What did you miss most during COVID lockdowns? Sitting in the bleachers, cheering on your favorite team? Going to live music or book talks? Or the bustle of a busy restaurant?
While everyone responded to pandemic isolation differently, evidence suggests that American social habits became more solitary. This type of reaction isn’t new. In fact, it can even be found across the world in 12th-century Japan.
This week, we’re bringing you a Stateside podcast special, Revival, a series about how COVID changed us. On this episode, what the pandemic changed about about how we gather.
The experience of solitude enforced on many of us during COVID-19 distancing is by no means an isolated incident. Every year, Erin Brightwell teaches a similar story—from the 12th century. Brightwell is a professor of pre-modern Japanese literature at the University of Michigan. The story she teaches is called Hojiko, and it shows how people in medieval times reacted to infectious disease and general unrest. The story, written by Kamo no Chōmei, begins with a recounting of a civil war before what would become Japan’s first Shogunate.
“It's not just a time of civil war, Brightwell said. “It's also a time of famine. We have a two-year famine in the middle of that war, and then, it's a time of kind of recurring epidemics. So, at this time in Japanese history, smallpox was endemic in Japan, but we also had measles epidemics. So, there's a lot going on.”
This was also a time when Buddhists in the region believed Japan had entered the final stage of Dharma. In other words, when religious teachings and practices would start to disappear.
“It’s a long age,” Brightwell said. “It doesn't mean the world is ending tomorrow. It's supposed to last 10,000 years. But, people are seeing this breakdown in society."
It’s during this time that Chōmei, an aristocrat, poet, and essayist, turned away from the world. He retreated to the countryside and set up in a 10-square-foot hut where he writes his most famous works, including Hojoki, which translates as "an account of my hut."
Chōmei described disease, but also a great fire that demolished a large chunk of the capital and bodies piling up in the streets due to starvation.
“This is a really dark time in Japanese history,” Brightwell said. “You know, he's experiencing it and kind of trying to figure out, ‘What do I do? How do I kind of survive?’ And, I think he's trying to reconcile sort of his, we would probably say, survivor's guilt, nowadays.”
But despite the challenges facing Japan, Brightwell said she doesn't think Chōmei viewed his solitude as a sad thing.
“I think [it’s] a way to free himself from worldly distractions and pressures."
Moving toward each other
Chōmei’s reaction to grief and disease has some resonance in the lived experience of millions of Michiganders during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In the past five years, some found ways to band together, even as circumstances seemed bent on driving them apart. That includes Grand Rapids resident Rae Bunce.
Bunce lives on a cul-de-sac lined with a half-dozen brick mid-century ranches and split-level houses. At the start of the pandemic, Bunce, a retired school employee, had a lot on her plate. Her husband, a truck driver, was still on the road every day. Her father passed away several weeks before lockdown began. Bunce was caring for her elderly mother while trying to stay in touch with her four grandchildren.
When the lockdown started, the normally bustling cul-de-sac became eerily quiet.
Then came Bunce’s text asking if anybody in the cul-de-sac wanted to meet up.
Bunce and her neighbors talked to us about the story of how they started meeting every afternoon to talk and support each other. At first, they stationed folding chairs in their own driveways. During the first winter, the group moved inside Bunce's garage, the door open and masks on. Looking back, the group laughed about the lengths they went to, just for each others’ company.
“We sat in the garage with heated rice bags,” neighbor Karen Brown recalled. “Dot bought new boots. We had 14 layers on. We all acted like we loved being there.”
“Rae emptied her garage, cleaned it all out and strung party lights,” Dot Hekman added. “And we had one of these little fake fireplace things that gave off no heat at all.”
As weeks of distancing became months, the group's connection deepened. They became a key support for each other through illness, family struggles, and loneliness.
And the bonds they forged during the pandemic endure. Happy hour is still happening, every Wednesday, in Rae’s living room.
A number of neighbors have noted the fellowship on the cul-de-sac has become something of a known commodity in Grand Rapids.
"Literally all of the other cul-de-sacs around here were jealous of our community," Susan told us. "And they all knew if you said we were on the cul-de-sac that did happy hour, they knew us. So, it was fun to kind of spread that community."
Rae Bunce recalled a spontaneous embrace from her granddaughter’s coach, who she ran into while running errands. The coach had seen the group gathering as she drove by. Bunce laughed, saying the coach wanted a piece of the closeness her group had built.
“One day," she told Bunce, "I'm going to put my chair in the back of my car and I'm just going to drop in."
Find more episodes of Revival here or wherever you listen to podcasts.
