Isolation and the Absence of Touch

I take a drought-defying shower. Long, hot and luxurious. The jet of water is powerful. Once I’ve finished washing myself, I stay there. I turn slowly and feel the water massage my muscles. The heat opens the pores, dilates the capillaries. I let the stream hammer my face, my scalp. I lean forward to feel the water move like fingers down my back.

I miss touch. I realise it now.

I see people. Nurses come to take my temperature. I miss their smiles behind the masks. My crewmates are my neighbours but we are forbidden to move beyond our doorframes. No-one touches me. Not even by accident. On the boat there was touch. Accidental touch and deliberate. The touch of a steadying hand on a shoulder as someone returned to the cockpit from the foredeck. Hands on shoulders as someone moved past in the tight confines of the saloon. These unnoticed touches of daily, unconscious interaction are gone. I notice them now.

I once read that single men, particularly the elderly and widowed, suffer most from the lack of touch. Living alone, with only the occasional male interaction, they live in a desert of physical contact. And they suffer for it. Because touch is good for our health.

Women are more comfortable with touch. They hug and kiss, they touch easily and unselfconsciously. Touch is ‘normal’. For men though, touch from other men is awkward. It’s even ridiculed. The new trend of men doing the chest-bump handshake thing should be a sign of loosening the taboo of male touch. Instead, I’ve heard people making fun of it. We’ve a way to go.

I hadn’t realised how much I missed touch until this morning. It took me a while to work out what was so good about the overlong shower. I’m normally in and out. Finish the essentials and get on with the day. But not today. Today it was a touch substitute.

How many more people out there are suffering from the lack of touch? Old people who live alone, who are visited, touched, only occasionally, are they now completely deprived by the ‘lockdown’? Those of us separated from lovers, partners, parents, children by quarantine. Touch deprivation forced on us by social distancing and isolation.

I think about coming out of quarantine. Going home. Our greeting will be a hug. A kiss. We will, once again, lounge together, touching absently in front of the television. Her hand running along my back as she passes me in the kitchen. Feeling our limbs touching as we fall asleep at night. I’ll hug Mum and Dad, I’ll stroke the dog. And then, I’ll do it all over again.

Routines

Breakfast comes with a knock at around seven in the morning. Lunch arrives from twelve-thirty. The dinner knock is around six pm.

When I open the door a tray lies on the carpet. I’m not allowed to take the tray, just the foil food containers. Androgynous people in blue overalls and masks scurry away down the corridor. I call a hello and receive a muffled response.

One container holds a hot meal. Airline style. Edible but not always appetising. The other contains the same items every time: a small block of Gouda cheese, an airline-style packet of crackers, a Bar One or sometimes a granola bar, oversweet drinking yoghurt or, for some reason, a small disposable container of water. There is a set of plastic cutlery and salt and pepper sachets.  In a separate see-through plastic bag there are tea bags, sugar, instant coffee and a couple of mini-cartons of long life milk.

Mealtimes break up the day.

I have a ground coffee supply that I brought with me from the boat and a gadget that immerses in my cup to make it. I have been supplied with two paper cups. I use one cup for my morning coffee, the other for my post-breakfast cup of tea.

I read the news. I check twitter. I read some more news then check Twitter again. I go to my blog to see how many people have clicked on it since the last piece I uploaded. I go back to Twitter.

I lean on the ledge with the sliding window open as wide as it will go. Below is a parking lot for a block of deserted offices. I watch a security guard walk across the lot. He wears a dark suit and his shoes blink in the sunlight. He rounds a corner and taps a sensor on a wall. There’s a chime of acknowledgment. His patrol checkpoint. The guard walks away and disappears from view. He re-appears one level down. He finds another checkpoint which makes a different little sound. He reaches into his pocket then taps another sensor. The barred gate clicks, and then clangs as he opens it. It clangs again and he is gone.

I meditate for a while.

Outside the hotel next door, a man with a broom is fighting a losing battle with autumn. Two other employees have ducked behind a wall for a fag. They think no one can see them.

I sit and write until the lunch-knock interrupts me.

The crew arrange a chat. We sit on chairs just inside our doorways. This we’re allowed to do. It’s a relief to be able to talk for a while. We don’t do this for long. There isn’t much to say. Our predicament hasn’t changed and our news comes from the same TV channels. The morning’s WhatApp jokes get discussed. We speculate about the advance of the disease that’s caused us to be confined.

I’ve started exercising. It helps to clear the grey fug that stuffs my head. I do step-ups onto the chair. I do push-ups, sit-ups and some stretches. Afterwards I feel great.

I watch CNN. I check Twitter and Facebook. I read an article in The Atlantic about the therapeutic value of reading books. Tonight I’ll go back to the book I’m reading on my iPad. It’s the English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. His writing is beautiful and I wish I could write like him.

Back at the window the sun is out. I can see all the way to Constantia Neck again. Cars go by occasionally. I see a nurse with a backpack walking somewhere.

More Twitter.

I wait for the dinner knock. It will come in three hours.

Grateful for a view

I’m grateful for my view. I can see the misty bottoms of clouds rolling over the mountain. I can see the slopes gradually vanishing into the grey. I can see rooftops and bits of houses peeping out of the suburban forest, the trees taking on their autumn rusts and reds.  Gaps in the cloud sometimes reveal the gap that is Constantia Neck.

Wind tugs at the curtains framing the open window. It rushes leaves below me into activity. The air smells of coming rain and foliage. Redwing starlings swoop about as busy as ever, their piping whistles so distinct and clear.

Rain is on the way.

I’m grateful for my view. With it, quarantine is bearable.

We’ve heard that our 14 day quarantine clock started ticking when we arrived at this facility. Because that’s the day Immigration officials stamped our passports. But we were in quarantine on our boat at the end of the dock for several days before that. An administrative ‘glitch’ is what it was called. It’s a glitch that will give us three extra days in quarantine unless someone unglitches it. We don’t want special treatment. We just want to go home.

I have elderly parents living with me. I wouldn’t do anything to endanger their health. I know I’ve had no contact with anyone but my crewmates and the sea for well over two weeks. I wouldn’t go home if I was a risk. And every medic we’ve spoken to agrees that we are not.

 I’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that the officials are following strict processes and that these times require blunt instruments. Our situation is different, but they don’t have the capacity to deal with nuance right now. But to hear that a glitch will keep us here longer than necessary, even by theirown rules, is tough to deal with.

I’m grateful for my view. The clouds and the cool and the autumn slowly scroll towards winter. The seasons have their pace.

I take a breath and settle down to wait.

Overquarantined Sailors

We have been moved from our quarantined yacht on the end of the immigration dock, to a hotel in the southern suburbs.

We went from being four men on a small sail-boat, to solitary confinement. From cooking for ourselves and baking bread, we went to airline meals. From a larder of snacks and a stash of beer and wine, to a couple of teabags and tap water (disclosure: I did bring a stash of ground coffee and a little coffee-maker gadget). Although I’m enjoying the privacy, the space and a bathroom of my own, it’s still a contrast that is taking some getting used to. No need for sound-camo now.

Quarantining returnees to the country is important. I have completely bought into the reasons. Isolation is important. The lockdown is essential. The end of logic, not so much.

These are extraordinary times and the measures governments are taking are unprecedented. I’m on board. I’m a conformer. I understand that every nuance, every set of personal circumstances cannot be catered for in the regulations. But science should be the guide.

Add the time we were at sea on our passage back to Cape Town from Luderitz, to the time the government has had us in quarantine for, and we have had more than two weeks of isolation. Not a seal, a penguin or even a storm petrel came close enough to us to pass a disease. The closest human during our passage was over a nautical mile away (1.85 km in landlubber money) on an ore carrier. Probably the closest human contact we will have had in the last two weeks is with the health officials who have us under their care and control. And with the possibility of new arrivals in the quarantine facility, we are probably more at risk here than sitting at home with our partners and kids.

The doctor, nurses and other staff at this repurposed hotel have all been fabulous. They’re friendly and very professional. I’m grateful that across the country people like these are putting their own health at risk to deal with this pandemic. This needs to be said loudly and often. They are the heroes of the hour.

To be fair, I’ve eaten much worse food. And I can do without a beer or glass of wine with my dinner. The accommodation is very comfortable. I have two double beds in my room and if I want to I can sleep in a different bed every night and swap from one side to the other for variety. I have free WiFi so I’m able to have video calls with my wife. I’m in a kind of luxury solitary confinement. But please, please, please, can we have a bit of scientific sense? My fellow crew and I are of no threat. All we are doing is costing the government money that should be spent on more important things. We’ve been in isolation for more than enough time and we have our satellite track to prove it. Maybe someone in authority will see sense.

Quarantine and Sound Camo

The thing about living on a boat is that there isn’t much privacy. Well, that’s one of the things. There are others. Out at sea the sound of the water against the hull and the wind in the shrouds helps to muffle the more basic sounds of human comings and goings. But tied up at the dock there is little in the way of sound-camo. So every plop, groan and push is a matter of public record. A particularly busy moment in the head can cause crew to bail up the companionway for a bit of clean smelling air.  Burning bunker fuel from the trawler berthed upwind can be a beautiful thing.

The olfactory assault can be tolerated when there’s shore to go to. A bar to drown in, a restaurant to get a decent meal you didn’t cook yourself. But Covid19 has played its hand and the officials-who-must-be-obeyed have decreed us a fourteen day quarantine.   

Apparently the regulations don’t recognise the isolation we’ve been in at sea, even though we’ve got passport stamps and a satellite tracker to prove it. So here we are, morale seeping into the grubby dock-water and provisions down to the boring and the bland.

There are worse places to be quarantined. I can sit and gaze across a marina of masts and yachts to the mountain. We’ve been baking fresh bread. A very pleasing smell-camo, especially when followed by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.  The beer and wine hasn’t run out. Yet.

Meanwhile the harbour carries on as though everything is normal: the cops in the police inflatable wave as they return to base. The crew of the service vessel carrying supplies to passing ships wave at us as they come and go. The pilot vessel hangs out in Duncan Dock until the tugs guide a container vessel out to sea. Who’d know that Cape Town is in zombie-apocalypse mode?

I chat to the seal that is using the brand new catamaran opposite as a bedroom. He doesn’t say much. Occasionally he coughs or sneezes. The gulls are more chatty but they are a bit loud and aren’t good listeners.

The other guys on the boat are good listeners. And good piss-takers.  One is a good pole-dancer but the less said about that the better. With a bit of sound and smell-camo we’ll get through the rest of our quarantine in good humour.

  

Hang on, how much beer is left?