We’re on a plane heading home after six days in New Jersey, all but the last one sunny and the penultimate one even warm. We had great fun visiting our younger son and his friends, as well as two friends of ours who moved back east from Santa Cruz last year. We swam in the heated pool in our hotel, used the gym, and sat in the hot tub. Central New Jersey is very spacious, with large houses on large lots and lots of fields. Even the hotel seemed enormous, with lots of spaces to hang out and lovely views of a stream running among the buildings. There’s lots of parking almost everywhere.

This last day was mostly spent getting to the airport and waiting in the airport, watching planes slithering through the drizzle in dim light. Finally we took off, and five minutes later, the plane rose above the clouds to meet the sun. Now we are flying west over a beautiful cloudscape, chasing the sun toward the edge of Earth. I know it will set before we land, and I plan to see it. As with our incoming flight, Bill and I have a full row to ourselves, six seats across.

It’s Super Tuesday, but most of the country is still voting and I’m not thinking of that much, except for sending occasional dark thoughts Biden’s way. Coronavirus is prominent in the news recently, as far as we can tell from checking it about once every other day, and we do have a couple of masked passengers. I hope they are trying to avoid getting an infection, rather than to contain one they have already contracted.

In the spirit of getting most news from comedy shows, we watched John Oliver’s coronavirus-focused episode of Last Week Tonight, and thought his advice was sound: Don’t get too fearful, but don’t ignore it, either. Wash your hands a lot, cover any coughs or sneezes, and if you get flulike symptoms, Stay Home. It seems pretty simple, but will people do it? Actually, are people who don’t watch John Oliver even being asked to do this? I have a vague impression that Trump is sending the message, I’m doing a great job, which is not that useful.

The book I have been reading most on this trip is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. As it happens, this book is about a much more serious disease pandemic that spells the end of civilization as we know it. I’m sure those of you who are avid readers will understand why I keep confounding the world of the book with the world I am in, especially with talk of viruses and wearing of masks. I found myself wondering, for instance, how many more planes would be able to leave after ours, before there weren’t enough people to do all the things that people do to keep planes in the air.

Although this is a fictional book, it reminds me of a non-fiction work called World Without Us. That book is a thought experiment based on the premise that for whatever reason and by whatever method, all humans simply disappear one day. What would happen then? I remember being surprised by how quickly all traces of humanity would be erased. The George Washington Bridge in NYC, for instance, is constantly painted, derusted, and cleared of acidic bird droppings, and when we stop taking care of it, it fails rapidly.

Station Eleven reaches many of the same conclusions, with all things electric basically gone within a couple of months, most of them within a couple of weeks. In the fictional book, though, there are a few people who survive, perhaps 0.1% or so. Many of these are initially violent, unfortunately. All of the ones who survive have to learn how to hunt and butcher animals, so they can eat, and how to defend themselves against human predators, so they can survive.

I feel like the book focuses perhaps a bit too much on people’s efforts to preserve culture, or at least the memory of culture, and not enough on how they manage to survive at all. I agree with the author that people would want to preserve culture, but I don’t think they would be able to spend much time doing so. Feeding oneself without food production and delivery infrastructure has got to be time-consuming.

The cloudscape is turning a very rosy color now, not even thirty minutes after takeoff, so I’m going to watch the sunset for a while, reminding myself that the sun is setting on a world not much changed from yesterday, at least for the nonce.