Behind the Scenes of Chapter 4

Hindsight — Chapter 4 — April 2020 — Purgatory

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Hindsight by Neil Shooter (photo by author)

Back to 2020. April, the middle of the first lockdown.

In the first part, we open with a bit of anxious foreshadowing. But everything is fine for now! Will and Juss are happily distracted, most of the time, with a kind of post-modern rustic idyll. It’s hatching time, and the baby chickens are truly heartwarming.

This part is almost 6000 words. When I sat down to edit, my intention was to shave off a thousand words or two, to bring it down to a more manageable level. I ended up adding words, not taking them away.

I considered splitting this part in two. After all, my schedule has become slightly irregular, so wouldn’t it be fine (having missed posting on Sunday) to post the first half on Monday and the second half on Wednesday?

I ultimately decided against it. Go long or go home? I am home. So there.

I love the humour between Juss and Will. The gentle needling. The thoughts left unspoken but understood nevertheless.

Is the early April warm spell a true part of 2020? I can’t remember, to be honest. I feel like I was modeling the 2020 weather on real events, but at this point I can neither confirm nor deny that idea. Warm spells are not unheard of. Neither are cool spells. I remember one spring that we had 6 weeks of absolutely wonderful weather from the beginning of April to the middle of May, and THEN came a killing frost, destroying all that joy and progress. But I don’t think it was 2020.

I do have an incubator or three. And brooders. I had them well before the pandemic, though. Same with my tiller. But it’s true about the soil in the suburbs. Tough as old nails!

The rocks in the soil here are real. I’ve collected them from day one. I have a rock tumbler, but after a summer of it running all the time, I wasn’t pleased enough with smoothed and rounded quartz rocks to bother doing it again. Somehow, though, I keep saving the pretty rocks I find. I found a couple today!

Actually, now that I think of it, there is a lot of real life in this part. In this whole chapter, really. The milk shortage. We went three months without milk! I ran out in March and we went for our first curbside in June.

The chicken lore is, I believe, pretty accurate. But I guess I should put in a disclaimer saying that the contents of this chapter should not be construed to be chicken rearing advice and I will not be held liable for any injury or accident resulting from the implementation or duplication of any of the chicken rearing actions described herein? Too much? No: make that, “described in the whole book”!

The berries and the garden stuff are more or less real, but from a few years before, rather than 2020. By lockdown we already had our berry patch and orchard line well established.

The event with the lady in the posh car happened, almost word for word. She didn’t ask for Cleopatra’s Head, though, because Cleopatra’s Head doesn’t exist. Or rather, that isn’t its name. I can’t fathom why, because, on the map, that is EXACTLY what it looks like! Anyway, it’s a way to establish this as a fictional universe, as well.

The stock-up shop is real. It was March 3, 2020. Napanee is also real.

We also did a LOT of watching the news that winter. We felt like Juss feels, that we had been paying close attention to this since January 2020, watching religiously, perhaps obsessively, throughout February, watching the numbers rise, the disaster unfold, and STILL we thought that the stock-up shop was not the last one. We STILL felt like we were completely overreacting with our trunk full of stuff, and declining a visit with my mum for her birthday, and a whole host of other things. But we weren’t overreacting.

Something that is false, and that underscores that this is a different timeline than the one we experienced, is how Trudeau declared an emergency in March and Trump waited until early April. In reality, Trudeau and Trump were back to back. I think it was March 12? Definitely not April. But it’s another good way to explain how and why things are different in Hindsight, even though so many other things are already very different. And think about it, with each human interaction essentially random in so many ways, and therefore the evolution of a novel coronavirus ALSO essentially random in so many ways, it’s obvious that if you ran the best simulation of COVID’s starting conditions multiple times on the best computer, you’d get different pandemics each and every time.

Marek’s Disease is another true thing. In 2020, there was no guarantee we’d even get a vaccine, but I was definitely worried that it would be a crappy vaccine, like the one for Marek’s. I can’t be certain that I wrote that paragraph in 2020, though. It could have been in 2021, after our vaccine’s limitations were coming to light.

The “Home Speaker System” skit is fictional, but I think it’s a realistic reproduction of MANY similar interactions I’ve had with a different home speaker system. I actually struggled with how to portray this interaction. I didn’t have specific artists in mind. The central joke of the skit is how no one is a fan of Nickelback. For whatever reason. (I don’t know why, so don’t hate on me for it.) So Nicole Bachman, the Colbeck Man podcast, Nikko Baertman, and even Music FM are all fictional, and designed specifically to fit this Nickelback joke.

Remember the Johns Hopkins map? I was so annoyed when they changed their format, periodically. I suppose they needed to. But it messed up my own logs of what was happening.

The potato chip ritual is completely and utterly real, except that it didn’t happen to Juss or Will. Meanwhile, the chick names are all fictional.

The incident with the early chick in the incubator really happened. However, DON’T try to lift eggs out while still ON the incubator tray. It’s going to end in tears. Take the extra time to just move the eggs. Actually, I have enough incubators now that I can move the eggs directly to a ready-and-waiting lockdown incubator. Jackpot’s real name was Lucky. He was indeed a rooster. Sadly, no longer with us.

Feed deliveries were a thing for a few years. Very convenient! The feed store stopped doing it one recent summer. BOOO!

The visit with the neighbours is a merger of a couple of separate incidents. The neighbours really did walk the country roads, desperate for connection to the village, and maybe “bumping into” people. Also, other neighbours later came to introduce themselves while we were in the garden, and it was a bit awkward and socially distanced. But Eric and Karen aren’t their names.

The red baseball cap seems like loaded imagery these days, but it’s simply true to life. The neighbour had a red cap. It didn’t have any words on it. Or acronyms. Red caps are (were, at least) common enough in Canada. It’s the dominant colour on our flag!

In April 2020, I DID believe that the reason the government was not mandating masks was that there weren’t enough to go around, and that front-line health workers had the greater need. It’s in my diary!

Ronalda’s real name was Maradona, and she DID go around the incubator kicking the last late eggs, but that was in 2019.

Funny factoid about that: my cousin visited and asked why I’d named my cutest, fluffiest Silkie hen after the greatest soccer villain of all time. Honestly, that hadn’t been any part of my thinking, and I suppose it goes to show how little I understand about the intricacies of soccer!

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