look at the whiskers.” We weren’t so much worried about the bird flu the sea lion might be carrying as the hypothetical white shark that might be looking for sea lions. We started rowing fast until the water was only a few feet deep. Children and adults took turns in the kayak and nothing bad happened. In fact, we had a lovely six days on Cape Cod, escaping with no damage from nature. The only injury I sustained was self-inflicted. Early one morning, while waiting for a family Wiffle ball game, two grand-daughters charmingly tutored me on how to run. I forgot I had not yet performed my daily old-guy stretching. As I ran to catch up with them, I felt a quad muscle wrench loose. I came home from vacation using copious amounts of Advil and ice. I cannot blame the wilderness for my pain -- but I do have a new and fearful vision of summer vacations. * * * Oops, this just in. Not to sound like Woody Allen, cowering in the presence of lobsters in Annie Hall, but Grandchild 2/5 reported seeing jellyfish ("that looked like prunes") in the bay, and Grandchild 3/5 reported a snapping turtle in a bucolic pond that we fell in love with. None of it was as fearsome as the traffic on and off Cape Cod. GV Welcome back, George, even if a little worse for the wear. Having vacationed on the Cape in the day, I would say you escaped the worst danger if you completed Rt. 6 safely, and did not get stamped while trying to get ice cream. Loved the U.S. women being able to win in the last 30 seconds, but felt for the Canadians and Christine Sinclair, who I have learned a bit about this summer. Cheers.
George Vecsey
8/7/2012 03:09:49 am
Ed, thanks. That game was terrific. I'm hoping to write about it before the final. Plus Real-Milan Wednesday in Yankee Stadium.
Charles in Absecon
8/7/2012 04:01:59 am
I'm certain there's a movie in all this. 8/7/2012 08:56:42 am
George,
George Vecsey
8/7/2012 12:38:03 pm
Guys, if it is any consolation, we got back to Long Island, and our daugfhter and grand-daughter were startled by the resident raccoon scuttling past them on the deck. Danger everywhere! GV
Ed Martin
8/9/2012 10:09:01 am
Thoughts re U.S.-Japan result in Women's Soccer Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html |
