King of the Road, COVID-19 Edition

“Or, Travel Under Constant Anxiety Edition”

Hey, I’m finally back from my month-long break, or whatever length of time I was away for! Three weeks? Four weeks? I don’t know; time is, and always has been, irrelevant, and especially more so now with the USA going in and out of quarantine like a cat trying to decide to go through a door or not, unable to commit to one or the other. But summer, unlike the virus, is coming to an end, and I finally have to actually get back to classes and responsibilities like a normal human being. What a drag. Hey, might as well at least tell you what I was gone for, though, right? For better or for worse, it was: vacation. Hm.

As a semi-scientists myself, I should be the first person to follow the rules suggested by health professionals. And, to my credit, I did. Mostly. I just happened to be on the road the entire time. And it looked something like this; my brother Nick and I drove out to the east coast to see our grandfather and his girlfriend, Jane, to help briefly with some housework, and say goodbye to his town in New Hampshire before he moves out to Illinois in a couple weeks. That area out in New Hampshire’s a place that my brother and I have been going there to see our grandfather and his girlfriend since we were little, so we wanted a chance to see it again while they still lives out there. Life being as it is right now, it was… a little stressful, I guess.

My brother and I wore cloth masks the entire time we had to be around other people, including our grandfather and Jane. We also stayed out of restaurants, avoided being inside any building for too long, and keeping our distance from every other person. We washed our hands all the time, stayed in campgrounds in our own tent instead of a hotel, and got tested before and after the trip, both of which came up negative. We actually got tested during the trip, too, and that was an odd story; almost as if whatever gods of bureaucracy had cursed me for breaking the rules, I developed some sort of infection on the road, about halfway in. Headache, joint pain, runny nose, sore throat, the works. And it made me nervous as all hell; fuck, what if I got Coronavirus? Did I spread it to my grandparents? Could I be carrying it around to others? How long had I had it for? Did I need to go home? Could I still go to work?

All this anxiety ended up being for naught, as I never had a fever, was never in any serious pain, and ended up testing negative at one of Maine’s incredible testing centers, anyway. Not to mention that northern New England is one of the safest places to be right now, virus-wise, and that I had tested negative before going on the trip anyway. And that negative test beforehand was even more important, really, as just the prior week I had gone to one of the strangest places in America; the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. If practicing the standard social-distancing procedures there had protected me from the virus, then I figured (later, of course) that I’d be fine anywhere. And maybe I was. Or maybe I just got really lucky; you can’t be too careful with this stuff. Maybe this was Lady Luck’s way of saying I wasn’t being careful enough, so I got stuck with half a vacation of constant worry and existential dread. Or maybe I should take responsibility for my actions and quit blaming chance.

But whether it was the designs of fate or my underlying anxiety and stress, I got sick with something other than coronavirus on my socially-distant vacation. And that was ultimately ok; my brother and I still got to see and do all the things that we had been planning on. We had dinner with my grandfather and his girlfriend, we talked to his bird, we hung out on the lake, we hiked a couple hills, I bought an inordinate amount of knick-knacks, we saw a buttload of lighthouses, and we drove for about fifty hours. Did you know it takes about eighteen hours to get from Chicago to New Hampshire, depending on what route you take? I knew that going in and I was still bamboozled by the sheer fuckton of driving that is part of a road trip. Good thing my brother likes driving, because I don’t. I suppose “road” is in the title; there was a lot of that.

Anyway, the first day was entirely driving. We packed food and stopped at drive-thrus so we didn’t have to go inside anywhere. Then we got to our campsite where we didn’t see a single staff member the entire time and basically squatted on private property, despite paying for a site. Then we hiked up a very-misleading trail that was significantly more strenuous than either my brother or I had been expecting, and drove through the Bronx. As you might imagine, we did not stop in the Bronx. That would have been a mistake on several different levels.

After that we visited the University of Rhode Island, and went to Mattapoisett, MA, where some of Nick’s friends live. Oh, and I forgot to mention; the day before, we drove through Beech Creek, PA, the town where Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir-turned-Broadway musical Fun Home is set. But, anyway, the next couple days after that were spent driving up and down Cape Cod, which is a really pretty and really expensive area. But the national seashore is really nice; we saw at least one jellyfish, a bunch of shorebirds, a found-object art installation, and eight lighthouses. Poking around the area was quite fun, even though we couldn’t go inside any lighthouse or any museum or almost literally anything, but the birds were very nice.

After that we finally got to New Hampshire, where my grandpa and Jane live. It’s a beautiful area, with expansive swaths of trees, old stone fences like Robert Frost writes about, and bizarre accents. Yes, people in New England really do have accents. Though I shouldn’t talk, as people always tell me I have a slight Chicago accent, despite the fact that I live in the suburbs. I probably sound just as goofy to them as they do to me. But no matter; we got food from all our favorite local joints, like the Yankee Smokehouse, and shopped at our favorite little stores, like the Moultonborough general store, and hiked our favorite little hill, Red Hill, though calling it a hill is a bit misleading as it is, by Midwestern standards, a small mountain. But we’ve climbed it five or six times now, so it doesn’t seem that intimidating anymore.

And we visited Portland, Maine, a place I’d never been to before, and a couple other towns around the area. We saw more lighthouses, threw trash in a dumpster, slept in a cabin in the woods, bought pickled watermelon rinds from a very nice, very bald man, went on a historical tour of of Ossippee, NH, almost burned my grandfather’s house down by making a matchstick bonfire, and eventually drove home. We even stopped and stayed at an organic farm on the way home, which was pretty neat. And then we drove for a million more hours, and were back in Illinois.

All in all it was a pretty great trip; having the chance to tour a new part of the country with my brother and then having the chance to tour a part of the country we’re pretty familiar with was very exciting. What was not exciting was, of course, the distant, looming specter of death and silent knowledge that the entire world (or at least this country) seems to be falling apart around us. That took a pretty big toll on me, I think, along with the standard toll of spending hours on end cooped up in an uncomfortable car with music you only sometimes like. No matter how much I love my brother, I’m never going to like his playlists the same way he does. Sorry.

I’m still glad that I went on the trip, both to spend time with my brother and to have another chance to see places and people that I love. Honestly, now that my grandfather and Jane are moving to Illinois, it’ll be much, much easier for me to see him than it ever has been, so this trip was less “let’s go see Grandpa” and more “let’s go see Grandpa in the only place we’ve ever known him to be for the last time.” Which is bittersweet in its own ways, but hey, those places are still going to be there down the road, so to speak. There’s something special to waking up in a cabin on the edge of lake to the sound of loons calling back and forth across the water, knowing that the day will be full of tranquil spaces, forest vistas, and barbecued meats. And luckily, despite the circumstances of the world right now, I got to experience that one more time. That much, for sure, is lucky.

Oh, yeah, and before all this, I went to the Lake of the Ozarks with my girlfriend and her family. That was a really great trip, too, and I’m really thankful that they liked me enough to take me along. Boating around on a massive reservoir is always a good time, and walking up and down the cute little shops to get ice cream is a classic summer treat. Of course, doing all that with masks at hand is a bit odd, but hey, we do what we must. And I have some very specific feelings about the Lake of the Ozarks as a whole that isn’t really relevant to anything except maybe my three or so other articles about random cities. What a strange place that area is; entirely manmade, billions of gallons of water held in place by a massive concrete wall, coated from one end to the other in houses worth millions of dollars, and home to Sergio’s Burrito Bar and Helicopter Tours. An enticing place, with beautiful nature if you know where to look, but very strange indeed. Maybe there’ll be more about it later. But for now, thank you, Cheyenne’s parents, for taking me along!

So maybe there are safe ways to travel under COVID-19. Would I recommend it? Eh… I’d rather my next road trip definitely not require face masks, state-wide visitor forms, and perpetual self-doubt. But strange times call for strange measures, and these are some of the strangest of both. At the very least, if you’re going to go anywhere, avoid large crowds, like those coronavirus parties I keep hearing about. If you go to a covid party or a packed college bar right now, I don’t think you deserve to get sick, but you’re definitely destroying the line between responsible citizen and human test tube. Trust me, the best case scenario from those parties is advancing science by helping us determine if people can catch covid a second time and how likely young people are to die from it. Those are not the best case scenarios you want.

Obviously I’m not the person to tell you not to go somewhere. But for fuck’s sake, wear a mask if you do.