life in lockdown
I live in an apartment that is right on the Cambridge/Somerville line and work in downtown Boston. I am also an immigrant and a person who, despite having lived in Boston for 21 years, has, for various reasons both personal and external, never identified with this city. Like many, my attention over the past week has been on this city, this country and this world, as well as notions of fear and community and strength and alienation. Moreso than in election months, my feeds had been overrun with that most banal of all political pamphlets, Internet memes with a provocative image and a ten word phrase recycling the same things over and over. On Thursday night, I had gotten fed up with this mental cycle and just unplugged. Shut off the phone, read a book, and went to bed. I was asleep when most of the shooting and the chaos erupted on Thursday night in Cambridge. On Friday, I woke to news of a lockdown and manhunt delivered via Facebook.
The T was closed but the lockdown request had not yet been issued for Boston yet. All the same, my feeds were full of friends urging each other to stay indoors. We need to let the authorities do their thing. There are men with guns who are tense and on the job for 24 hours without sleep. Don't be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't add to the chaos. We've had enough of that so far.
Still, there were a few critical projects at work that were running behind and I knew that we were going to get pressure to continue working. So I sent a message to my team:
From: Cris -----
To: Technical Services@-----.com
Subject: This morning
Gents,
I realize that we have a lot of work to do today, but I leave it to your discretion as to whether you wish to come in today or not. If you either wish to stay home and be near loved ones, or come in to the office and do something besides listen to the news, or do a bit of a both, I leave that up to you. Just let me know what your plans are and we will adjust accordingly.
As far as I know, the current news is that Boston is technically not under lockdown, though many of the surrounding communities are. I assume that the office will be open for now, but I don't know if this situation will change as the day progresses. I do believe that the T will remain closed, including commuter rail, so I am assuming at a minimum that A---. and D---. will not be in the office.
Be safe, everyone.
I had work to do, but left my laptop in the office, so I made coffee, showered, dressed, got my bike out and took a deep breath and went outside.
The plan was to just nip into the office, get the laptop and go.
The streets were quiet, some people walking around, a few cars and trucks on their business, but it felt like a Sunday morning instead of the start of rush hour. I turned from my block on to Cambridge Street and saw the fleet of news trucks and police vehicles swarming around Norfolk, a block away from me, and I thought, "huh, I wonder what's going on there?"
I arrived in the office, to texts from friends saying that the lockdown had been expanded to Boston. I went online and looked up news on Norfolk Street and realized that the Tsarnaev's lived there. Their apartment is three houses over from my place, less than a hundred yards by the crow flies, and that block had been evacuated. Between that and the lockdown, I realized that I wasn't going to be going back soon.
So, you know, I got on with my day. The office was empty save for me and a couple of Hosting Operations guys, there to do remote monitoring of our data centers. We checked in with our office manager, letting them know where we were and that we were staying put. I had a couple of conference calls with West Coast clients that started with a frisson of tension and "how are you doing there?" but switched right into, "-- and let's get on with the agenda." Keep calm and you know the rest. The code that we were writing was a little sloppier than our usual. People were making a few more mistakes. Tried to handle it accordingly.
And, in the background, there's the Facebook feed and Metafilter thread updates and low hum of NPR. I exchanged texts and e-mails with friends checking in on each other.
"OMG, dude. Your neighborhood!"
"I know. Not there. Went to the office before Boston got locked down."
"You know, they lifted the lockdown for people who went to work?"
"I heard, but I kind of want to wait until the controlled explosions on my block finish exploding."
"Well, if you want, I know we're not supposed to open our doors to anyone except cops, but you know you can come here. We'll open our door for you."
I wanted to hug them. Instead, I sent out an invite to my friends, "when this blows over and you can leave your house, you can come to my place. Share a story, a hug, a drink."
As distant and as isolated as we all were; I hadn't felt like more of part of a community until that day.
I set a time for 7 pm that night, figuring that the lockdown may be lifted by then. I've been accused of over-optimism in the past.
After wrapping up a call on user enrollment and engagement metrics, I went out briefly for lunch. The great Italian place around the corner was open and for once, I did not have to wait in a crazy line. The liquor shop with the fantastic wine and scotch selections was also open. Or more, specifically, the owner said, "I'm not supposed to be open, but if you knock, I'll open the door."
I asked him, "so if you were to share a bottle of wine with your best friends after all this is over, what would that be."
"Something American. Something that tastes of sun and fruit and ... Hold on. Let me go to the cellar. Yes. This. You should share this."
The Starbucks was open. Most of the patrons had FBI or ATF jackets. State police and police SWAT were at the Dunkin Donuts a block over. Nobody was giving us hassle. Nobody was giving us grief. Everywhere that I walked, uniformed personnel looked at me, regarded my brown skin and my bag of takeout, sized me up and let me go on my day.
I still kind of wish I took a picture of the Starbucks and Dunks.
Outside, in the middle of downtown Boston, tourists were still walking through Fanueil Hall. A tour group of twenty was being lectured about the Boston Massacre.
When I went back to the office, the security guards had setup a table with a big sign saying "all bags will be searched." I opened my takeout bag and they just smirked and waved me through.
Eventually, at three pm, I got fed up of waiting for the bomb squad to do their controlled explosion and rode my bike back over the Charles. Cherry blossoms has opened up over the Esplanade. Trees were in bloom. Kendall Square, 18 hours after the carnage, was empty. My neighborhood was still swarming with cops, and a crowd of news people and neighborhood regulars had gathered around Norfolk street. My local bike shop, run by a fabulous, kind woman, had its door open and was letting people hang out and exchange rumors about what streets were closed and which areas were lifted. There was a power strip out for charging cell phones, and bottles of water and bags of snacks like an impromptu block party. I found out that my street was fine, but Norfolk was still cordoned off. The Portuguese cafe across the street was raking it in on TV crews.
I rode into Somerville, to get some groceries at Market Basket. The 'Ville had not yet been officially included in the lockdown, but the mayor had politely asked everyone to minimize their travel and cooperate with the general spirit of the emergency. The Market Basket was jammed. Lots of people were coming in on bikes. I think it was the sort of unofficial guideline during the lockdown. If you have to be out and about, don't be traffic. Ride a bike. Walk. Rollerblade. Don't be in the way of an ambulance or a police cruiser.
I went home. Cleaned my apartment, told everyone where I was, and finished up the last of my work e-mail and told co-workers that I was going off the clock.
By 5:30 a lot of us, those who had stayed indoors throughout the entire day, were getting stir crazy. We really, dearly wanted the lockdown lifted. While I think most of us would've sucked it up if it went into the night, there was this underlying negotiation of the social contract. We will permit you, authorities, to do your job. But you must do your job. You must find this criminal and you must show us that you have kept us safe. If you cannot do that, we will accept the risk of their being at large, and get on with the rest of our lives. All the same, I posted a follow up to my invite telling everyone, "I'm not going to ask you to disobey your city's urging or do anything irresponsible. I will say that I will be at home, and my door will be open to anyone that I know. I trust all of you to be good." At that point, I was ready for the night to continue in its solitary-in-presence, but connected-in-ether sort of fashion.
Except it didn't. The lockdown was lifted at 6. By 7, I had friends on my back porch with Lockdown Cookies and the remains of booze that they had been drinking at home. More friends appeared with scotch and boxes of free fried chicken that were being handed out by the soul food restaurant at the end of my block. When the update about further shooting happened, we fired up the TV; but conversations drifted between the living room and the porch depending on each of our appetites for more news.
We toasted and hugged each other when the boy was taken alive. And we kept talking, about the great things we read and what we did to keep our spirits up during FuckThisWeek. We talked about pride and summer plans and and who should play who in the movie dramatization (Philip Seymour Hoffman for Menino? yes). We took DrunkOClock photos of ourselves to send to friends who no longer lived in Boston, but seemed to take this ordeal harder than the rest of us -- friends who lived on the West Coast but remember the Town Diner in Watertown and were just so happy to get internet pictures of us being shitfaced and carrying on with life as normal.
That was life in the lockdown. People who watched the news and will be obsessing youtube videos may come away with the idea that lockdown was about deserted streets and men with guns surrounding terrified families. That attention is important. We should not accept this as normal. We should not believe that if operations such as this were successful once, that they should be permitted all the time; without accountability or respect for our private lives and property. But we should also recognize that this was a million people making their own decisions about how to balance living their lives with cooperating with an urgent need for public safety.
Many will point to things like Boston's tradition of snow days, and how that prepared us for putting our lives on hold, or the fierce solidarity that comes with being a sports fan here and how that builds into the civic spirit. I'm not a sports fan, but I know that rabid Sox or Bruins love is a manifestation of Boston's main virtue -- loyalty. It's funny how friendships form here. People who've moved from Boston to other cities will talk about how it's easier to meet people in LA or Atlanta or New York. That everyone's friendlier outside of Boston, and more willing to smile at you and say hi. But while it's easier to make friends, it's harder to keep them. People flake. Everyone talks about plans, but doesn't follow through. In Boston, it will take you a long time to make a friend, but more than likely, that friend will bleed for you when it's necessary. They will open a door for you if you need shelter. They will suspend their life for a day if it means making sure that all of their other friends and loved ones will be safe.
I always used to say that I could take or leave the city, but what keeps me here are the people. It's a simple oversight, but a city isn't the buildings and the traffic and the weather. If I love the people, I love the city. Before Friday, saying that I was from Boston was to invite associations of being a sports fan or a terrible driver from a city with streets planned by Cthulhu or from a city of bank thugs or a little brother to New York. After Friday, I don't care what other people think of this city. I care about what my neighbors, friends and fellow citizens see themselves as, and I'd be happy to stand with them.
This is an expanded version of a comment that I posted to Metafilter on Saturday, mostly in support of a number of Bostonians in that community who were calling out others that were labelling the people of Boston as "docile, cowering sheep afraid to leave their homes." I've been an off/on member of that community since 2001, and have always appreciated it for being a place that tries to foster reasoned, polite and informed discourse. It felt good to contribute in that way.