“The pandemic isn’t going any-
where,” Provincetown restaurant
owner Rob Anderson said when I
called in August to ask how he and
others were managing. “But we’re not
going anywhere either. We’re stronger
than that. We’re still standing.”
Like others in town, Anderson
watched his business crater in the
weeks after the Provincetown break-
through news, and he suggested I
consider the way a tightrope walker
reaches the end of each rope. “What
do you do? You look ahead,” he said.
“And you stay balanced. So that’s
what we do.”
This has stayed with me: the tight-
rope walker. I was thinking about
it—how hard 2021 has made us work
sometimes, just trying to remain
upright—when I called photographer
Stephen Wilkes, who as we spoke
was shooting the foldout panoramicimage that precedes this article. He was 45 feet in the air, photo-
graphing from an elevated lift that his crew had been allowed to
wheel onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C. When making
what Wilkes calls his Day to Night pictures, he works around the
clock, taking multiple photos and later merging them into one
sweeping image. For this particular Day to Night, he focused for
30 hours on the installation spread across 20 acres at the base
of the Washington Monument: white flags, each representing a
COVID-19 death in the United States.
“A sea of flags,” Wilkes said.
Then he corrected himself. Wait, Wilkes said. Not exactly a sea.
“Because of the height I’m at, I can see them almost as individu-
als,” he said. “They remind me of flickering stars.”
The artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg designed the three-
week installation as a giant grid, with open paths to let people
walk among the flags, write names on them to remember the
dead, and plant new flags as the death toll continued to grow.
A large sign at the entrance carried the latest national cumula-
tive numbers, which Firstenberg was updating by hand every
day. “When I came yesterday, it was 666,624,” Wilkes said. “This
afternoon it’s ... ” He hesitated. I imagined him up there on his
platform, holding his camera, squinting at the distant number
to read it off right.
“670,032,” he said.
We did the math in our heads.
In the morning there’d been rain, Wilkes said. “I see an older
gentleman, walking through the flags,” he said. “I see a woman
sitting on the ground. Just planted a flag. She’s African American,
has this light-green shirt on, she’s with—looks like her husband.
They’re holding hands.”
The afternoon light was doing something remarkable to the
monument’s shadowing, Wilkes said: luminous on one side,
dark on another. “Beautiful,” he said. “And it’s starting to clear
up. It’s spectacular, when the sun comes out. Because the white
flags just glow.” jTHE PANDEMIC
ISN’T GOING
ANYWHERE,” SAID
A RESTAURATEUR
WHOSE BUSINESS
HAD CRATERED.
“BUT WE’RE NOT
GOING ANYWHERE
EITHER. WE’RE
STRONGER
THAN THAT.”
Cynthia Gorney is a National Geographic contributing writer.
She wrote about toxic wildfire pollution in the April 2021 issue.YEAR IN PICTURES
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