Narration: Jonathan Berger’s An Introduction to Nameless Love

The Tunnel

I would go through that window, hop over the ledge. There was another ledge on the other side that was about four feet wide, not very much. And then right over there was a huge drop, say about seven feet. There was a small ladder. You couldn’t see it because it looks like it’s a part of the wall. But if you look carefully you can see there’s an old skinny ladder. Really rusted. You can go right down to the tracks from there. 

It was quite a few years I stayed down here. We stayed between the tunnel and under the rotunda, back and forth. We’d go inside the tunnel for safety.

Everybody had their own little division. Like, we were here at 103rd, that was our little division. We did everything for us there. They had another area that was up on 108th Street. They had their own little division. There was another one down further. There was about, I’d say, between 72nd and 108th, five divisions in total. 

It was my home, my other home. We were really a community. We worked together. We got food together. We all went up on top and found food and brought it down, not for one but for everybody. If one didn’t have a blanket, another one would help. When I first came down there, a gentleman reached out to me, he says, listen, being that you’re going to be living down here with us, let us show you how to live. And that’s what they did. They showed me how to dumpster dive. You know, smell this before you eat it because they have a tendency of pouring bleach. They showed me how to eat off the land. 

There is nothing like living life on the lam, like, being free. Actually having to live from day to day, not knowing where your next meal may come from or if you’re going to get one. Not knowing when your next dollar is going to come from to get high, or to do whatever.

You have no responsibilities but the responsibility to just do your part, whatever it may be. 

Everybody was down here for their own reason. Some were running from the law. Some really had nowhere else to go. We were just living. 

We got a lot of resistance from the police, the parks department. You’re not supposed to be here! We’re going to have you arrested! So in order to keep our stuff and stay out of their way, we decided to go inside the walls. This was a secret thing we had going on. We’d come down here, we’d come home, nobody knew nothing.

I was brought down here by a gentleman. He brought me here and we got high. He said, I will be back, and he left. I’ve [column break; begin top right] never seen him again. 

He brought me right to this spot, under the rotunda. So I waited and I waited, and a couple of guys said, well, while you’re here, you can help us out. And before I knew it I was staying down here and it became my second home.

I had my child down here, under that rotunda. It was the dead of winter. I delivered my child, on my own, right there under that rotunda. 

Sometimes we would see the lights shining from the outside into the tunnel. That’s how we would know it’s daytime. It’s beautiful in another gory sense. We have seen an array of animals down there. I have seen a ant that was all of the size of maybe a rat. It was humongous! And he walked directly past me. I’ve seen huge rats. I’ve seen a possum walk through there. They have water bugs down there that are the size of my hand. Now it takes a lot to make my stomach flip, but those water bugs! 

By me staying down here, I had lost a lot of the essential things of being a girl. Washing up, keeping myself together. Doing my hair. I forgot a lot of that stuff. You know, as a mechanism to keep people away, I purposefully wouldn’t take a shower. That was my, get back! I’m funky, get away! You don’t want to be around me! After months of being in that funk, I got accustomed to it. 

You know, I’ve come very close to getting raped a few times. Outside of the tunnel. I’ve been beat up, I’ve been robbed. And I’ve had to do little dirty things, too, you know, as we all did when we’re in the street life. You have to get a little dirty and gritty to survive. I learned from my teachers what I needed to do. 

The tunnel, we were a protected entity. It was a safe haven. Like, there was a crew. There was two females, and there was five or six guys. And nine times out of ten, we were protected. We were their little sisters, so to speak. And they were all brothers. We pretty much looked out for each other. 

For me, I would never take it back. If I had the time to turn back the clock, I wouldn’t change anything that I’ve went through under the rotunda, in the hole. My whole experience, I wouldn’t change for nothing. 

It showed me hot to fight. It showed me how to be independent. I’ve been bullied all my life. I never really spoke up for myself. Here, I had no choice if I wanted to try to live. It was, “Ria, you’ve got to open your mouth, talk, tell them you won’t do that.” I’ve had fights down here, standing my ground. The experience and the education through those years is something incredible. [end bottom right]

My doppelganger died

My Aunt Rhoda died at the age of thirty-seven when I was fifteen years old.

Her death remained something of a family mystery for decades. My grandmother, Rhoda’s mother, thought Rhoda’s ex-husband poisoned her in Mexico when they went down there to get a divorce. Other speculations included undiagnosed parasite, bad IUD, encephalitis, and mad cow disease. I have no idea where such notions came from, but to this day, should you ask a relative what she died of, you’d get only theories and shrugs. 

At age sixteen, I inherit all of Aunt Rhoda’s clothing, jewelry, and a large selection of her art work. I crawl into her life, her smell, her style, I wear her big-buttoned dresses that look like the Chrysler Building, her unpolished stone earrings as light as ancient fossils. I am her living archive and I carry her death into my future, casting exquisite crooked shadows across every step. I hang up her glue and ink paintings, her charcoal sketches, and place her bronze sculptures like sentries at my bedroom door. The small shiny gold-plated sculpture of a Georgian-style lion lives inside a silk-lined pouch embroidered in aqua and turquoise. I take it with me everywhere. Decades later, I notice an inscription beneath the lion’s left rear paw: for Mady. 

One day, not long after her death, I sit sprawled on the floor with a pen in my maladroit left hand and wrote crooked and angular words on unlined paper. I write from right to left and the words are illegible. I produce pages and pages of hieroglyphic musings and sign each entry with a different name in honor of the mysterious presence who seemed to author them. 

By the time I am thirty-seven, I have four journals of left-handed writing that can only be deciphered if held up to a mirror.

[left]

Fernando Pessoa

The writer Fernando Pessoa experienced himself as having no personality, a man without recognizable qualities, a chaos of moods simply implausible to unify into a singular identity. For Pessoa, madness was not the failure to make sense, but the attempt itself. Instead of seeking his voice, he sought his voices; he wrote as if he were a medium. According to Adam Philips, Pessoa was always at the point of disappearing from himself, and that’s the way he liked it. 

I would like to be like Pessoa. To elude the consistency I hear in all I say, in all I write. Pessoa didn’t need to imitate himself in order to keep writing. Rather, he exploded himself, wrote in seventy-eight different names, what can be called heteronyms: Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa, and seventy-three others! Pessoa became his own pandemonium, a cacophony of tongues, flirting and cajoling himself into a state of perpetual emergence.

I love Fernando Pessoa. He would never mistake me for myself. 

[right]

“If I only had a heart” the Tin Man, from the Wizard of Oz, 1939

I met Markey Doodles ay a gathering of ventriloquist dummies that I hosted in Los Angeles in March 2018. We all sat around in a circle and talked. I asked the dummies – four of them in total – a number of questions about love, relationships, partnering, friends (imaginary and otherwise), fears, everyday preoccupations, and the current political climate. “What are your pastimes?” “Are you in a relationship right now?” “What makes you sad?” “Do you have any advice for me about love?” Before parting ways, I posed one final question: “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” Markey Doodles, the youngest of the group, did not hesitate to answer: “I’d really like to be a person by then.”

I find it fascinating that Markey Doodles, like the Tin Man nearly eighty years earlier, longs for what humanity has to offer while we humans are every day converting ourselves into automata at furious rates. It’s your time, Markey! We humans want to be you! We literally love you to death. 

[left] 

Dummies: in the carpool lane

Mady: What can I ask you that nobody seems to ever ask you?

Roscoe: “Does that guy [points to his ventriloquist] talk to you when you’re not performing?” And the answer is, yes, he does. 

M: Does he talk to you when no one else is around?R: He tries to, but I ignore him,

M: He doesn’t listen to you?

R: I don’t listen to him! 

Darlene: Christine and I talk to each other when no one’s around. That’s what friends do! 

R: We’re not that kind of friends/ 

D: Sometimes Christine leaves me in the case. One time she was trying to move over into the carpool lane and I was in the case and I was yelling, “Let me out! They’re not going to know I’m here! You’re going to get a ticket.” That really happened. 

[right] 

Colin and Elaine

I had known Elaine Meaney for over three decades. She was a painter and weaver, fiercely independent, long since divorced and somewhat regretful about having children. She was deeply involved in eastern philosophy and ruthlessly disparaging og the New-Age practices that pervaded her everyday life in southern California. We really got along. 

When I learned of her death in 2005, I made the trip to Colorado to attend an intimate memorial service being held at her daughter Caryn’s house. 

As I drove up, Elaine’s grandson Colin, about eleven years old at the time, was out in the street feverishly and doggedly directing traffic, telling us where to park, directing us to the house and listing our names in order of arrival on a large yellow legal pad. Once everyone was inside and seated, his aunts and uncles began the service. Colin interrupted several times to announce that we were not going in the proper order, that testimonials were to be delivered according to the names on his list. After several such interruptions the adults conceded to his demands and that’s exactly what we did. After an exhausting (and comically poignant) two hours, Colin’s mom Lise asked Colin if he had anything to say. Without hesitation, he said that he did not want to speak, but Ralph, Elaine’s dog, had something to say. Colin took his place facing the assembled crowd and called for Ralph who came immediately and sat by his side. “Thank you, Elaine, for taking care of me. Thank you for brushing me, and taking me on walks, and for feeding me slices of turkey off your plate at lunchtime. I love turkey.”

[top left]

I. I am in here

Mark: I have a body and mind connection disorder. 

My living felt like I was on my own. Yet much attention was given to my body. If you can imagine being a glorified pet, that is what it was like. 

I used to find it easiest to describe my mind as a castle. A castle with many rooms. And each room has a focus, such as good memories and sweet thoughts and funny things and old movies. 

I was in the world but experiencing it in my own way. People didn’t know I knew everything that was going on around me. I found it frustrating that people found me stupid, and I was not. 

‘The little green bird says: I am tired of so many friendless days in my life. I want to know how it feels to have old, cold, lonesome longing for love gone.’ That is a line I wrote long ago. I am aware that I felt deeply aware of love for a long time. I felt love, and saw love between real people and between the movie TV folks too. But I was not a participant, though I found I felt it in me. 

I want the transformational soothing of someone knowing me, and vice versa. 

[top right]

II. We deserve royal treatment for our lost souls

Emily: For two hours a week he came. I only knew his mind. Someone brought him and took him away. As we did more work together, I got more of a sense of his life. One time I had to be with him for 5 days and do his daily thing. He said, ‘You think my life’s depressing.’ I said, ‘Well it is depressing. You bowl, and you have the kind of life that someone in services has.’ But I’d never seen it up close all day long. I started to understand what it’s like to be in developmental services. 

I am an accommodation for what Mark is thinking. I’m bringing nothing, except this has become a way for Mark to get his thoughts out. There are other ways he could learn to pick letters. My support is just physical. When he was learning to type to communicate, he would reach for a letter he wanted, and my role as facilitator was to pull his hand back after he got that letter. Sometimes he picks the wrong letters and has to slowly take them out. It’s a difficult thing he does. 

So he needed a great communication partner, and a great communication partner is really calm. It meant that in order for Mark to have a good partner, he needed to work through some of the stuff holding me down. ‘How can I have her be the quiet, easy person that will allow facilitated communication to work effectively?’ There were things in my life that weren’t working. Mark helped me realize I didn’t want to be at my job anymore. Or in my relationship anymore. 

Mark said, ‘I bring positive thinking. Emily struggles with it.’ Which is true. 

So Mark and I made a deal. I would help him get out in the world, but he would help me with my inner world. He’s either clairvoyant, or he’s just super positive. He said, ‘You can pull yourself up into a lighter place. Everything’s going to be better. I’m telling you, everything’s going to be fine.” 

[top left]

III. I'm tired of being the only one. She is tired of being the only one. 

E: Mark, do you want to sit a little back in the chair? You look a little uncomfortable. Put both your feet on the floor.

Mark will clap so loud that the person is drowned out. It’s inappropriate. Me personally? I get upset because it hurts my ears. But he doesn’t want to be asleep in the corner. He wants to be very alive. 

M: I am making a concerted effort to be engaged in my life, so I am noisy. I often clap really loud at too many things and for too long. Emily thinks I am going nuts, but I’m just trying not to sink . I have a lot of fear that I am stuck here in the valley between ‘I am in here’ and the life I want as a voice of our time. 

E: There haven’t been people who ask us questions in this way. We feel like we’re on an island. Why don’t other people understand?

M: I can see Emily in my mind… in her castle, which is sometimes near and clear and sometimes foggy and far. 

E: I pulled back my support for Mark with the hope that other people would start to show up. But nothing changed. I think I’ve done my part. But then I think I want to be a part of Mark’s life. But not the only part. We exist in a world where systems don’t work. It’s a world that Mark is very much a part of. People think, ‘What do you expect us to do? This is how developmental services works.’

M: I am totally so tired and yet this is the only avenue joy has given me. I have got to make it work. I hope for the best. 

[top right]

IV. Long game

M: I am thinking of the long game always. Can you see the finish line? Oh, yes, I can. 

E: ‘Oh, yes, I can?’

M: Oh, yes, I can. And it is good. 

E: So can you see the finish line?

Maybe that’s my life’s work – to figure out if Mark can really tell the future, or if he is just saying he can because it’s positive. It’s such a beautiful, fun, amazing thought to think, ‘Oh, my friend can see it, and now we’re moving towards it.’ 

M: Fun.

E: Yeah. Like, the ‘Church of Mark Utter’.

M: Yes.

E: ‘Cause also you don’t have to pay taxes if it’s a church. 

M: I think we should be daring and write some dialogue for a tragedy that ends with Emily leaving and the epilogue is totally positive and true… 

[top left]

V. Doll's House Movements Out in the World by Mark Utter  

Scene I 

M: I long to make this way of being last forever. 

E: This is not possible. I need to not be a person held for so long in this role of communication support. 

M: Will you sometimes support my thoughts coming out?

E: On the table is the book I have assisted you in creating. In it are lots of things I have learned about you and your larger way of looking at the world. This is going to assist you amazingly. 

M: Hallelujah. I know it easily will fill the space you are leaving. Alright, this is painful. Do not go. 

E: I will always think of you and our work together and what an impact we have had on each other’s lives. 

M: May I email you? 

E: Yes. It will be such [top right] a pleasure to hear from you. 

M: I will send you all the support you will be missing. You might get confused and lost without me. 

E: No. No. 

M: I must help you if you need it. 

E: I am needing your friendship but not all the life advice you have been feeding me for years. Now the miracle is going to have to happen.

M: What is the miracle?

E: It is something with both have to believe in and get others to believe in it too. 

M: Oh, I will! 

E: For this to happen I must leave. Goodbye. (She goes out)

M: She is gone. I thought she would never really go. (he picks up book) And now for the miracle of miracles. 

Living together alone 

The relationship with God has to really be like a lover. You have to feel that connection.

To be a shaker you have to feel something that’s called a calling. You have to feel a sensing from God that this is a place and a way of life that you need to be a part of. It can’t be something that’s coming from you because it looks romantic and it’s nice. Community life is very difficult. The concept of community is that ‘the strong will help the weak along’. None of us have perfect personalities; we all have faults and failures. When you have a collection of people who are together, you get to tap into those resources that help you to make a collective whole and make life better. 

In the first days of the shakers in America, they had no converts. They lived very apart and very alone. Mother Ann kept telling people to get ready, get ready. They would plant more crops every year, they would build buildings they didn’t need, and nobody was getting it. And she said, they’re going to come like doves. And they did. Because she had such a faith in it. Mother Ann, she raised work up to be so important. We have to see beyond work to see it’s the spiritual work that we’re doing at the same time. So the hands to work, hearts to God is a living reality – we’re not talking about ideals, we’re talking about reality. 

We’re doing this to help each other and to help build it up, and so no matter how meaningless it seems that task is, it’s not meaningless at all. No matter what job you’re doing, no matter how hard, disgusting, repulsive it is, if you’re in the mindset of not saying, I hate this, and say to yourself, alright, we’re going to get through this and god give me the strength to make it happen, and just recognize that it’s not you. 

It definitely becomes something of an act of devotion. 

Brother John Anderson made, like, 2000 spectacle cases. If you asked him what is your greatest accomplishment in life, he wouldn’t have said 2000 spectacle cases. He would have said, ‘I’ve been a believer for 40 years,’ he’s using his hands and he’s using his talents to help – that is a prayer.

Even my every breath is a prayer to God. That’s the ideal. So anything we’re doing is potentially an act of prayer, of devotion to God.

We produce goods because we need to produce goods to live/ and we had to have something to sell so that we could afford to live. And we are detached from it and always have been detached from it. To see these pieces and the way they were used and then not used, and to understand that there has to be a forward progression. Both of faith and of living. We don’t cling to the past. It’s this whole cosmic struggle that’s going on around us and inside of us, it’s all of these things about our yearning not to be here anymore. This is not our home. This is our home but our heavenly home is where we’re aiming for. 

The shakers have a very good understanding of perfection, I think, and that is to say, perfection is progressive. I couldn’t cook the best tarragon chicken I’ve ever cooked today. Five years from now I should be cooking it better than I did because I practice it. I’ve done it. I’ve refined it. You can do it literally on the physical plane as well as the spiritual plane. So that’s what we’re aiming for. It is a progression. And to think you’ve obtained the perfect moment, there is no such thing. It’s a perfect moment for the moment, and then we’re moving on. But you’ve also got to look back every now and again. That’s spiritual too. Doubt can be a healthy thing, because you have to examine yourself to think, am I living up to my expectations and God’s expectations for me and the community’s expectations for me, and if I’m not why am I not doing it? Am I unhappy? We don’t know when we’re strong and we don’t know when we’re weak, and when we think we’re the weakest is sometimes when we’re actually the strongest. The challenge – every day to give and forgive and to be forgiven, and to just move on and progress forward as much as possible. 

We as individuals have to be motivated to want to change. When that happens then good things start to happen and better things start to happen the more we practice it, and we feel a genuine love, which is free from the body. It’s fully of the soul, and it’s fully for humanity. And it’s, I think you can use the word compassion, and that, that’s what it’s really all about.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the word love, and I think a lot of people misunderstand love. Where we seem to fall so short is when we take an ideal and we want to make it a reality and when it’s not a reality we don’t know how to cope with it. Love is always and take and a genuine love is something that, is something that continues to grow and is deep and abiding. 

The reality is love takes a lot of work to and it takes a willingness to compromise constantly. It takes a willingness to be open, a willingness to admit when you’re wrong, a willingness to pick yourself up and to go on and to love without bounds, because God has loved you without bounds. And that means we are called as the instruments of God every single day of our lives to constantly be breaking down those boundaries that separate people from us and us from them. And we need to open it up and have to recognize the oneness of man that is so broken and so distorted, and God’s constant calling us back to this oneness within God himself. 

The thing is you also have to be prepared to recognize that there are times when you’re going to have a feeling of being very alone, very apart, and very deserted. 

The work goes on. The hands fall off, the feet fall off, the work goes on. 

I do fervently believe and it has been given to me to understand that that is going to be the case. People will still be shakers long after me, because, well, I think that this is the truth and the truth can’t die. 

When you can feel the love of God. Oh how precious, filling all immensity. And a million other ones. 

[left circle, from outermost ring to innermost] 

I love a challenge. I love a man. I love his mind mind mind. I love the corners of his mouth when we find find find. 

This life is grand. This life is fine fine fine. He knows me real. Real real. We are a kind kind kind. This life is good.

My name is Ray. Ray Ray. It’s a man’s name. My name is Ray. Ray Ray. I play a man’s game. Dancing corners of the room. It’s more than line line line.

Our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is

Spectacular things! A rush of creation. Of brass and gold rings. A carnival flutter. And shudder and dreams. 

Petunia, horsetail, the hallway between. These things we gather and weigh ourselves by and with.

[right circle, from innermost ring to outermost]

Petunia, horsetail, the hallway between. These things we gather and weigh ourselves by and with.

Spectacular things! A rush of creation. Of brass and gold rings. A carnival flutter. And shudder and dreams.

Our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is our time. This is

My name is Ray. Ray Ray. It’s a man’s name. My name is Ray. Ray Ray. I play a man’s game. Dancing corners of the room. It’s more than line line line.

This life is grand. This life is fine fine fine. He knows me real. Real real. We are a kind kind kind. This life is good.

I love a challenge. I love a man. I love his mind mind mind. I love the corners of his mouth when we find find find. 

But it was unbelievably, intensely complicated.

He talked of this very structured place. 

But walls came and went all the time. 

That really is Charles and Ray together –

Putting on the perfect show. 

We’re the final act. 

It wasn’t like one imagines a couple. 

I think in many ways they were their own client. 

Everything was the product of their love. 

Who you are as an individual was pretty secondary to being there. 

There was always a lot of controversy around credit. 

She composed in three dimensions and he composed in two. 

He was the politician. 

She was the eyes of the office. 

She never came to any of the meetings. 

He’s with IBM and his name is on the letterhead. 

She remembered everything visually. She was a synesthete. 

She made the house look the way it did. 

Je liked the process. Snapping Polaroids. 

Custom made suits. All these groupies.

I think the words he used are love and discipline. 

It moves away from furniture and into exhibits, 

Intellectual excursions. 

The aquarium that never got built 

He was tough on her, and in ways that… 

Later they would come to work separately and 

Perhaps leave work separately. 

Each in their own car. 

But when they were there, they were, 

You know… 

He knew. 

And she knew. 

She tried for a while after he died, 

But she really couldn’t do it. 

She couldn’t keep things moving. 

Charles kept projects moving. 

And Ray started living, sleeping in the studio. 

He talked about the circus as a city plan. 

The Empress

It was a dark period of my life. I had been deeply immersed in writing when my family’s business and an enormous amount of debt fell on me during the space of a phone call. All activities stopped and it was over three years before I was able to crawl out from under it. And basically during my thirties for that whole decade, I was not letting any life into my life, other than what came through writing. Then even that was interrupted. 

Empress was not her name, it was what my friend called her which the press later latched onto. She did not have a name and I did not relate to her that way. She came out of an all-you-can-eat spot in Chinatown called Bingo’s that used to be on Mott St and open until 4 A.M. This was around 1993. I would go there with the factory owners and production managers from the Garment District after work. We were leaving and there was a beautiful grey and white skinned turtle swimming frantically in the tank with the eels we passed on the way out. She riveted my attention, but I did nothing and left. 

All night I kicked myself for my failure to act, then ran back in the morning. She was still there, down at the bottom of the tank, looking exhausted. I bought her for $20. They fished her out of the tank and headed back to the kitchen to chop her up. I managed to prevent that and took her away in a bag. 

I knew nothing about this animal, not what kind of turtle she was nor where she came from or how she got to Chinatown, whether she was male or female, or what she ate or needed. I knew she was a turtle. 

I figured out enough to keep her in a 200 gallon tank with aquarium salt in the water, a basking light and haul-out log of cork bark. We related largely through the relation of our bodies in space. I needed to move softly so as not to frighten her. She could fly off the log at speed and slam into the glass sides of the tank. She saw me primarily as something dark moving overhead swiftly or, danger. Later, she had a provider category for me. She did respond to music and my friend sang to her.

She was a diamondback terrapin, malaclemys t. terrapin, a brackish water turtle native to the mid-Atlantic seaboard salt-marshes and had been illegally harvested from hibernation. A month after arrival, she dropped five eggs in the water. I put them on the kitchen counter in vermiculite. 57 days later, 3 hatched. I was already in love with this turtle, but seeing the hatchlings emerge from their eggs I was completely overtaken. 

To understand her better, I began talking to a wider circle of people, much like any love relationship can bring you into contact with a larger community. I became a New York State Wildlife Rehabilitator, and I began to acquire turtles out of food markets in southeast Asia to build assurance colonies. It was 1998, the year the conservation community understood the precipitous crash of turtle populations was worldwide. 

I transitioned quickly from four to 200 to 1500 turtles, and soon had the second largest captive group of threatened and endangered turtles in the U.S., including the largest genetic pools of five species presumed extinct in the wild. 

Relationships with people are about a hundred different things at once. With an animal, you know much better what is going on, what you are doing and what you are feeling. 

It is like when you meet someone on the street and you know that you know the person and how you feel about the person, but you cannot place the person – you are in a space of recognizing-without-identifying. Then the compulsion to figure out “who this person is” sets in. As soon as you do, everything collapses and the open feeling is gone. With an animal, the pre-verbalized feeling of recognition can remain much longer. 

There is a lot of mortality dealing with animals from food markets and confiscations. When these creatures die, they slip away with no trace. Death is silent. Their dying makes no noise, has no mark in history. The sadness shakes you to the core. We make much of our names and we give them to our animals. But animals were persons before their names. 

I used to say writing was my public life, and animals were my private life.

I released that diamondback terrapin into her native habitat along the Atlantic coast after a long quarantine.