24Dec

The Social Distancing Champion Thrives in the Pandemic

• Saved in: Chris Orcutt Books, Craft, Fiction Writing, Film/TV, Memoirs, Mystery Writing, Novels, Process, Rewriting, The Dakota Stevens Mysteries Series, Travel, Typewriters, Workspace, Writers, Writing Experiences, Writing Life, Writing Tools
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on The Social Distancing Champion Thrives in the Pandemic

I have a T‑shirt with a quote by F. Scott Fitzger­ald on it. The quote reads, “You don’t write because you want to say some­thing. You write because you have some­thing to say.”

This is the rea­son why I so sel­dom write blog entries: because I usu­al­ly don’t have any­thing to say. Well, now that I’ve been liv­ing through COVID for the past sev­en months, I final­ly feel like I have some­thing to say. Here goes…

I spend next to no time online any­more, so I don’t know what oth­er peo­ple have writ­ten about their year in the time of COVID. How­ev­er, I imag­ine there have been more than enough posts about how hor­ri­ble life has been this year—how COVID has pre­vent­ed peo­ple from trav­el­ing, see­ing their fam­i­ly and friends, and in gen­er­al dis­rupt­ed their lives.

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The pan­dem­ic and the uncer­tain, com­bat­ive polit­i­cal cli­mate this year has remind­ed me that most of Life is out of my con­trol, which is why I’ve spent the major­i­ty of the past nine months focus­ing on two things I can con­trol: my writ­ing and my fit­ness.

Com­pared to oth­er occu­pa­tions, many of which have been severe­ly dis­rupt­ed by COVID, mine as a nov­el­ist has actu­al­ly ben­e­fit­ed from the pan­dem­ic. The rea­son is the lack of dis­trac­tions. I haven’t been able to go any­where, so every day I’ve sim­ply risen ear­ly, sat down at one of my eleven type­writ­ers (yes, I got a few more this year), and con­tin­ued work on one of the five nov­els I have in progress.

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Hon­est­ly, this year it’s been far eas­i­er emo­tion­al­ly to bury my head in the metaphor­i­cal sand by buy­ing type­writ­ers and focus­ing on my writ­ing. The social and polit­i­cal unrest, the vio­lence, the protests, and the restric­tions and incon­ve­niences of COVID have all made me want to utter­ly ignore the “real world,” and instead escape each morn­ing into a fic­tion­al world that I cre­ate and (to some degree) con­trol.

* * *

Besides the stag­ger­ing COVID num­bers and the deaths caused by the pan­dem­ic, there was news this year of oth­er deaths that affect­ed me deeply, caus­ing me to feel nos­tal­gic for my long-gone child­hood and remind­ing me of my own mor­tal­i­ty, which in turn spurred me to write more, and faster.

“Ars lon­ga, vita bre­vis. Art is long, life is short.” — Latin trans­la­tion of a Greek state­ment by Hip­pocrates.

“Work, work, for the night is com­ing!” — Michelan­ge­lo

For dif­fer­ent rea­sons, the deaths of the fol­low­ing peo­ple had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on my out­look, in some cas­es send­ing me to bed, depressed, for a cou­ple days:

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Kel­ly Pre­ston. I loved her as the sin­gle mom in For Love of the Game, as the dri­ven, man-eat­ing, emas­cu­lat­ing girl­friend in Jer­ry Maguire, and in Stephen King’s Chris­tine, but the nos­tal­gic side of me loved her most in the obscure teen sex romp Mis­chief, from 1985. It’s a great com­ing of age sto­ry about a teenage boy in the 1950s, and Kel­ly Pre­ston plays the sexy teenage Alpha girl per­fect­ly. Over the past four years, while I’ve been writ­ing my own “teen epic,” the antics in Mis­chief have giv­en me fre­quent bursts of inspi­ra­tion.

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Elaine Sad­of­sky. The moth­er of my best friend, Mrs. Sad­of­sky was, in my opin­ion, a great painter—particularly of water­col­or still-lifes. She had con­sid­er­able dif­fi­cul­ties man­ag­ing moth­er­hood (par­tic­u­lar­ly try­ing to raise a genius son like Jason), and was lack­ing in some life skills, but I always found her to be warm and com­pas­sion­ate and artis­ti­cal­ly inspir­ing. I’ll nev­er for­get the first day I vis­it­ed Jason after school at his family’s apart­ment (on the oth­er side of our devel­op­ment, Green Hills of Glen­ham in Fishkill, NY). When I went in the door, three things struck me: one, Mrs. Sadofsky’s warm smile; two, the fact that the apart­ment was a ter­ri­bly clut­tered mess; and three, most of all, the stacks of her paint­ings all over the liv­ing room, includ­ing an easel with a paint­ing-in-progress on it. My moth­er always loved Mrs. Sadofsky’s art­work, and one of my few regrets in life was nev­er hav­ing bought a paint­ing from Mrs. Sad­of­sky for her. Although I had­n’t seen her for many years before her death, I will miss her.

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Eddie Van Halen. When he died in Octo­ber, my mind was flood­ed with mem­o­ries of all of those great Van Halen songs from my teen years, and I—a man my wife says is per­pet­u­al­ly about 14 years old—instantly felt my age. Back when I was 13–17, I kept Van Halen cas­sette tapes in my cas­sette clock radio, so I could wake up every morn­ing to songs like “I’ll Wait,” “Pana­ma,” “Hot for Teacher,” “Run­nin’ with the Dev­il,” and “And the Cra­dle Will Rock.” Indeed, Van Halen’s music plays a major role in my “teen epic” Big Book, star­ring 16-year-old Avery Craig. Here is a “sneak peek” from a scene in the nov­el that men­tions the dear­ly depart­ed Eddie Van Halen:

Avery went over to the juke­box, dropped in a quar­ter and select­ed Van Halen’s “And the Cra­dle Will Rock.” The song opened with a wal­lop. To Avery, its killer open­ing gui­tar work sound­ed like an elec­tri­cal storm, and its swanky, dri­ving beat made him imag­ine super­mod­el Elle Macpher­son sashay­ing down a cat­walk in noth­ing but high heels and a skimpy string biki­ni. Singing along with David Lee Roth, Avery swag­ger-danced like Roth back to the counter, where he stomped his heel to the music and skimmed the “Cos­mo Quiz.” … At the pre­cise moment Eddie Van Halen launched into his scorch­ing gui­tar solo, Cait­lyn slinked half a step inside, held the saloon doors open and stood still with one knee seduc­tive­ly bent for all to admire. Avery’s eyes widened, his breath­ing stopped, his heart quaked in his chest. An over­head light shone down on her, mak­ing her hair sparkle red, as if there were small rubies in it. Her Blow Pop was gone, but her smirk­ing lips were as volup­tuous and slip­pery-look­ing as ever.

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Sean Con­nery. Any­one who real­ly knows me and has known me for a long time will tell you that I’ve been a Bond fan since I was sev­en or eight years old. When I was a lit­tle kid, I was enam­ored of the James Bond por­trayed by Roger Moore, but when I became a teenag­er, it was all about Sean Con­nery and the Bond from the nov­els. Indeed, my bed­room at ages 13 to 17 had a poster of a still from GOLDFINGER: Sean Con­nery in the Alps, lean­ing on the front fend­er of his Aston Mar­tin DB5. I can admit now to watch­ing cer­tain Con­nery scenes over and over, try­ing to fig­ure out exact­ly what made him so damn cool. It was just that: Con­nery was the epit­o­me of cool. What­ev­er char­ac­ter he was por­tray­ing in a movie, he gave the role author­i­ty, style, and mas­cu­line strength. Besides the Bond movies, I loved (and still love) him in The Great Train Rob­bery, The Untouch­ables, and even the oth­er­wise for­get­table, mod­ern action flick, The Rock.

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Diana Rigg. The “Bond girl” in one of the less­er-known and less-appre­ci­at­ed Bond movies, On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice, she brought an ele­gance to her role as Bond’s wife, Tra­cy Bond, that none of her fel­low Bond girls have man­aged to before or since. Along with the afore­men­tioned poster of Sean Con­nery in the Alps, lean­ing on the front fend­er of his Aston Mar­tin DB5, my teenage bed­room also con­tained a bul­letin board with images of my favorite Bond girls, and a small poster of the love­ly auburn-haired Diana Rigg in her fig­ure-skat­ing out­fit in the movie was among them. When I learned ear­li­er this year that she had died, I actu­al­ly felt a throb of hurt in my chest. It was as if I’d heard that a for­mer girl­friend had become sick or fall­en into penury or addic­tion before dying. And I will admit here and now that Diana Rigg, along with Bar­bara Bach in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, was a major inspi­ra­tion for my char­ac­ter Svet­lana Krüsh in the Dako­ta Stevens mys­ter­ies.

* * *

And with that, back to my writ­ing. Specif­i­cal­ly here’s what I accom­plished with my writ­ing this year:

Now, while I’ve made great progress this year in the actu­al writ­ing of new mate­r­i­al, my book sales have been way, way down. But, as if to coun­ter­bal­ance this reduc­tion in writ­ing income, my stock port­fo­lio has pos­i­tive­ly crushed it this year—all stocks that I picked, by the way, not because Cramer or some oth­er loud­mouth declared them a good buy.
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One inno­va­tion I’ve incor­po­rat­ed into my writ­ing process this year that I’d like to men­tion, is the acquir­ing of an Epson ADP (Auto­mat­ic Doc­u­ment Feed) scan­ner. With this baby, I’ve been able to type pages on one of my type­writ­ers (my new favorite is a recent­ly acquired Olivet­ti Stu­dio 44), and at the end of each writ­ing day scan them into the com­put­er. This is prov­ing to be an incred­i­ble time-saver, obvi­at­ing the need for me to re-type type­writer pages into a com­put­er.

I’ve mar­veled at how far the scan­ning and OCR tech­nol­o­gy has come in the past 20 years. Back in 2002 or so, I was using this same process while writ­ing the first draft of the Dako­ta mys­tery A Real Piece of Work. Not only was the scan­ner the slow­est flatbed chunk of crap I’ve ever worked with, but also the OCR soft­ware was wonky and inac­cu­rate. Not so any­more.
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A cou­ple weeks ago, I decid­ed I want­ed a dig­i­tal copy of all the hand-edits I’d made to hard copy pages of the Big Book. Remem­ber­ing how long sim­i­lar scan­ning projects had tak­en me in the past, I ear­marked 20 hours (or about one hour each work­day after­noon for a month) to com­plete the project, but I did it—scanned 2,600 man­u­script pages—in less than 4 hours! Incred­i­ble.

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Fit­ness, or…“Work, Bitch!” As I men­tioned above, the oth­er area of my life that I can con­trol and which I’ve been focus­ing on this year is my fit­ness. Per­haps antic­i­pat­ing COVID (but more like­ly out of a desire to be able to work out every day inde­pen­dent of gyms), I spent a lot of time last win­ter out­fit­ting a com­plete home gym in our base­ment. We have a Nor­dic­Track tread­mill fac­ing our old­er HDTV, so I can have car­dio cin­e­ma every after­noon. And I have, hik­ing or run­ning 3–5 miles a day while watch­ing any num­ber of my favorite movies.

Recent­ly I bought a row­ing machine for the home gym to aug­ment the weight bench, weights, resis­tance bands, TRX straps, yoga ball and oth­er equip­ment I already had in place. My wife, Alexas, has been incred­i­bly active with our gym as well, tak­ing PiYo class­es twice a week, and doing online Pelo­ton class­es every after­noon. Seri­ous­ly, I don’t know how we would have been able to han­dle the iso­la­tion and restric­tions of COVID with­out our lit­tle home gym.

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On a relat­ed note, the Out­doors. If we did­n’t have a home gym, I prob­a­bly would have been spend­ing even more time outdoors—that is, more than the 20 hours a week that I’m already doing. Since Jan­u­ary, I’ve climbed about 15 small moun­tains in New York and near­by Con­necti­cut and Mass­a­chu­setts; hiked hun­dreds of miles in state parks and on the Appalachi­an Trail; and, when there’s been snow (like the past week), cross-coun­try skied tens of miles as well. My ski­ing has got­ten bet­ter as I’ve aged, prob­a­bly because I’m no longer push­ing myself to go as fast as pos­si­ble. Instead I’ve been focus­ing on form and tech­nique, know­ing from my youth as a ten­nis play­er that if I can get the form down, the speed and pow­er will come even­tu­al­ly. I prac­tice every chance I get. Here’s hop­ing we get anoth­er 2 feet of snow dur­ing the Christ­mas to New Year’s week!

While I’m men­tion­ing the out­doors, I’d like to take a moment to cred­it some men and an insti­tu­tion that opened up this world to me and helped me to devel­op these skills. In recent years it’s become cus­tom­ary to bash the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, and some of that crit­i­cism is cer­tain­ly jus­ti­fied. How­ev­er, I can’t speak to any of the alle­ga­tions lev­eled against the orga­ni­za­tion or some of its for­mer leaders—allegations of sex­u­al molesta­tion (or worse), homo­pho­bia, etc.—because none of those things were my expe­ri­ence. My expe­ri­ences with Scout­ing were unequiv­o­cal­ly pos­i­tive. In fact, the more time I’ve spent in the out­doors, the more I’ve come to real­ize that I have my excel­lent Scout­mas­ters of Troop 95 in Fishkill, NY to thank for my skills and com­fort in func­tion­ing in the woods. Most if not all of them are prob­a­bly dead now, but I have to thank the fol­low­ing men for their lessons and lead­er­ship, and for being such great, sup­port­ive role mod­els: Mr. Mac­Far­lane, Mr. Loven, Mr. Dewood­ie, Mr. Grif­fiths and, yes, even you, Mr. Cruick­shank (the “mean Scout­mas­ter”). They all taught me well. Almost 40 years lat­er, their instruc­tion on hypother­mia, build­ing a fire, ori­en­teer­ing, moun­tain res­cue, knots, fil­ter­ing water, build­ing a shel­ter, iden­ti­fy­ing ani­mal tracks, etc. has stuck with me and served me well for decades.

Case in point, back in April, while hik­ing along the Tacon­ic range in East­ern Dutchess coun­ty, I went to a stone edi­fice mark­ing the spot where the bor­ders of New York, Con­necti­cut and Mass­a­chu­setts meet. On the way back from the site, I encoun­tered a lost hik­er who was stum­bling around, look­ing for the trail. It was a cold, windy day, and with the wind-chill on the bare moun­tain­top, prob­a­bly only 20 degrees. He was thor­ough­ly unpre­pared. I mean com­plete­ly. He had a tiny water bot­tle and a pow­er bar for food, but noth­ing for a shel­ter, noth­ing to start a fire with, and was wear­ing car­go pants with holes in them (no base lay­ers), sneak­ers, and no hat. As I got clos­er, I noticed this hik­er was limp­ing to boot, and I said to myself, “Chris, if you don’t do some­thing here, this moth­erf-cker is gonna die.”

What I did next amazed me. With no con­scious thought what­so­ev­er, the hun­dreds of hours of train­ing I’d received in Scouts and the elite Scout orga­ni­za­tion, The Order of the Arrow, kicked in. I got his atten­tion, asked him some ques­tions and estab­lished that his speech was slurred and he was con­fused (symp­toms of hypother­mia), cov­ered him with a Mylar emer­gency blan­ket, built a fire and sat him down in front of it, and took out my back­pack­ing stove and made him some hot tea. With­in half an hour, he was much bet­ter, and because it was late in the after­noon and clouds were rolling in, we head­ed out. I asked him where he was parked, and it turned out to be at the same trail­head that I was. The only prob­lem was, to get back to our cars required climb­ing down the same steep (and in places, out­right sheer) ridge that we’d climbed up in the morn­ing, and now he had to do it with a sprained ankle, and if he tried, I knew he’d fall to his death.

At the back of Boys’ Life mag­a­zine (the mag­a­zine about Scout­ing), each month there used to be a com­ic strip of sorts called some­thing like “Scout­ing in Action.” Each month, the strip told the sto­ry of a Scout who had saved the day by putting his Scout train­ing to use—saving old women from burn­ing hous­es, get­ting pets out of wells, pulling hap­less kids out of ponds where they’d bro­ken through the thin ice. As I gave the hik­er one of my hik­ing poles to use as cane or a crutch, and we hob­bled back towards the cliff top, I thought what a great com­ic strip my cur­rent adven­ture would make, if it weren’t com­ing 35 years too late.

When we reached the top of the cliff where the trail zigzagged down the steep rock and scrub­by face, I opened my pack and pulled out a 50-foot res­cue rope (I’m not kid­ding). I’d pur­chased it before a failed late win­ter sum­mit of Mount Wash­ing­ton a cou­ple years ear­li­er, and, despite its weight of 3–4 pounds), kept it in my pack, because, after all, the Scout mot­to is, “Be Pre­pared.” I’d bought this res­cue rope for myself know­ing that I might need to self-belay on my way down Mount Washington’s exceed­ing­ly steep Lion Head trail. Now I was real­ly glad I’d kept it in my pack.

I’ll spare you the tedi­um of the mechan­ics involved in low­er­ing an injured hik­er down a steep trail, and then get­ting your­self down. Suf­fice it to say, it involves a lot of bow­lines (a cru­cial res­cue knot) and dou­ble-bow­lines; a length of cordage for pulling the rope down to your­self; secur­ing the rope to a tree or rock; and repeat­ing the process every 25 feet or so. It took almost two hours to get off that moun­tain with him, and when we reached the bot­tom and snow began to fall, I was incred­i­bly grate­ful for my knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, and for my Scout­mas­ters teach­ing me all of this stuff so long ago.

As for the hik­er, I nev­er received any sub­stan­tial thanks from him for what I’d done (seri­ous­ly, a Har­ry & David fruit assort­ment would have been nice), which was to res­cue his stu­pid, sor­ry ass. But then again, Jesus cured ten lep­ers and only one thanked him, so I’ve come to believe that ingrat­i­tude is the norm. After­wards, I gave the guy some advice about buy­ing a basic sur­vival kit before he went hik­ing again, but I doubt he fol­lowed my advice. I’m afraid that guy is des­tined to join the hun­dreds of peo­ple who die in the woods every year because they gross­ly under­es­ti­mate nature. Sigh.

* * *

The iso­la­tion of COVID has giv­en me ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to reac­quaint myself with oth­er loves, hob­bies and skills that I pos­sess, includ­ing cook­ing, chess, and “being handy”—that is, doing things like putting up cur­tain rods, tak­ing apart the pipes under the kitchen sink to clear a clog and assem­bling fur­ni­ture. The cook­ing espe­cial­ly is a dou­ble-edged sword, because my cook­ing is excel­lent, and invari­ably I con­sume most of what I cook. Oh well.

In an unre­lat­ed note, I also got into T‑shirts in a major way this year. After 20 years of work­ing at home, it final­ly occurred to me that I could wear what­ev­er I want, so I start­ed wear­ing T‑shirts with mes­sages on them that I liked. Here are a few that I got myself this year:

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SO…now that 2020 is almost over (thank God), I’m start­ing to think about 2021 and what I want to accom­plish. Here is my plan:

If you read this to the end, why not drop me a line to let me know how you’ve been far­ing through COVID? Send me an email at corcutt007 ‑at- yahoo ‑dot- com. Thanks. I hope to hear from you!

Tagged: 2020 in review, 2020 worst year ever, ADF scanner, Boy Scout, bushcraft, Chris Orcutt, COVID, COVID-19, cross-country skiing, Diana Rigg, Eddie Van Halen, Elaine Sadofsky, Fishkill, hiking, Kelly Preston, novel writing, novelist, NY, Olivetti Studio 44, Order of the Arrow, outdoorsmanship, pandemic, Scout skills, Sean Connery, survival, Troop 95, typewriters, video of cross-country skiing, writer's life, writing, writing life, X-C skiing, XC skiing

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