People are finally milling about maskless, signalling the end(?) of the pandemic.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail
The discarded black mask lay a few metres from the Calgary airport’s 7-Eleven, looking – to me, anyway – like a statement. It wasn’t quite midnight in the Mountain Time Zone, but it was Oct. 1 somewhere, when Transport Canada was to drop its mask mandate. Had someone ripped off their KN95 in quiet celebration? Did they then take a swig of their Big Gulp and raise it to the sky, an offering to the gods for getting us to this moment?
In the depths of the pandemic lockdown, back when we were watching Tiger King and washing our groceries, my fantasies about its end looked something like V-E Day: people dancing in the streets, myself among them, perhaps in the arms of a young sailor.
Remember that Extra gum commercial from the spring of 2021? Set in the not-too-distant future, people emerged from their locked-down lives after a radio announcement. “This just in: We are back!” the WGUM DJ says. “We can see people again!” As Celine Dion croons It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, people, some tentatively at first, return to public spaces. Men with overgrown facial hair – one clinging to a package of toilet paper – leave their apartments; a harried working mother shuts her laptop on the Zoom screen and races out of the house; workers – including Zoom mom – fight their way through office-building revolving doors overgrown with plant life to get back to the desks they’d left behind.
People make out in a park – on tree branches, benches, the grass.
This was the euphoria we were envisioning for the end of COVID-19. Vaccines were rolling out, some institutions were cautiously reopening, people were meeting up in backyards and on patios. We imagined a joyful return to the office, the gym, the game, choir practice, our favourite restaurant (if it was still open), a wild party.
We were so innocent.
You know what happened next: vaccine hesitancy, Delta, Omicron. There would be no mass necking on the park benches of Canada. No end-of-pandemic radio announcement. There would be no single moment when we could safely leave our homes and dance with sailors.
The end of the pandemic – and I know it’s not over, but things are coming back to us now – is happening not with a bang in the park, but with a maskless whimper. A series of lower face reveals, hard hugs with people we care about and, to my horror, the return of the handshake. Young people lining up outside a bar on a Friday night. In-person book festival events across the country. The Who, The Weeknd, the symphony, in front of a live audience.
For me, the moment when I knew things had shifted occurred a few days before my YYC moment, on a different leg of my journey. On a flight to Toronto from Vancouver, someone near me coughed. And nobody freaked out. There were no looks of fear or derision. People kept watching their movies, sipping their tomato juice.
The pandemic was ending not with dance parties in our city squares, but with a cough heard ‘round the airplane cabin. Even I, a somewhat anxious COVID-19 person, did not shift uncomfortably in my seat, nor throw the culprit a dirty look.
On Friday evening, in the last hours of the Transport Canada mask mandate, I rolled my bag into Pearson airport, where officials stood guard at the doors into Terminal 1, ordering people to put on a mask if they desired entry.
I landed in Calgary a few hours later, still Friday, to an airport where most people were not bothering. Where I saw that mask on the floor (which, most likely, had tumbled out of someone’s pocket).
On Sunday, the day after the mask mandate lifted, it was a whole other scene. In the 90 minutes or so that I spent at the Calgary airport, I counted exactly 38 people wearing masks in a sea of hundreds. On the flight to Vancouver, there was a smattering of mask-wearers, myself included.
This is what it looks like as the world wakes up: people choosing to no longer mask up – on flights, at the office, at the supermarket (where I still cling to mine). At, much to my trepidation, our kids’ schools.
People attending weddings, Thanksgiving dinners, playoff (!) baseball games.
There are no 84-point headlines, no parades marking the end of all this. No mass public displays of affection to a stirring Canadian power ballad.
I’ll take it.