Something a bit different for this issue. We find ourselves in a very odd situation, so I wrote something of a reflection on being wanderers when wandering becomes impossible. For what it’s worth, I wrote this more than a week ago, and obviously a lot has changed since then! So, read this with something like March 4 eyes instead of March 12 eyes. Thanks for reading, liking, subscribing, and social distancing.
The flight from Boston to London’s Gatwick airport was not substantively different from any other flight. There were no announcements about the coronavirus, no admonishments to wash hands or sneeze into the crook of your elbow. The flight was mostly—though not entirely—full. The plane did not fall out of the sky.
But still, an air of tension laid across the entire endeavor, like the plane was wrapped in a thin layer of shellac that would crack at any reasonable provocation. A cough or sneeze would ring out in the economy cabin (who knows what was taking place in the glorious and, I like to imagine, somehow virus-free land of lie-flat seats and endless booze), and eyes would dart about. Face masks, covering somewhere in the vicinity of ten percent of the passengers, were nervously adjusted and periodically removed, likely rendering them useless. Hand sanitizer materialized out of seat-back pockets and backpacks. Shared armrest space was given a centimeter more of a polite buffer than one has come to expect. Sleep seemed more fitful than usual for an overnight flight, with flickering seatback screens remaining lit throughout the cabin.
This was on February 29, around eight weeks into the coronavirus outbreak, and the world seemed to have a sort of teetering potential energy to it, like some wrathful Olympian had inhaled deeply before blowing the fleet tragically off course. Case numbers in South Korea and Italy were beginning to spike, gaps in testing in the U.S. and elsewhere sparked concern, and various national and international events had canceled or were considering it. Experts quoted in news articles and on television seemed to agree, this would get worse before it got better.
Waiting for that flight to depart, I wondered at what point doing this exact thing—moving about the world, through bottlenecks of human activity like airports or train stations—would simply become an indefensible act. Had we already arrived at that point? [Ed. note from March 12: Yes.] I looked around as we boarded, listened for accents and wondered what percentage of passengers were people simply trying to get home—surely an understandable move, even in the face of a spiraling epidemic.
What, then, to make of my wife and me, traveling by a strange and self-made necessity? How do you self-quarantine at home when you don’t have one?
In late August of last year, we sold our house in New Jersey, near Philadelphia. We sold our car, sold or gave away most of our furniture, donated piles of clothes and boxes of books, and then packed up the shockingly extensive collection of things that remained and moved them into a storage unit located in the generic armpit of several highway interchanges, to be dealt with in some unknown fashion at some unknown later date. We spent a week at my father’s house in Philly, carving out time for pub quizzes, museum visits, and pizza and game nights with every friend we could rustle up. And then we left.
On September 1 we flew west—far west—starting a nomadic existence that continues now more than six months later. We left because we felt a need to try something different, a change from the northeast coast of the U.S. where both of us had lived in one spot or another for all our lives; but also because we felt the country pushing us away, its litany of indefensible scourges piling up until we looked around and asked ourselves why we felt the need to tolerate them. As a freelance journalist, I could, more or less, work from wherever. As an experienced teacher and educator, she could likely find jobs almost anywhere, if we found a place we wanted to settle. We did not have children, or pets, or particularly urgent plans to acquire either one. Though daunting in the planning and preliminary execution, we quickly understood that the idea was, simply put, feasible.
As we approached our departure it started to seem increasingly obvious. Do we stick with the country sliding headlong into absurdist authoritarianism, or grasp that feasibility and try out literally anywhere else? How much longer should we bother with impenetrable medical bills and calls with insurance companies, with a country that won’t raise wages or offer paid leave or even vaguely try to stop burning fossil fuels? How many more of her Philly-area students had to be murdered (the number sits, incomprehensibly, at nine) before it became acceptable to simply opt out?
As we made our tour of friends and family prior to leaving, most people seemed to understand: this place is making so many of us sad or angry or confused. At least trying out some other version of a life, if you find yourself in a privileged enough position to do so, is hard to argue with.
So we swallowed the guilt from our climate-endangering flights, and wandered for a bit. We were in Southeast Asia, then New Zealand, where Parliament passed a zero-carbon bill two days after we arrived and where a tragedy populationally proportional in scope to 9/11 led to actual reforms instead of endless war. We got used to living out of our bags, and began to adjust what it meant to feel at home.
When we left, though, the diffusion pressure felt unidirectional. The disease we fled—always with the caveat that we might return, who knows, maybe we’ll miss people too much, and that storage unit filled with clothes and books and other things we couldn’t bring ourselves to shed does exert a certain gravity, after all—was at home, localized, undoubtedly tinted orange but also far more systemic than just one person. The disease that showed up later, and worsened when we swung back through the U.S. as visitors heading toward a new portion of the peripatetic existence we were carving out, had a point of origin but within weeks began to feel inescapable.
It certainly felt present on the flight to London, if only as a thought on every passenger’s mind. But what could we do save keep moving, at that point? We were on our way to a tiny hamlet in the Somerset countryside, where our home for a month—this month, now, as I sit and write—was a 16th-century farmhouse, where a retired couple and their dog, a golden lab named Bessie, enjoyed an existence that the word “quaint” does not begin to describe. A stream runs next to the one-lane road, alongside a 500-year-old stone wall. Sheep graze on the hill above the house. Drop one pound and ten pence into a box out front of one house, and grab a half dozen eggs collected that very morning. Numbered addresses are non-existent here, with only a name—Pickering, Old Mill, Thatchover—required for mail to arrive without a hitch. One centuries-old house, a neighbor told us, was the setting for a rather infamous royal love affair some decades back.
The owners of our house weren't there, of course—they were traveling in Australia, and through a clever website we had been connected as someone who could house- and pet-sit while they were gone. We get free lodging, they get free pet care and a dog that can stay comfortably at home—a reasonable trade. Our plan, after various unexpected changes to my regular freelance gigs in the previous months as we wandered Asia and New Zealand, was to hop from house-sit to house-sit for some months, enjoying the company of various pets while staying comfortably still in the English and French countrysides. Europe is not a cheap place to sleep, so doing it for free had an undeniable appeal.
And so we arrived to Somerset, slept off our jet lag, and walked Bessie through the mud and past the newborn lambs on the hill. I joked that we had skipped right to the end of 28 Days Later, when the surviving heroes have settled somewhere deep in the countryside, happily sewing together massive signs of greeting for the uninfected world to glimpse from planes flying by. It felt vaguely and accidentally responsible—assuming we hadn’t picked up the virus on our way across the Atlantic, we were relatively isolated, alone in a country house with little to do and only the comically friendly neighbors to see every now and then. We stocked the fridge and freezer with the intent of making the food—and the many bottles of wine—last the full month; we returned the rental car after only a few days. We sat still, shook no one’s hand, did not go to work, avoided any large gatherings. We even washed our hands more often than normal, though that could have been related to Bessie’s predilection for digging in the mud and delightful demands for attention.
But the unease of the situation would not abate. The calls to take personal responsibility to help stop the coronavirus’s spread began to proliferate on Twitter and elsewhere (the house’s stone walls did their best to keep us off the internet, but wifi and our addictions won out). “This isn’t just about you.” “This is a test of both governments’ and individuals’ ability to empathize with people we do not know.” “Cancel your travel plans, maybe save a life.”
How, exactly, does a nomad cancel travel plans? Is “travel plans” even truly the right term? This particular house-sit in the Somerset countryside will end come April. Assuming the owners make it home from Australia and New Zealand, do we simply demand to stay? Make the case that it would be irresponsible to travel to London, to board a train headed under the Channel toward Paris, to arrive at another small town where an excitable Weimaraner awaits our care? What do we tell those owners in France, whose own travel plans have been set for some time and are counting on a reliable couple to feed and walk the dog twice a day?
And then there is the chance that we end up with no choice in the matter. If the virus spirals truly out of control, the patchwork of travel restrictions we have seen so far—heightened State Department alerts about traveling to Italy, Lufthansa’s canceled flights to Israel, the obvious dip in any travel into China—will be rendered hilariously quaint. [Ed. note from March 12: Correct.] Maybe Bessie’s owners won’t even make it back from the Southern Hemisphere for some unknown period of time.
Or perhaps our next hosts, in France or others we have committed to in Oxford and Edinburgh, decide that they should be responsible global citizens and stay home. Though of course we would be disappointed on a personal level, there is obviously no criticizing such a decision—except that we don’t have a home at which to stay. We sit here, literally unsure what the governments, businesses, and various travelers of the world will throw in our direction, and what the responsible course of action will be once it is thrown. We left what felt like a diseased home to wander, and find ourselves in an absurdist, disease-ridden limbo, with no place to sit still and no excuse to keep moving.
Find me: