Courtesy of New England Historical Society An illustration on the New England Historical Society website depicts early peoples "lamenting death by disease" during an early epidemic.

No matter where we go, what we do or which way we turn, there’s no escaping the fact our daily lives have taken a turn toward a place no living man or woman has gone before.

We head there not because we’re curious and adventurous like Captain Kirk and his crew were (and still are, thanks to movies and reruns), but because we must collectively take the bold steps necessary to help thwart this unseen enemy, while the experts work around the proverbial clock toward an antidote capable of neutralizing its power and vanquishing it for good.

Like most all of us, I’ve watched with a furrowed brow for a month now as authorities put in place more and more restrictions, while turning out sometimes mandatory, sometimes suggested, orders with which we civilians should arm ourselves as we fight the battle together.

But even with all the sights and sounds warning of COVID-19, it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that the scope of this thing really hit me.

I mean, anyone even mildly familiar with traversing downtown Nashua by car on a Thursday or Friday evening would probably consider having me committed if I was to tell them I went and picked up a to-go order from a longstanding eatery at the southern end of Shaw’s Plaza, gazed at an empty, darkened lounge with nary a soul in sight, then upon leaving the parking lot stopped, looked both ways — only to see a totally deserted Main Street.

Not a single car, truck, bike — nothing. No vehicles in sight. That just doesn’t happen on Main Street in Nashua.

I remember being so taken aback I sat there, left blinker flashing, for a good 10 or 15 seconds. Only when one car took a right out of Lake Street and went past me did I feel it was safe to proceed.

I think I had a Pavlovian moment.

All the way home, except for a slight backup (two cars) at a red light on the East Dunstable Road overpass, my car and I were alone. Talk about social distancing.

Surely Nashua, and New Hampshire, the nation and the world have been hit by epidemics and pandemics before.

(Because I sometimes use “epidemic” and “pandemic” interchangably, a note regarding their definitions according to the CDC: An epidemic is “a rise in the number of cases of a disease beyond what is normally expected in a geographical area.” A pandemic describes “a disease that has spread across many countries, and affects a large number of people.”

In 1918, a flu pandemic — Spanish Influenza, they called it — infected an estimated 500 million people, about one-third of the world’s population.

Globally, 50 million people died from the virus. About 675,000 of those were in the United States.

One thing about epidemics and pandemics — there are many things that could be said, none of them printable here — is that they invariably arrive with terrifying swiftness, according to the New England Historical Society’s newest online newsletter.

Three centuries before the 1918 flu pandemic, European fishermen are said to have brought plague and smallpox to the region’s native population.

As a matter of fact, according to the newsletter, it was New England’s indigenous peoples who bore the brunt of the suffering and widespread deaths that came this way from overseas.

“Then, as now, children and the elderly were usually the ones who died during epidemics of smallpox, the flu, measles, cholera and diphtheria,” the newsletter states.

And the point is made that even with the obvious advances in medicine, science and public health since the first recorded epidemics more than 500 years ago, they still scare the heck out of us for their ability to create the very situation we find ourselves in today.

The European fishermen, meanwhile, first sailed into this region around 1504, landing up and down the Grand Banks along what is now Maine and stretching north into Canada, according to the society’s newsletter.

Barely a generation later, more than 300 European ships were making round trips each summer to what is now Newfoundland.

“All came to fish,” the newsletter states.

The European visitors, presumably unwittingly, brought with them diseases such as smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague — to which the American Indians had no immunity.

A typhus epidemic in 1586, according to the newsletter, “devastated Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians,” who were among the first to make contact with the Europeans.

Then come 1616 — just four years before the Pilgrims, as legend has it, landed at Plymouth Rock – “a terrible plaque” swept coastal Massachusetts, devastating several American Indian tribes and “clearing out nearly all the Wampanoag … from Plymouth to Boston.”

To read more about the region’s history of epidemics and pandemics, and related topics, go to www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay home if possible, practice social distancing, use common sense, remember we’re in this together – and know we’ll get through it together.

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