Today's Reading
PROLOGUE
THAT'S WHERE IT IS
The musicians walked onstage first: three carrying violins, one a cello. The fifth sat down at a grand piano. They were greeted with waves of sound, as the audience in the auditorium struck their hands together in applause. The applause grew stronger as dozens of singers streamed out from both wings, the men in black tuxedos, the women wearing bright scarves draped over black dresses. Older singers, some walking with canes, settled down in the two rows of chairs behind the musicians. The younger ones stepped onto the low bleachers behind the chairs.
Now all in place, they faced the audience. Out of the ninety people assembled onstage, four wore masks.
There about a hundred seventy people in the audience on the night of May 6, 2023: a gathering of friends, families, and unconnected lovers of music from the northwestern corner of Washington State. They had traveled to McIntyre Hall in Mount Vernon for the spring performance of the Skagit Valley Chorale. One member of the choir taught fifth grade, and her tween fan army, done up in rhinestones and taffeta, buzzed overhead in the balcony. Some people in the audience wore pale blue surgical masks that fit loosely over their mouths. Others wore N95s that sealed tight. What would have seemed strange in 2019 seemed fairly normal four years later.
As the applause died down, a short woman with a gray pageboy walked to the front of the stage. She unclipped a microphone from its stand and introduced herself as Ruth Backlund. A retired high school French teacher and the president of the chorale's board, Backlund welcomed the audience.
"I have two thoughts about gratitude," she said. "I'm very grateful for Skagit County, which runs from the mountains to the sea. If you look in the woods, everything is blooming. And I am grateful for all the scientists who made the vaccines that let us be here."
The audience clapped again. Backlund introduced Yvette Burdick, the choir director. "She is the best teacher I ever had," Backlund said. Burdick strode onstage in a flowing black pantsuit and low gray pumps.
"Thank you," Burdick said with a quick bow. "We are going to start right off."
The choir began with a hymn. At Burdick's cue, the singers dropped their diaphragms. They inhaled the concert hall air deep into their lungs, into the fine alveoli at the deepest tips of their airways. The oxygen in the air seeped into their bloodstreams, while carbon dioxide outgassed. The singers then let their lungs deflate, and the altered air made its way back up through their bronchi, into their tracheas, and through their larynxes. Bands of muscle buzzed in the upwelling breeze and produced a spectrum of sound. The singers set their mouths into different shapes, to sculpt the acoustic waves as they escaped.
The sound raced across the hall, the waves jostling molecules of air and bouncing off walls. The waves ended up in our auditory canals, making our eardrums vibrate and generating electrical signals that entered our brains, where they produced the perception of sound. The physics of the air joined us in a communion as the choir shared songs about gratitude: for the Earth, for liberation from slavery, for love. "Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm," the vibrations told us.
° ° ° °
On May 5, 2023, the day before the spring concert, the World Health Organization made a major announcement. Speaking in Switzerland at a press conference, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that Covid-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. Three years and five months had passed since the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, China. Covid-19, a disease never seen before, became the worst public health disaster of modern times, infecting the majority of people on Earth. By the time Tedros made his announcement, it had killed about 25 million of them.
Some of the first people in the world to get Covid-19 stood before us on the McIntyre Hall stage. On March 10, 2020, fifty-eight members of the Skagit Valley Chorale had become infected at a rehearsal. Before the month was out, three were in the hospital. Two of them died.
The outbreak brought horror to the choir, and also shock. They knew that some diseases can spread in droplets slathered on doorknobs, or fired at close range in coughs and sneezes. But subsequent research would reveal that the Skagit Valley Chorale outbreak was likely spread on a song. An infected singer released an invisible cloud of droplets so tiny that they resisted gravity and floated like smoke. She did not cough or sneeze to unleash the viruses: they escaped with every breath. Covid-19, in other words, was airborne.
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