Fetch The Bolt Cutters

April, 2020: COVID had gone from a far-away news item to pretty much taking control of every day of my life. At the clinic where I worked we were already several weeks into a testing and case management protocol that created a seemingly endless list of sick patients to call, assess, arrange to test, and in those patients’ wake a new list of test results to review, positives to call and manage and educate and care for. And so many rules to change and update and tell providers about. It was too much work, even if I sort of enjoyed the urgency of it, the sense it was definitely something important we were doing and probably also the way it gave me a sense of agency that most people didn’t get to have then; the pandemic wasn’t just happening to me, I was responding to it, ameliorating some small part of it, and I think that was worth the struggle, in a way.

But it was also making my already pretty bad sleep tendencies worse. Nights of trying to sleep and failing, lying awake, lying still to not bother Kim sleeping next to me, or heading to the couch to toss and turn with abandon. On the night of Thursday April 16, I'd already migrated from bed to the couch, where I’d often try to move in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d been on the couch for a few hours when I sighed, exhausted, and reached for my phone and checked the time: 2:23 am. Defeated, I defied the instructions I usually give to patients struggling with insomnia and opened my phone and took my usual circuit of the internet, which at the time included Pitchfork. There I found that Fiona Apple's new album was out, since it was now Friday, and that it had been given a 10.0. I am the kind of nerd who had a good sense of how rare that was, so I was even more excited than I'd been to realize that Fiona Apple had a new record. I decided to go for a walk and have a first listen.

Even though we’d had pretty warm spring weather by then, it had snowed during the day before--a classic Nebraska late snowstorm that comes after two weeks of temperate weather will convince a visitor or less-savvy local to pack their sweaters away for the winter--so I grabbed a coat and hat and boots in addition to my nice, open back, over-ear headphones. And yet I was surprised at the scene when I opened my door to a winter wonderland: six inches of wet, heavy snow covered the ground, bent the branches of trees, and blanketed almost every reverberant surface of the outdoor world in soft, pillowy sound-proofing so that even through my headphones I could hear—could feel—the silence of the world in the middle of the night. I stood just outside the open door to my house and fumbled with my supposedly touchscreen capable gloves trying to pull up the album for awhile before I gave up, and pulled a hand out of my glove and pushed play before returning my hand to its cocoon, closed the door, and headed out into the snowy world.

I remember hearing my boots crunching untouched snow outside my headphones as the first airy notes of piano played, and how it felt like these were the only sounds for miles. I walked through my neighborhood, the isolation and solitude of the heavy snow on unlit houses enhanced by the knowledge that so many of these doors wouldn’t open at all today, the world shut in and locked down. Fiona serenaded me as I walked through what felt at the time, and what feels even more in my memory, as if I’d stepped out of my house and into a space outside the world, a world apart from the dismal one where I’d been living, the world that I’d return to eventually, later that morning.

I ended up listening to the entire album. I walked for miles in that transported state. I remember that at work later that day I was exhausted but buoyed by my excitement for the album, an excitement I could transmit to exactly none of my co-workers (who were mostly bemused when I tried to tell them about my magical morning).