By: Corey China
As I look out my window, the light and leaves are changing and there is a definite chill in the air. Halloween is around the corner and neighbors keep asking me if we’re taking the kids trick-or-treating this year, should they give out candy, and what’s the safe thing to do under these pandemic conditions? It’s a strange and stressful time to be a parent, to want your kids to have the experiences of childhood, to be exuberant and carefree, yet the world we inhabit has changed drastically, and the moment requires the opposite approach.
In episode #57 of Close Talking, Connor and Jack take us into Ted Kooser’s poem “Abandoned Farmhouse,” which has all the hallmarks of an unsettling, mysterious event that took place, and we move through the house and farm, absent of people, but littered with clues to their previous existence. The title tells us the farmhouse is “abandoned,” and it “was lonely here, says the narrow country road.” We are told there was a family living here, trying to farm, who created a home with lilac wallpaper and preserves in the cellar. We’re told a child had toys and a sandbox. But something “went wrong, says the empty house.” The father was a “big man,” a “tall man,” a “God-fearing man,” not cut out for farming. The clues allude to a violent act that took place, and it seems the father was the monster, preying upon his wife and child. Like the specter observing the evidence that Connor and Jack mention, I wonder what they endured, and did it take place over some time, or was it a single event?
This past spring, I found myself watching and reading more to escape the daily stress of the pandemic, and oddly enough, I was engaging with horror and post-apocalyptic novels. Why put yourself through that when we’re already living under nightmarish conditions you might ask. I think that imagining what life might be like after the pandemic had passed and how we might survive actually feels hopeful to me. And right now, I’m most interested in the parenting that occurs in these texts under extreme and dangerous conditions. It raises all sorts of questions; the most fundamental, what does it mean to be raising young children at this moment in time?
An abandoned farmhouse much like the one from Ted Kooser’s poem.
As for “Abandoned Farmhouse,” there’s an abrupt anxiousness that resonates with how our lives have been altered: “the still-sealed jars / in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.” The child’s “toys are strewn in the yard / like branches after a storm,” indicating a rapid and rushed exit. While we don’t know for sure, I like to think that the mother did what she needed to do for her child; she made the hard and quick decision to leave behind her belongings and the home she had created, out of a need for safety. As with the pandemic, so many parts of life no longer operate as they did before, and in the spring we had to make sudden changes to how we live in order to remain safe. My hope is that mother and child escaped, and they are out there together somewhere, surviving.
In the film A Quiet Place (2018), we meet a family living mostly isolated on their own, and we gather that predatory alien creatures have wiped out a significant portion of people on Earth. The only way to stay under the radar from these creatures is to remain completely silent, since they decimate anything that makes sound. This family has miraculously survived these conditions (although we learn they lost a child to one of the aliens) by setting up an elaborate living situation that includes laying down sand pathways to muffle their footsteps; walking with bare feet; using a lighting system to help navigate their farm; eating and sleeping underground; and communicating via sign language (their daughter is deaf, easing plausibility). These careful precautions they’ve taken feel akin to how we’ve adapted our lives for the pandemic: masking, hand sanitizer, social distancing, grocery pickup, working from home, endless zoom calls. Adding to the strain in the film, we can see that the mother is heavily pregnant. Whether or not they chose to become pregnant, one might ask why bring a child into this world that is now full of horror with almost every breath taken?
Still of the parents played by Emily Blunt and John Krasinski from A Quiet Place (2018). Photo credit: Jonny Cournoyer.
Despite all of that, A Quiet Place shows parents who fiercely protect their children, who have disagreements and fights but still work together as a family unit to make life work. And in the end (spoiler alert), the baby provides comfort and purpose to his older brother as the family takes a stand against the aliens. I think the film shows us that our children are a reason to fight and to overcome what we’re facing, because although the world may not be what we want for them right now, they give us a purpose to strive to make it better, to change it for their futures.
Now, for something seriously grim—and maybe that’s one reason to read it—the pandemic pales in comparison to the overwhelming trauma, near-starvation, and evil the father/son pair in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road experience. The story follows them as they journey across a landscape that’s been devastated by some unknown plague or cataclysmic event:
. . . a country where firestorms had passed leaving mile on mile of burn. A cake of ash in the roadway inches deep . . . . The thin trees down. The waterways a gray sludge. A blackened jackstraw land.”
This narrative, more than any of the others, showcases risk in almost every action the pair take. From passing people on the road, to lighting fires outside, or deciding who to trust. Unlike A Quiet Place, there is no ability to plan ahead, only the ultimate goal of heading south and reaching the coast.
Cover of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
But like the parents in both the poem and the film, the father will do anything to protect his son; he often goes without food, warmth, or sleep to ensure his son’s needs are met. Not to mention the evil they frequently pass and try to avoid—however, despite the bleakness and near lack of hope, the father teaches his son to hold on to their values; he repeatedly tells him that they are the “good guys” and are “carrying the fire.” In the stories the father tells, he and his son are always helping people.
As a result, the son retains a level of humanity in this intense environment. The son implores his father to help those that they can, and he laments that they can’t take on a little boy they pass by or a stray dog that comes their way. When they encounter an old man, it’s the boy who convinces his father to give him something to eat: “In the morning they stood in the road and he and the boy argued about what to give the old man.” Another spoiler alert—as the father is dying, he tells his son that he needs to carry on, he needs to “carry the fire.” The son says, “Where is it? I dont know where it is.” The father replies, “Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”
As for the pandemic, we hear daily from experts that the kids will be all right, do what you must to get through the day, and I believe they are right, but we are sadly leaving something behind, that once idyllic farmhouse from Kooser’s poem we’ve been forced to abandon. The pandemic is not a perfect comparison to the devastation and horrors in these three texts, but I believe there is an affirming message to be gleaned. I see resilience in the way the parents soldier on, how they navigate an environment where every decision has enormous consequences, and make the tough choices to protect, provide, and teach their children. There’s a resolve in focusing on those duties, instilling hope in our children even when we do not always feel it ourselves.
So, to answer my neighbors—will we be trick-or-treating this year? No, unfortunately not. As part of our adjustment to living with the pandemic, and remaining safe, it’s one of the tough choices we’ve had to make. We will instead do what we can to retain some Halloween spirit, carve pumpkins, wear our costumes on the couch, and settle in to watch a scary movie together (minus any predatory aliens that is).