A Rainy Day in Riverside
Originally published in 2020 and later 2023.
Words and Photos by Michael Zurvalec
By most accounts, March 10th, 2020 is considered the last “normal” day of our lives. Since then we’ve battled seemingly endless waves of a certain virus, violence on Capitol Hill, and watched the world hover dangerously over a big, red metaphorical self-destruct button. In the week before I’d been joking about shipping someone off to China if they wouldn’t shut up and I’d started making plans for a weekend in the mountains with my friends at the end of March. By the end of the week, those plans had been tabled indefinitely and I was settling in for what they said would be an easy two weeks of “flattening the curve.” Instead, ten months into “15 days to flatten the curve” I sat down and wrote about what I was doing on that last, “normal” day. I published it on an old blog I’ve since taken down for various reasons and now, as we approach three years, I’ve sat down again to revise that piece and share it with the world so, here it goes.
On Tuesday March 10th, 2020, I stood in the rain, practicing my street photography in downtown Riverside, California. The main street promenade was empty and the Mission Inn’s bell tower poked ominously into the clouds above the streets and faux-western facades. The galleries at UCR Arts were virtually empty and I was even able to have a one-one-one discussion about an exhibit in the adjacent California Museum of Photography with the museum’s senior curator about the exhibit I’d come to see. Titled “Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West”, it features a sobering series of images taken by professional photographers on the front lines of some of the decade’s worst wildfires in the American southwest with many from our own California backyard. Display cases among the paintings showcased the burnt remnants of a photographer’s life and studio while video footage of California’s infamous Camp Fire played in the background.
I wandered the gallery with my iPhone in hand, making notes on photos and the museum in general for a college essay due that Friday, pausing to look at an 80’s-era Nikon before marveling inside the museum’s enormous camera obscura on the third floor and it’s inverted view of the office building across the promenade. I don’t think I could’ve been any happier that day, alone in an empty museum filled with photographic memorabilia and a refreshingly eclectic mix of work from both rotating exhibits and the museums vast collection with nothing but time.
Writing about that day now, almost three years later that adage about the calm before a storm rings true. When I walked the main street promenade before the museum opened, everything seemed quiet, a little too quiet if you ask me and I already had a surgical mask and Purell appropriated from my dad’s work in my pocket to make my mom feel better when I left the house that morning. To me, and I think a lot of people at the time, the pandemic and the changes it would bring with it still seemed a little too far-fetched to be true, the realm of a bad Hollywood disaster film instead of a world-altering beast waiting to rear its ugly head.
A week later though, as I was waiting for the fate of my semester and for the grade on that essay, I flipped through the memory card from that day in Riverside and selected five images that would make up a small album I now call “The Last Normal Day.”
Like the opening scene of a movie the wet, empty streets and an ominous grey overcast sky paint a picture fit for some opening credits and leave even me, the photographer who took the pictures asking, “is this really it?” I grappled then with my thoughts for months to come up with a name for them and at one point even felt obligated to call it something philosophical, to make a statement with it but instead, I opted to call it what it was and leave it at that. After all, it was the last normal day I can remember.
Notes:
"Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West" went off exhibit at the California Museum of Photography in August of 2021. Select images from that exhibit can be viewed here:
https://virtualucrarts.ucr.edu/facing-fire/
For more information about UCR Arts and the California Museum of Photography, visit:
UCR ARTS
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
Tel: (951) 827-4787
