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Orion’s Belt: Walking Through A Pandemic

By Galen Bunting

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how

astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,

what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and

lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate

oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced

to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and

jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

- Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”

The night before I was diagnosed with COVID-19 was a night that I went walking.

It was February 2021, when the vaccines had been announced but not yet rolled out. I

worked as a teaching assistant for a professor who I wouldn’t meet in person until a full year

later. Walking was my refuge from grading student essays, answering emails from brokers, and

filling out applications for apartments, which we carefully screened through a palisade of emails

and shaky YouTube videos and sometimes, masked tours.

In a desperate fit of No-Longer-Dealing-With-This, I had taken to the Boston rental

market. I couldn’t remain in the 250 square foot studio on Burbank Street where I had lived with

for the duration of the pandemic. I said I was sick of scheduling Zoom calls with my class so that
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they would not overlap with my partner’s Zoom meetings, but I just needed some space to

breathe- both literally and figuratively.

So, regular as a dog that walked itself, I took to the snowy path outside my apartment.

It had just begun to snow, but I felt feverishly warm, a warmth I credited to my quick

walk down four flights, the blasting radiators on every floor, and the layers I’d donned.I did not

stop. After all, I’d tested negative just the other day. Inside my layers of sweaters and parka, I

was like a foil-wrapped packet of steak in an industrial dishwasher.

The glass door of my apartment building swung open easily, despite the crusty layer of

snow which covered the steps. A leftover wreath still swung on the grey wall inside. Ice-

feathered wind lifted the edges of the wool beanie my sister had knitted for me that Christmas.

When the cold air struck my face, I felt better. Cooler. Saner. In retrospect, this was probably the

start of the fever, viral levels peaking.

It had been snowing for the past few weeks, and to relieve the cabin fever, we’d been

watching a reality television show set in Canada. The conceit was survival, in the style of the

eighteenth century pioneers. Two family groups struggled to survive in the countryside, despite

rain and snow, for a year, only using eighteenth century techniques to farm and take care of

animals. The show covered such thrilling moments as the dredging of their first well, the time a

fire got out of hand and burnt their pig to death, and the minutiae of sowing, and later, harvesting

crops. When the snow fell, one of their number succumbed to pneumonia, and they had to take

advantage of twenty-first century methods of survival: an emergency visit to a local hospital.

I turned left at the end of the street and walked past the twenty-four hour corner store, lit

up despite the snow. Past snow-laden trees, I walked the rolling paths into the fens, for which

Fenway Park is named. In the summer, insects swarm, and murmurations of starlings fly as thick
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as the gnats. Students squat on pathways, passing around anonymous paper-wrapped bottles. But

in winter, soft snow muffles footsteps, wraps statues in white. At night, the Fens have become a

favorite walking spot for me during the pandemic. I know about their hidden rose garden, the

plots of carefully curated plants in the Victory Gardens. Last spring, I saw a raccoon, looking

back at me with little rheumy eyes, as it plopped from a tree. (When the park rangers looked for

it, it was gone).

I passed the little playground at the crest of the hill. Swings swayed in the breeze. Its

name, Mother’s Rest, was twined out of steel and rests at the top of a heavy gate, upon which

laces of frost lie. The hill curved up towards a Celtic monument, and stairs reached down to the

bottom. I took this stairway down. The ice on the pond was frozen, creaking beneath my boots.

Out of a trash can stuck a snow saucer, snapped in half. It still had use. Plucking it free, I used its

snapped plastic as a lever to ascend the steps, marble crusted with ice.

My body felt heavy, but I sat down on the saucer and pushed myself down the hill with a

sudden lightness. Usually this path is a scrum of people, grocery carts, red bicycles. Now, it was

abandoned, turned into a mouth that yawned at me as I plummeted down the snowy hills, the

breath sucked from my lungs as I sped down white ice to the bottom of the hill. I lay on the

broken half of the saucer, and stared upward. Through the bare limbs of trees, I saw the black

night sky, but no stars- too close to the city, to light pollution, which stretches, an unseen dome,

blotting out the constellations.

I put the saucer back into the trashcan- I no longer needed it.

Back on the path, I crunched through the snowbanks, past the anonymous plots of the

Victory Garden. Each plot has its own decorations, its own character. One plot sported a series of
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waving lights in an eerie blue, while another featured sets of stuffed animals, plopped into chairs,

their bodies shapeless lumps of white.

Near the war memorial, I stopped. It was darker here, and the trees blocked out much of

the light. The stone angel on the monument shimmered in the dark, snow filtering down in front

of her, like fuzzy static on a television set. I took a step forward. Here, I was far away from the

stream of information pouring into my email, my eyes focused on a screen. Instead, I brushed

snow from my glasses, adjust my mask to keep it from fogging them up. My fingers were cold

when I took off my gloves for additional dexterity; the wind’s bite felt real, worth feeling,

despite the chill.

For almost two years, the bulk of my time outside the house was spent in walking, in

observing the green spring as it crept over the ground, as mushrooms erupted in the fall, as the

leaves turned the Riverway orange. Now, February snow covered the ground, and in a few days,

it would be March, meteorological spring, and the first vaccines were rolling out. In that

moment, I felt-something. Perhaps I felt lighter. Perhaps I felt hope. I didn’t realize- how could I-

that the virus was already inside me, that I was already infectious, that it was (loathsomely)

reproducing. This is the limit of viewership, though. Though we may desire to take in so much,

we cannot even look inside ourselves, see the virus proliferating.

But on this cold night, the night before the diagnosis, I lie down in the snow, and look

above. Virginia Woolf said in her 1926 essay that while ill, one is “able, perhaps for the first

time for years, to look round, to look up — to look, for example, at the sky” (37). Ordinarily,

such gazing upwards might be disruptive, might be misconstrued by public passersby. But it is

night, and there are no people here.

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In the blank expanse, I see a few of the stars which make up Orion, The Hunter. Three

stars. Each of the studs across the hunter’s belt. I know that these same stars look down over the

house where my mother and father live in Oklahoma. Maybe my father has taken his telescope

out into the field, and is looking up too.

In the days that follow, I’ll take the warmth of those faraway stars with me, after I test

positive, after I can no longer go outside for ten days. But right now, I look up, and bear witness.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The New Criterion, vol. 4, issue 1, January 1926.