Fountains are dry; park flower beds lie fallow; life guards block entry to what remains of the sandy terrain; the city chooses fences rather than repairing concrete walkways eroded by Noah’s rising waters; unmasked bicyclists opt for the pedestrian walkway rather than the parallel bike path designed to protect those walking hand and hand. Signs are everywhere—Maintain Social Distance, Mask Up, Keep Moving. The sun shines as shadows grow longer; the air is warm, with a breezy swoosh that both cools and reminds that August is humid; dusk descends, leisurely. People gather, wanting to mingle in mass. But lingering caution (or in some cases, guilt) exerts a countervailing force, similar to the repulsive one that prevents two magnets from touching when they are forced together.

People must go outside on a day like this. Parents still cooped up in the house each workday offer a supporting hand to kids learning to ride a bike. Teenagers meet in the park, straddling their ten-speeds as they knowingly laugh, oblivious to the few who linger in near proximity. They ride in groups of three and four on the asphalt pathways that weave through the parks lining the lakefront—in the words of Chuck Berry, “with no particular place to go.” Mostly boys. Keep a hand on the toddlers. In no time, they are running in circles around a fountain or climbing up the base of a statue that has yet to be torn down by an angry mob. Imagine living in close quarters with those little spreaders 24/7.

Something is in the air. If I were an Okie in John Steinbeck’s drought-ravaged plains, I would see the tornado headed my way. I would hear its cyclonic roar. I could take shelter in a storm cellar, protected from the debris by the double doors mounted at an angle to the flat, dusty terrain. But what is in the air on this beautiful August day cannot be seen with the naked eye. I can see only the tracers that follow in the wake of its pinballing movements, like radioactive particles in Argonne National Labs' underground particle accelerators — hidden under circular mounds visible from observation windows in a tall NASA-like center: mounds reminiscent of the imagined circles left by UFOs that touched down in the cornfields in nearby Iowa and Nebraska.

Something is in the air. Many believe that what they cannot see won’t hurt them. The mounting data belie this naive sense that it happens only to someone else. As if there is no need to worry when you don’t know anyone who has died (yet). One 37-year-old denier claims that seven family members — some elderly — contracted IT but none died, so why should he limit his social life by taking precautions against a nonlethal ailment?

Speaking of deaths, the total in the U.S. hit 160,111 today. Officially, 4.91 million Americans have been infected, but multiple peer-reviewed studies indicate that the number likely exceeds 50 million Americans. Many of those statistical data points suffer no lasting scars; for them the illness is just a brief inconvenience. But a significant number of the five million have what appears to be long-term lung, heart, and kidney damage, according, once again, to peer-reviewed studies. There have also been reports of impaired memory, and some researchers have even postulated that the life spans of survivors may be shortened by up to ten years.

Victimhood also exhibits itself indirectly. Thirty-one million are out of work; evictions can now begin as a result of congressional impasse; food lines extend for miles down highways leading to distribution centers—food insecurity in America is at an all-time high; neighborhood restaurants, bars, theaters, and boutiques close because newly-imposed government business models make continued operation unfeasible, even with favorable financing from the Federal government; and professional sports statistics once again appear in print and on Sportsbook boards in Las Vegas, but despite extreme precautions, games must be canceled, leaving holes in some people’s evening viewing schedules and forcing others to the Blackjack tables.

Everyone wants schools to open, but IT has already run through the hallways of several that opened early. One solution was to expel the student who took the photographs of maskless high school students crowded in narrow hallways between periods. More inferential evidence that something is in the air. But IT can’t be there because you can’t capture IT in a photograph.

Or can you?

[Click on an Image to Enlarge It]

A NOTE ABOUT THE PROCESS:

The photographs in this post were not made by randomly moving Photoshop sliders. I used a digital camera that was converted to infrared through a full-spectrum conversion. The photographs were made using one of three filters—550 NM, 720 NM, and 850 NM attached to the camera using a Lee filter holder. Different effects are achieved with each filter. On the day of my journey, I made a custom white balance for each filter in camera. Before importing the photographs into Lightroom, I converted the RAW files to .dng files, which expands the white balance scale to better accommodate the in-camera custom white balance measurements. If the photograph was created using the 850 NM filter, it was converted to monochrome. In the case of photographs created with the other two filters, I used Photoshop to swap the blue and red channels in order to achieve the false colors that would have resulted had I been using infrared film. I did not swap the channels for the photographs entitled “Is IT Red?,” Cafe Brauer in the Afternoon Life,” and “And There is Still Climate Change to Worry About.”

All the photographs were captured during a four-hour, late afternoon walk.

BONUS IMAGES

Four bonus photographs from several days before—I did not fully understand the process at this point: