I woke up this morning knowing I needed to go for a walk—alone. That only seems strange when you consider that I’ve already spent a month—alone—in my apartment during the coronavirus “shelter in place” rules. I am allowed out for critical activities like shopping for food or getting exercise. I normally walk with a friend, maintaining our six-foot distance but talking.
Today something is different. It is Easter Sunday, but I’m not a believer. Besides, I grew up with Russian Easter, which is next week. But I step briskly out into the cold, gray air and head for a unique spot about forty minutes away, at the end of a long jetty that creates the shelter for San Francisco’s yacht clubs. I walk along a wide, empty street and encounter a man from the Wild West on a horse and carrying a giant American flag. A brief distraction, but I hit my stride and soon find the solitude I was seeking.
As I reach my outpost—created from old pieces of marble torn down when the Laurel Hill Cemetery was closed in the 1940s—the tide is just starting to return, but no people have arrived.
I sit on that cold marble and understand why I needed to be here. There is only water between me and Alcatraz. Between my current constrained world and the one that had constrained prisoners for so many years. And I think about my cousins in Serbia, unable to leave their homes for any reason. Their only crime? They are over sixty-five years old. I appreciate deeply the difference between their quarantine and our shelter in place.
I look online to remind myself that Al Capone really was one of the first prisoners on Alcatraz, and then notice that the name came from the Spanish word alcatraces, or pelicans. And of course some pelicans fly overhead to remind me of the appropriateness of this name.
A couple of weeks ago I sent my friend Yves in France a picture I had taken of the Bay. Where I just saw the view from my window, he saw something much deeper:
À droite, le passé : une vielle prison, de vieux bateaux ; Le confinement !
À gauche le futur : l’appel du grand large, les voyages : La liberté !
On the right, the past: an old prison, old boats; Confinement!
On the left the future: the call of the open sea, travel: Freedom!
As I walk back along that old dock towards the Golden Gate Bridge and its opening to the rest of the world, I remember his words and feel my spirits rise. A few moments later, a friend sends me a live link to Andrea Bocelli singing in Milan for Easter Sunday. I turn it on immediately and a few minutes later I’m sobbing. His voice raised in prayer in an empty cathedral, soaring in counterpoint to images of deserted streets around the globe, coalesces into one of the few moments of my life when I have wished I could believe in God. These tears are not sadness. They are awe, and then overwhelming gratitude for the sense of unity with the world I feel in that moment.
