A few days into social distancing, I learned my daughters’ school would be closed indefinitely. And as the school where I teach had crash-landed into its own eerie spring break, the walls of my house started to close in. My wife and I set up Google Hangout and Google Meet, and weighed the prospects of third-grade virtual reading groups and of all the screen time our daughters might have as we slouched toward our de-limbed lives.
I’ve been approaching the news with dread, fascination and an even more acute mixture of distance and kinship. I’ve seen hospital rooms in China, empty restaurants everywhere forced into layoffs, a lonely fruit stand in Barcelona. I imagine what it’s like as I stare out my window at the birds flitting around on limbs soon to burst with green.
Each day, another of the very pillars that hold up this vast canopy seems to topple — there’s no such thing as sports or school or public gathering. It can feel as if we’re at the bottom of a dune filling with sand.
Over the weekend, I got a text from my neighbor Melanie: “Anyone interested in doing a neighborhood primal scream everyday at 5:29 p.m. or something? Step outside, bang pots and pans, give a good scream and then carry on?” Against the mountain of despair, that seemed like one of the best uses of time.
After so many warm days in early March that added another eerie layer to these circumstances, that evening was almost appropriately brisk. Putting on a hat and gloves — and something besides pajamas — made it more like an outing. My girls had their pot lids; I grabbed my Home Depot five-gallon pail and a mallet.
We spread ourselves out between the cul-de-sac compost bin and the spot where we had a doughnut-on-a-string eating contest last summer. But it was just Melanie’s brood and us, and from the looks of it, some of us did not look so up for screaming. But when 5:29 came around, we started wailing and pounding, shouting and singing, feeling our voices echo against the houses and into the woods, the most primal of broadcasting.
Growing up in rural New England, every now and then I used to scream like this. Mostly, after running up Rattlesnake Mountain I’d let it rip off the quarry walls and down into the valley. No one knew it was me. I’d raise my voice up an octave, pitch the neck to 45 degrees and push out enough air to cause a reverb effect, so that there’s a tingling on the inside of the brain. It’s a momentary lift, and so ancestrally available.
John Lennon was perhaps the most famous practitioner of primal scream therapy, which aims to transform repressed feelings through spontaneous, unmitigated hysteria. “It’s like somewhere along the line we were switched off not to feel things,” he told Howard Smith in a 1970 radio interview.
“This therapy gives you back the switch,” he added. “Locate it and switch back into feeling just as a human being.”
Though Melanie said she had no particular design in choosing 5:29, it turns out to be a brilliant time to meet. In the normal world, it’s about when we turn the key and walk back into our snug lair. These days, it’s the end of another semi-adequate attempt at coaxing our kindergartner into reading as my wife and I try to be quasi-responsible with work.
As the headlines pile up and I keep reading them, I’m becoming more inured to words like “trillions” and “shut down,” and people wondering whether it’s OK to go out and walk their dogs. Getting out and screaming feels like a pretty healthy response.
Day Two brought all the neighbors, and word had gotten out to the street below. Day Three, I went solo up to the highest rock around me — not quite Rattlesnake Mountain, but close enough — to get a lay of the land. The scream started near us, then below, like the night before, then behind, then over, then across. It was maybe 30 people, mostly pots, some lids and one other, more cheerful drum sound, maybe made by a two-gallon bucket.
On Monday night, my wife found it on Facebook. Someone we don’t even know invited her friends to join, wherever they may be. I joked with Melanie via text that this stranger was horning in on her territory. “We are in post-ego times,” she wrote back.
Of course, the scream is really just the prelude. It has become the reason we stand in what days ago would have seemed like an absurdly big circle, arranged by house group around an intersection gone quiet. A lot of the talk begins with “Can you believe …” It’s comforting to know that some of the hard stuff really does seem difficult for any of us to fathom.
We talk about the rippling effects of all this, our varied success with home schooling, and, seeking some structure, agree that now is really the time to teach our kids to do chores. It’s still kind of weird to stand at least six feet apart; confessions can’t just be whispered away. But it’s much better than speaking into a screen. You miss things that way.
You might not see that weaving through this circle is a rush of scooters and bikes with 20-inch wheels, in something between a parade and a race. Kids riding and scooting and laughing around their neighborhood, perfectly happy to go ’round and ’round the loop. This is happening, too.
Tim Donahue teaches high school English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City.
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