March 31, 2020 Sheltering-in-Place Day 12 “Oh Hell” It is the mildest of all expletives, a modest, simultaneous explosion of wonderment and previously unchecked emotion, consciously targeting no-one but meant for everyone. It is spoken softly, a tense, troubling, stage-whisper that does not quite reach life’s pricey, front-row seats. It is also a card game. A family favorite that you can play online. This then is a story of several “Oh Hell” moments. The coronavirus exploded when we were in California. We could no longer fly, we would have to drive. “Oh Hell” Commentators and pundits are fond of the term “new reality” to describe life in the coronavirus era. I prefer shifting reality because nothing has been defined; we are standing between quicksand and a minefield, terra-firma within reach but the path to safety uncharted. The time horizon for this disruption was initially defined for me on the trek east. I viewed a better future in terms of days as in “the drive f
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3.29.20 Sheltering in Place Day 10 Life has slowed down. Way down. To a crawl. A creep. A slither! We come from a hyperactive, mile-a-minute, eight-lane, unlimited-access, high-tech world and are now living in Monty Python’s farcical Middle Ages where a handcart vendor roams the streets slapping a stick against an iron triangle shouting: “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” My favorite line in that film comes when the grim reaper, his death cart full, says without a trace of irony: “See you Thursday!” Ok it is not the middle ages. But we live in a different time than we did three-weeks-ago. The world that we now can touch and feel is suddenly very insular, very small. There is no where to go, no one to see. Certainly there is no where to go in a hurry. We live, by choice, in the boonies. So my three-mile, daily walks are along streets with no people, few cars, roaming chickens, cows and sheep safely behind electric fences and the occasional scary dog. Yesterday
3.27.20 Sheltering in Place Day Eight Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Brown says I should be willing to die to help jump start the American economy. For the record, I am not willing to die to save the American economy. I am not willing to die at all. Americans 65 and older should be willing to give their lives so General Motors can resume making quarterly dividend payments, the light-in-the-head Texan politician argued. I am 71, he is 69-years-old. He likes GM more than I do. If Dan Brown follows his own advice and we abandon self quarantine and social distancing and return to work before medical experts tell us it is safe he will be killing Americans. There will be no economy to save. His advice is criminal. There is no need for his dangerous foolishness. All any of us have to do have to do is follow the simple CDC guidelines and wait while our brave and brilliant health care professionals wrestle Covid-19 into a manageable box. Some of us will die but far fewer than if the country lis
3.25.2020 Sheltering in Place Day Six Our bathrooms are very clean! This in itself is not unusual; the fact that I cleaned them is worthy of a screaming, two-deck, page-one headline like this: ”Seventy One Year Old Discovers Lysol Porcelain Shines As Pandemic Spreads” This is a bit silly but self-quarantine begats silliness. And it quietly encourages us to do things at home that do not come naturally. Like cleaning toilets. For the record, I am a modern man, not a Neanderthal. I do my share of home and farm chores everyday: laundry, dishes, some cooking, vacuuming, bed making. OK, perhaps not bed making. I am bad at that one; breaking the “last one up makes the bed rule” quite regularly. We have settled into a shelter-in-place routine that is not so different from life before quarantine. We do farm chores, read, cook, text, write and email with our boys and their families. We rail at the president during his daily briefing and watch in horror as the numbers grow exponent
3.23.20 Sheltering in Place Day Four My grandfather John Molloy, a 29-year-old Irish immigrant living in Boston with his wife and two children, was killed by the flu in 1914. I write “killed by the flu” and not “died from the flu” because it is more precise, more accurate. The flu is a killer. It is an aggressive, mean-spirited pathogen that will take your life if you do not take it seriously. After our week-long, cross-country sojourn, we are in self-imposed quarantine on our farm ever-mindful that the virus could have hitched a ride with us anywhere along the way. If we dodged the bug on our trip then we are in a good place. There are only 68 people per square mile here. Sixty eight is the state average, we live in a very rural area, away from our state’s few population centers. It is easy to self quarantine here. Our second son is a chef who lives in Brooklyn where the are 37,137 people per square mile. He and his girlfriend are also sheltering in place. It is not so e
3.21.20 Sheltering in Place - Day Two Deadly viruses and tennis! Polio was the coronavirus of the 1940s and 50s, at least it was for our family, church community and neighborhood. USA Today has a good story about this today. It hit home for me; I have been thinking about polio and the personal parallels to the coronavirus quite a bit in the last few days. One day around 1950 or so my older sister Kathi woke up and could not walk. She was quickly diagnosed with polio. A classmate at my parochial school in Rhode Island had several family members with the disease. And everyone in the neighborhood knew someone on a respirator or in an iron lung. I recall polio hit Rhode Island hard; everyone was on edge for a couple of years. For kids, it was terrifying. Most likely adults too but I was a kid with a sick sister. I saw the illness through a child’s eyes and those are my memories. My mother, an RN, came to my classroom one day and gave everyone a sugar cube to chew, the latest del
Day Eight Washington, Vermont Sleep was elusive for both of us last night. We were wide awake by three am, achy, chilled and worried that the virus had stowed away in the messy back seat of the Nissan. It was still parked in our muddy “dooryard” as we say here in Vermont. We have no real symptoms. No fever, no dry cough or sore chest. I can still hold my breath, even while squeezing my nose, for a full 25 seconds. No cheating! I think we are just exhausted. We caravanned another 100, mind-numbing miles this morning, returning the rental to the ghost town they call Burlington Airport, BTV in airline parlance. There were airplanes but no people. No cops telling me to move my truck away from the curve. No TSA guys hanging by the young girl at coffee cart. No baggage handlers. Moving full circle, there were no baggage handlers because there was no baggage. And there was no baggage because there were no people. The was a solitary, helpful clerk at the Hertz counter. You have to
Day Seven Vermont We are home! We did not go to Boston. We went directly to our home, a farm in Central Vermont. We flew to California two weeks ago from Logan airport. Our car is at our number four son and daughter-in-law’s home just a few miles south of the airport. This morning our third son, our host last night in Harrisburg, convinced us to go directly home ”You don’t need your car,” he argued, “Boston is not safe.There is a lot of virus there.” He and his girlfriend work on health care and related issues for state government; they have a good perspective. We listen to them. And he is right. We have a truck here. We do not need our car. And we are not going anywhere. We took our son’s advice and drove north from Harrisburg, through New York state to Vermont. We dodged both New York City and Boston by taking this route. This means our journey is not quite over however. Tomorrow we will drive the additional 50 miles to Burlington to return the Hertz rental. Hopefu
Day Six Harrisburg, Pennsylvania What do think when you see a bunch of shifty-eyed guys hanging outside a convenience store, truck stop or apartment building? Smokers taking one last, deep cancerous drag before entering a smoke-free facility? Pasty addicts jonesing for a fix, their dealer no where to be found on the urban landscape? Bored, street toughs with nowhere to go, nothing to do? Nope! There is a new class of sidewalk lurker. If you get in close you'll probably hear a conversation that goes something like this. "It's your turn." "No way, you do it, I did it last time." "I don't have any gloves." "Too bad, open the damn door!" "Wash your hands when we all get inside." The issue, of course, is who gets to touch the door and risk getting the coronavirus. This is life on the road in an age defined by a terrifying bug. Jack Kerouac must be turning in his grave. Trav
Day Five Winston Salem, North Carolina Remember Pleasantville, the 1998 film where everyone initially saw the world only in black and white? Color invades 1950s Pleasantville half way through the film as the town and the lives of its citizens become more complicated. The film moves from a simple, drab, sepia landscape to a Kodachrome world full of fear-fueled hope and opportunity. Pleasantville offers viewers two realities. We witnessed those two realities today. Our 715-mile-journey through five southeastern states was on one level a drive though and around Monet’s palette. But our trek was also a gallop through a lifeless land devoid of color, personality and possibility. Life springs eternal at this time of year. The cherries and dogwoods are in full bloom; the landscape an explosion of pink, white and violet. The fields are a verdant, lush green, covered with pale yellow ground flowers, likely mustard or some other plant I could not identify. In places the moist, bro
Day Four Clinton, Mississippi Shelter-in-place is a terrifying concept when the place you would most like to shelter is 1,507 miles away. We are five miles from Jackson, Mississippi, the capital. State capitols, the buildings not the cites, fascinate me so in normal times we’d drive over there tomorrow and and take a self-guided tour. Not this time. These are not normal times. We will continue to dash east towards North Carolina tomorrow to visit with close family members. But as we approached Dallas today from the West Texas oil fields, the Nissan began to pull to the left, in this case north. It seemed the car was quietly telling us: “Go north to Memphis, Nashville and straight onto Boston.” Our greatest fear is not that we will get the virus. We can and are protecting ourselves from that, washing hands, wearing gloves, washing gloved hands etc. Our greatest fear is that we will not get home because domestic travel will be curtailed. We fear being forced to shelter in pl
Day Three Abilene, Texas Keep it light! This is the consensus of the legions of readers I have attracted these last three days. The message is clear. “Dark is bad. The networks are scary. You need to entertain us.” I’ll try. First there is a road sign north of El Paso that reads: “Prison. Do not pick up hitchhikers.” Really! We were hoping to ask a few felons to join us on our journey. Yesterday it was “Fresh Jerky.” Today it was “Green Chile Jerky.” We are in Jerky Country. Yum! The day began in Las Cruces with an hour of outdoor tennis on the abandoned campus of New Mexico State University. We met an adjunct professor there and in a socially-distance-appropriate conversation learned that he missed sports most. The Aggies men’s basketball team was undefeated (16-0) in its conference and was surely headed to March Madness. He drove to Vegas for the conference tournament only to find when he got there the season was over. “Sports are big here,” h
Day Two Las Cruces, New Mexico Bill Marriott spoke to me from the grave this morning. “Why are you sleeping in a no-tell, motel in the middle of a global pandemic,” Bill asked? “Our brands are not unique. Unique is overrated. And unique is not safe. All our hotels offer travelers the same boring consistency we know they really crave. And our rooms are virus free.” Ok Bill did not really speak to me. But the first thing I saw this morning was an email from Arne Sorenson, the Marriott CEO and president. He was channeling Bill and promoting boring consistency and while he did not promise virus free he argued the rooms were squeaky clean. Right about now boring consistency sounds pretty good. Rachel Maddow scared the bejesus out of us last night. All that talk about shabby planning, exponential growth and no hospital beds is unnerving. Social distancing and boring consistency may just help us survive this trip and this pandemic. With this in mind we did not ava
Day One Tucson, Arizona We are finally headed east. First we went west! Our trip actually began yesterday when we drove our original rental 70 miles west from Riverside to Los Angeles. As we did not expect to drive home, I rented a Nissan from “Cheapo Car Rental.” It was a fine car but we could not take it out of state. So we lumped the rig back to LAX where we hoped to get a long distance rental from a more reputable company. Hoped! No such luck. A midsize from LAX to Boston was about $1,000 without insurance. The same car, from the same company at Palm Springs Airport was $476. So we jumped in a Lyft car back to Riverside and today kind nephew Andy drove us to Palm Springs where we picked up another Nissan. The airport was pretty empty. The smiling Hertz agent was unoccupied and happy to help. She explained the cost differential. Everyone is leaving Palm Springs, she said, no one is flying in. Their business is off by half, down to 175 customers a day. The are swamped wi
Too Old To Fly We are two seniors from New England vacationing in Southern California as the coronavirus spreads panic across the country. Earlier this week the CDC told the President that all seniors should not fly. He softened that advisory and warned that only seniors with weak respiratory systems should be grounded. We have decided to listen to the CDC. So tomorrow we plan to self quarantine ourselves in a Hertz rental and begin the long trek east. We plan to take the southern route all the way to family in North Carolina and then head north to Boston. We have stocked up on food, water, wipes and nitrile gloves. We made our own hand sanitizer from witch hazel, aloe Vera gel, vitamin E and essential oils. We have a farm back home so we have masks with us that we use in the barn. We will isolate ourselves in our sturdy rental as we cruise across the virus-plagued landscape. We will protect ourselves from others but not our country. We plan to stop and hike in the