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Masks For a Hard-Headed Dutchman

In my carpenter days, I thought I was a hard-headed Dutchman who feared nothing. My mother’s family is Lynden Dutch from the Netherlands. Outside Whatcom County, a Dutchman is usually a person of German descent. My father’s family is from Prussia, home to the hardest headed Germans. Both families were stubborn dairy farmers accustomed to hard work and bad weather. They formed their own opinions and stuck to them. I was turned out from a tough and hard-headed Dutchman mold.

Back in the late 70s, I was a carpenter. Sometimes I got orders to wear a mask, but I avoided them whenever I could, although I knew full well that masks were self-protection and for my benefit.

I didn’t need any stinking masks. I knew I was supposed to wear a carbon filter when I worked with hot solvents like acetone and lacquer thinner, but I was young and tough. Once, I had a job installing a Formica bathtub surround. I’ve installed acres of Formica laminate and my process was down pat. Paint the wall and the Formica with contact cement and let it dry, releasing clouds of solvent. Use thin strips of waste to separate the laminate from the wall until the surround was positioned perfectly, then pull the strips and roll the laminate down tight. I applied the cement, waited, then began to wrestle the surround into place, inhaling solvent fumes. My head started to swim, and brown clouds rushed in from the sides. I stumbled, opened a window, and turned on the exhaust fan as my vision constricted to a foggy tunnel. Fortunately, fresh air cleared my head and I was able to finish the installation.

At the time, I was proud of myself. I came through a tough spot and delivered a good job. Forty years later, I have a different opinion. I was a stupid kid who was lucky to have survived. The only good thing I can say is that I endangered myself, no one else.

In those days, I was also not as careful as I should have been around asbestos, which was all over construction sites back then. Not too long ago I heard of another tough Dutchman, a skilled craftsman whom I admired. He was my foreman on a few jobs. He died of asbestosis, a fatal lung disease caused by asbestos dust. Many of the carpenters I knew from those days are dead now, not all of them from lung diseases, but a fair number. My lungs are still good, but that’s luck, not being tough. I should have been more careful.

Forty years later, I still have some of that hard-headed Dutchman attitude. Well, so what? We tough Dutchmen make our decisions and don’t complain about the consequences. That’s what tough means to me. Back in the day, I acted like a first responder who doesn’t take time to grab protective gear. Yeah. A foolish hero. I made bad decisions but I was the one I placed in danger.

Today is different. The kind of masks that most of us are requested to wear now do not protect the wearer, at least not directly. To start with, since COVID-19 is infectious before its victims have symptoms, anyone in an area where COVID-19 is active, unless they have tested negative for the virus in the last three days, can transmit the disease without knowing it. Some people spread the virus without ever getting sick. That’s why public health officials in some places ask everyone to wear masks.

Water droplets laden with virus are the villains. Breathing, talking, singing, coughing, and sneezing all project droplets into the air. These droplets break up and evaporate into even finer particles called aerosols that hold the virus and float up to six feet before most have fallen to the ground. In cold air, they float longer. The aerosols are so fine, they are inhaled right through a cloth mask. Breathe in enough of these minute virus-carrying packets and you are infected with COVID-19. A cloth mask blocks the droplets and prevents tiny aerosols from forming. Healthcare personnel and first responders, who must get close to infected victims, don special masks that stop the aerosols, but the cloth masks worn by the rest of us only keep the droplets in, which impedes the spread of the virus, but does not protect the wearer from aerosols coming from disease victims. People wearing masks protect each other. Remove your mask and you threaten your neighbor.

If enough people wear cloth masks, and follow other practices like social distancing, frequent hand washing, and surface disinfection, the spread of the virus will slow, and we will all be safer and the daily death toll will go down.

Heroes sacrifice themselves for others; selfish wretches hurt others for their own convenience.

Where does that leave a hard-headed Dutchman who wants to own his fate? He makes his choice based on what he has learned.

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Whatcom County’s Towering Monuments

Today, silos in Whatcom County stand empty, towering monuments to old practices. Dairy farmers still feed silage, but their modern equipment stores it without a fuss in the giant white plastic wrapped marshmallows stacked in fields and barnyards.

This afternoon, I looked into one of my mother’s diaries and discovered that 54 years ago, instead of fretting over COVID-19 like everyone seems to be doing today, my dad was getting ready to fill the silo with grass silage.

The silo on the farm, built by Art Weden in the 40s

Some farm events, like chicken catching and hog butchering, were almost celebrations; family, friends, and neighbors gathering to enjoy working together. Not silo filling. It meant days of hard heavy work amid howling equipment that shook the ground and pounded ringing ears. During silo filling, the men were on edge, worried about breakdowns and foul weather, trying not to dwell on the how the day could go wrong.

Farming is still a dangerous profession, but in the 50s and 60s, when farmers gathered at the old Hilltop on the Guide Meridian for a cup of coffee on a rainy afternoon, talk began with pleasant banter about milk prices, corn versus grass silage, and the merits of the fresh heifers on the block at the Everson auction. But as often as not, at some point, the conversation took a sober twist toward overturned tractors, hands mangled in spinning power take-off shafts, and falls that broke arms and legs.

Grandpa and grandma several years before I was born.

In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field chopper and a blower. The machines were expensive, and they were used only for a few weeks each year. By combining their resources, Dad and the others were able to buy equipment they couldn’t afford individually. There was no contract or legal agreement. They just decided to pool their money and work together. I doubt that they even bothered to shake hands on it.

Each farmer supplied and outfitted their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is hauled on trucks or wrapped in plastic in the field, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons to move chopped grass to their silos. The wagons were outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to pull silage to the back of the wagon where it was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyor attached to the blower. I was proud and excited the first time Dad handed me a fork and told me to start pulling grass off the wagons. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the fodder already in the silo.

The largest and most powerful tractor pulled the field chopper. The howl of the chopper was loud enough to be heard from the silo, even when the machine was a half mile away. The chopper cut waist high grass, slashed it into one-inch lengths, and blew it into a silage wagon that trailed behind. When a wagon was full, another tractor dropped off an empty wagon and towed the full wagon to the silo. Driving the tractors hauling wagons between the field and blower was a prime job on a silage crew.

The blower fan was spun by a twenty-foot flat belt driven by a pulley mounted on a stationary tractor running with the throttle wide open. Log chains were attached to the tractor and twisted with a peavey to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor engine traveled for miles. The ground thumped and shook when hundredweight wads of silage hit the blower fan blades and were thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.

Inside the silo tower, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter, leveling the chopped grass, and tramping down air pockets that would spoil the silage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as strenuous as pulling the grass off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required hard fork work, especially when the silage was wet. The silos had to be filled quickly while the milk-producing protein content of the fodder was at its prime; the soaking squalls that come in off the Salish Sea in May, like we had last week in Ferndale, were no excuse to let up, despite the slackers’ grumbles.

As the silo filled, the work got harder as sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section disappeared, the green cascade of blown grass became more difficult to direct and the incoming silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.

About ten feet from the top, the pace became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the engine quickly, the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with silage. When the silage was on the dry side, a nimble and lucky crew could clear the pipe by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage would wedge in tight and the blower pipe had to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to dig out the clog.

Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a slick mud hole by rain and wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.

One sloppy wet year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and crumpled. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to rush him in our car to the emergency room at the county hospital on the corner of Northwest and Smith. They sewed up his wound and he returned to work. One of the other farmers hurried off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide for a replacement section of blower pipe while my dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the undamaged sections.

The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.

COVID-19 is horrible, life has always been hard, but working the farm was heroic in ways it has taken me a long time to recognize.

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COVID-19 Contact Tracing Training

I finished the COVID-19 contact tracing course from Johns Hopkins online last Friday. This Monday morning I was surprised to find an article in Wired by a journalist who has taken the same class, an article in the New York Times on the huge numbers of people who have applied to become contact tracers, and the MIT Technology Review had both an item on why contact tracing may be a mess in the U.S., and a piece on what it is like to be a contact tracer.

Sonofagun. Sandbagged by a zeitgeist.

The class was easy but contact tracing is not. When I started taking the class, I thought it might be a nice way to volunteer and do my bit in the pandemic crisis. But as I began to learn what a contact tracer does, I began to have doubts that I am tough enough to be a one. If an opportunity arises, I’ll give it a try, but I am not nearly as confident that I can help as I was before I took the class.

Washington State already has a robust contact tracing program in place. Close to 1400 tracers have been trained. Most are from public health services. Around 400 come from the state Department of Licensing which has been idled by the virus, another 350 are National Guard volunteers. I may still have an opportunity to volunteer because experts estimate 30 contract tracers are needed per 100,000 population, in other words, our state may need another 850 tracers. However, an arthritic C++ coder with no background in healthcare is not likely to be among the best candidates.

Contact tracing has been used for centuries for controlling infectious diseases. Recent victories over the Ebola, SARS, and MERSA epidemics are the result of contact tracing. Social distancing slows the spread, but contact tracing defeats epidemics.

Essentially, contact tracers question each person with COVID-19, discover whom they could have infected, phone each of these, warn them that they could contract the virus, and ask them to stay home until the danger that they will infect others stops.

A number of things make contact tracing a tough job. Sometimes, a contact tracer is the first to tell a victim that they have tested positive. Asking someone to stay home from work and away from their family is hard. Tracers also warn victims of symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, or turning blue (yes turning blue) that mean they may die soon if they do not get help immediately. Some people will need help getting food, paying bills, and getting child or parent care. None of this is fun.

COVID-19 has some nasty characteristics. Each infected person appears to infect 2-3 others, some estimates are higher. Hence the soaring number of cases and deaths in just a few months. At present, evidence shows that a person can infect others from 2 days before they get sick. The danger continues until they are well. If you are exposed to COVID-19, it can take as long as 2 weeks for symptoms to appear. In other words, you are a threat to others and should quarantine for two weeks after you are exposed.

Perhaps the scariest part is that you may never show symptoms and still pass the disease to others. Remember the Typhoid Mary story? She was a cook who had typhoid, but no symptoms. She refused to quarantine and continued to spread typhoid, leaving a trail of misery and death. This is why we should all wear masks when we are out and about and close to others. The mask prevents you from becoming a COVID-19 Typhoid Mary.

One of the reasons I feel compelled to volunteer is that the virus is so deadly. Best estimates are that people infected with COVID-19 die 2 to 3 times more often than flu victims. The flu kills 12 to 60 thousand Americans each year. And that’s with a vaccine. COVID-19 has killed over 90,000 in 4 months. Early on, it was said that the virus doesn’t affect children, but cases have turned up in which children get severely sick and a few have died. There is some evidence that death rates increase where more people are infected. That is, in ten square miles where 100 people are infected, 2 or 3 may die, but in the same area where 10 times as many are infected, many more than 20 to 30 die. We have to stop the spread of COVID-19.

As is to be expected in 2020, a robust contact tracing plan is accompanied with a haze of vicious misinformation. Isolation and quarantine, contrary to what is being said in some circles, is not mandatory. A National Guard volunteer may call you, but they are calling to trace your contacts, not to force you into quarantine. If asked, quarantine yourself to protect your family, friends, and neighbors from misery and death from the virus. But no one will force you to do the right thing. The information collected by a contact tracer is confidential like health records in your doctor’s office and your name will not be passed to your contacts.

This is the way contact tracing is done in a free democracy. Places under authoritarian regimes force victims to stay inside at gun point and publicly shame them. Not here.

On the other hand, for the time being, the authoritarians are doing much better than we are against the virus. They will be glad to take over if a free nation can’t handle COVID-19.