Gathering acorns in quarantine

When I was a teenager circa 2011, I treated my then-undiagnosed anxiety disorder by playing this song at ear-splitting volume repeatedly until I knew every line of Crim’s intro by heart. Later in the song, Jack White appeals to the listener, in a way that seems both earnest and irreverent, to: “Be like the squirrel, girl.” The message was simple. You can take care of yourself in the face of extreme adversity. Combined with Jack’s inexplicably cathartic guitar jam and Meg’s reliable percussion, it was a soothing reminder that my fate was not entirely out of my own hands.

It’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve listened to “Little Acorns” hundreds of times over the years. I still didn’t expect the theme of storing up food as a tactic for self-preservation to apply to my life quite so literally until early March, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that New York was under a state of emergency due to the coronavirus.

My roommate and I, a bit shocked by how abruptly the outbreak had gone from a real but peripheral concern to the main focus of every moment of our day, began to stock up on the essentials: pasta noodles, canned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, boxed wine, and (the superstar of self-isolation pantries everywhere) beans. Somewhere between making disinfectant out of diluted vodka and making masks out of old T-shirts, my roommate casually raised a question: Should we start pickling stuff?

The idea was comforting: We wouldn’t need to rely on an uncertain supply chain or grocers’ ability to keep products on the shelves, the latter of which was increasingly in question as panicked New Yorkers hoarded goods. As we stood in our Queens kitchen, we pondered the pickle we were in, a quarantine with no certain end, and decided on pickling.

Pickling is simple: Slice up your chosen fruit or vegetable (we went with jalapenos, red onions, garlic, ginger, and lemon rinds), and put them in a jar half-filled with a simple brine. You add whatever herbs suit your fancy and whatever vinegar you have on hand, shake it up, and leave the mixture to soak. The timing varies. Jalapenos and onions are ready overnight. Lemon rinds, mixed with anise for flavor, take a week or so, but then you can slice them up and eat them like candy or use them to garnish margaritas.

Sauerkraut took more patience. We sliced up cabbage and mixed it with salt, working it with our hands until it created its own brine, then left it submerged in the salty water on our kitchen counter for weeks. As time went on, the sauerkraut became a calendar: How long had the kraut been fermenting? A week? Two? Not long enough. Leave it to bubble. In quarantine, marking the passage of time via the fermentation process of cabbage makes just as much sense as crossing off days on a calendar. There’s a comforting predictability in it: As inevitably as death and taxes, if you leave cabbage in brine, it will become sauerkraut.

In the first few weeks of quarantine in New York, the sounds you hear coming in from the street are bird songs and sirens. The marriage of the two sounds is eerie — birds are happily indifferent to the upheaval of the city. At first, you hear the sirens every 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, and then there are overlapping sirens coming from different directions, and you stop keeping track. Then one day, you realize that you’ve stopped noticing the sirens altogether, and that inspires a different kind of dread. You’ve gone from detective procedural to David Lynch film.

The act of pickling, fermenting, and bread baking feels odd in a small city apartment. I was born and raised in Wyoming, a state that’s more wilderness than not, more Great Plains than buildings, more empty space than living space. There, it’s easier to imagine growing your own vegetables and saving them in jars. But when society as you knew it is crumbling, the process of preserving food assuages fear, even in a modest kitchen in Astoria. The development of a skill that builds self-reliance is a reassurance when there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to rely on the institutions that have defined your reality.

As the weeks dragged, restaurants and bars remained shuttered, and we remained inside. The number of cases in New York City soared: 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000. Friends who we lived just miles from but couldn’t see sent care packages and postcards. We craved normalcy, so we tried to replicate pizza from our favorite local spot. We strained tomatoes for the sauce. We used items we had preserved ourselves for the toppings. We made the dough from scratch. Pasta was our next project. We rolled out the pasta dough with empty wine bottles and sliced each noodle by hand. We made the sauces by mixing the pickled lemon rinds with butter and garlic and tomatoes with mushrooms.

We weren’t the only ones in New York City and beyond who turned into Oregon-Trail cosplayers as a way to ward off anxiety during the pandemic. A friend who flew to Arizona to wait out the quarantine in the sun altered clothes to pass the time. She cut apart a dress she’d worn in high school and sewed it back together, to keep her hands occupied. When she finished that, she built a camera out of a coffee can. Friends in Harlem began growing tomatoes in the window of their 24th-floor apartment. Anna, a friend in Queens, started making candles in jars and cans she had around the house. Meanwhile, baking became a phenomenon. Social media feeds filled up with city dwellers’ attempts at focaccia, ciabatta, and bagels. It became such a popular pastime that yeast and flour producers couldn’t keep up with the demand.

In my experience, anxiety doesn’t go away; you just learn to corral it into submission. When I was elementary-school-aged, I went through a stage in which I was convinced that something terrible would happen if I didn’t close all of the doors before I left the house. For a few months, I traced the left side of the wall with my fingers when I walked through the hallway to keep some vague, ominous threat at bay. I compulsively went to the basement and checked under the water heater to make sure there was nothing under it that could catch fire.

And I washed my hands until they cracked and bled. The irony that a decade and a half later, I would find myself in a situation in which something terrible was very likely to happen if I didn’t constantly wash my hands wasn’t lost on me. It’s kind of funny, if you think about it: What was 24 years of living with anxiety preparing me for if not a worldwide pandemic? Therapists call the act of playing out every possible bad outcome “catastrophizing,” but it’s easy for people with anxiety to think of it as “preparing for the worst-case scenario.” And now, one of these worst-case scenarios is here. Welcome to the end of the world. The perpetually troubled have been waiting for you. Would you like some focaccia?

The key to keeping anxiety from consuming you is learning coping mechanisms. Mine became invaluable in self-isolation: Finding tasks to keep my mind and hands occupied and building rituals into my daily routine to fake an element of predictability, and taking the pandemic day by day — breaking it into manageable pieces when it feels like a vast and uncertain stretch of time.

Meeting your own basic needs, for clothing, light, food, and comfort, and the needs of those around you staves off the fear of problems that are out of your control, which you try not to think about at all: Will the places you loved that made New York home still be there when quarantine is over? Will your friends who fled New York in the early days of the pandemic come back? Will jobs be there for them to come back to? What will this city, which has rebuilt itself over and over again, look like when the curtains of quarantine lift? You don’t know, but you know how long it takes cabbage to ferment, so you begin the process again. When you can control nothing else, you can gather your acorns.

Brooke A. Rogers is an editorial page assistant for the New York Post and a frequent commentator on Fox News.