National Distance

My mom had rescheduled her flight several time before the coronavirus took off and, in the end, we decided it would be best if she just canceled her visit to come out and see her granddaughter.

“Don’t worry, ma,” I told her. “We’ll come out and see you, instead.”

But I didn’t really have any plan in place for doing so other than a sudden opening my summer calendar where my trip to Glacier National Park had been canceled. United Airlines had given me a credit for $300 after I’d learned that most of the park wasn’t going to be open. I could’ve used the credit to buy tickets to Michigan. I had the money to make the trip and I had the time but I wasn’t sure I had the moral authority.

Where we live, up in sparsely-populated Humboldt County, we’ve been spared the brunt of the COVID pandemic. For one thing, there’s very little to do here indoors. Our usual recreation involves drifting down foggy morning beaches where the water is ice-cold, but the scenery is majestic or hiking through mountains which have no superlatives and are near no population centers but are, none-the-less inspiring and wild. That is, the whole point of living in a place like this is ‘getting-away’. No one comes here to stand in a crowd. Sure we’re lacking a bunch of amenities that you’d find in places with crowds, but it’s a trade-off and one that showed itself to be advantageous after the pandemic. They even had spots on the local radio stations comparing our county’s numbers with other counties across California ending in the suggestion to stay local for the summer because this place was so comparatively safe.

Unfortunately, I’ve always been lousy at heeding warnings. I’m restless and I guess I still have a little too much of that teenage feeling of invincibility. In May, after the semester ended, I furtively sneaked down to the Bay Area to camp for a night and go see a friend I hadn’t seen since Christmas. I spent a night in the city, but I didn’t feel guilty about it until I came back, wondering if I was carrying anything back up to the pristine redwoods. I felt like patient zero on the drive back. But I kept my distance in the grocery store and washed my hands a lot and the county’s numbers never started going up, so I felt like it’d been ok.

The greater challenge came when my mom started calling, barely managing to hide her urgent need to see her granddaughter. Since she’d canceled her flight, the need to connect seemed to have grown disproportionately. The time that had gone by compounded with the distance between us was beginning to tell on her. And, in truth, I couldn’t help but to feel like the Skype calls were becoming such a thin approximation for interacting with a toddler. I think the biggest blow came when my daughter started trying to offer my mom food and we had to explain to her that it couldn’t be passed through the computer screen. After that, she lost interest in talking with grandma and I think we all saw Skype for the interactive ruse it was.

Almost unwittingly, I started looking at tickets, much the way I look at home prices and available jobs. Such an activity is the internet’s substitute for contemplation. I don’t go for long walks and think about finding a home, I scroll through catalogs and let the possibilities present themselves, only then do I bother to think about whether anything I’ve found would be tenable. It’s as if everything has been reduced to list of items, a menu for life and we only need continually find something to select from this menu.

And select I did. One day I came across a reasonable direct flight. Covid had brought the prices way down and I had my credit to use. But rather than think about whether it was something I should do, I put the onus on my wife—as I usually do when faced with a burden either of thought or deed.

“Hey,” I yelled from the computer. My wife was in the other room trying to change our daughter’s diaper and at the same time attending a dinner cooking in the kitchen. I’d been on Duolingo—which had become some kind of important ‘work’ for me over the summer. “There’s a flight to Detroit for $250. Should I buy it?” I shouted, without even being sure I was being heard. When no one answered, I sighed heavily, as if I’d been put out and got up from my chair.

In the living room, my wife was wrestling with our 18-month-old daughter, trying to get her into a diaper while trying to get a large container of oats away from her that she’d managed to grab from the pantry when no one was looking. Instead of helping, I just repeated my question from the doorway, looking at the chaotic scene as if it were something totally removed from my life, like watching crows on a telephone wire or my neighbor mowing the lawn.

“Hey. There’s a flight to Detroit for only 250 bucks. Should I book it?”

My wife looked back, unbelieving that I’d be asking something so superfluous when whatever is in the kitchen was clearly starting to burn, but rather than chide me, she prepared to think over the logistics of the situation that I’d neglected in my impetuousness when the top suddenly came off the oats and they showered over the living room carpet, the couch, the rug and the children’s books scattered all over the floor.

“Sure.” She said, with a deadpan delivery. “Book it.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant it, but I went to book the flight anyway. $250 was just too good of a deal. I meant to help clean up the oatmeal, but by the time I finished with the booking, it was already done and dinner was on the table.

Gradually, I began to think about the trip. Between bouts of Duolingo, I had time to contemplate what flying would mean. With a toddler, we’d have a member of our traveling party not wearing a mask—there’s no way she would’ve kept one on for a minute let alone 6 hours—which would make my wife’s and my mask useless in avoiding contact since my daughter would be breathing all the sneezes and coughs of the plane’s passengers and when we got off she’d be breathing right into our faces and into the faces of my parents and my grandmother, who we were also planning on seeing. They were all healthy people, but I didn’t want to be the one to test their health. And what about my daughter? While babies were usually spared sever Covid symptoms, I was hearing more reports of the Multi-System Inflammatory Disease which was infecting children who’d been exposed. On top of that, there was the social question of travel. I couldn’t help but to notice that when I saw people obviously on vacation in my small community, I wanted to roll my eyes. Even up here in the rural redwoods where tourism is fairly important and it’s easy to stay away from people, I resented those who’d made the choice to drive here and have a look around when they obviously didn’t have to. I puzzled over how I could feel this way when I was planning on flying across the country to do something that a lot of people would probably consider even more indulgent than camping in the forests of northern California.

But that’s a big part of the way the world is now We’re willing to give ourselves a pass for reckless behavior because we know our reasons. But, for others, we’re inclined to assume the worst. I had to go back to Michigan because my folks were missing my daughter’s toddler-hood. The last time they’d seen her she’d been crawling and babbling and now she was running and sharing her food. If we waited until the end of the pandemic, who knows where she’d be developmentally. But when I saw the people with out-of-state plates, I assumed they were just taking a trip because they’d gotten bored. So with this selfish logic in place, I decided we had to go. My mom was calling almost daily asking what we wanted to eat while we were there and my dad was pulling all the old baby toys he could find out of the basement. They sent me pictures; the yard looked like playground. I told myself I was doing it for them. I told myself other people couldn’t understand—couldn’t judge—my motives and it was easier to live with the decision.

In the week leading up to our departure, I found myself avoiding mention of the trip to anyone I spoke to. I was frequently doing some syntactical juggling to avoid mentioning it. “Gonna take a little time off,” I told everyone at work when getting shifts covered. I even went so far as to tell a few people I was taking a camping trip, which was true in a way since I was doing a little camping before we left, but drawing these two days into nine was a pretty bold lie. Again, it came down to the personal reason I had for traveling, to allow my parents to see their granddaughter. This wasn’t something I felt I could expect anyone else to understand. Of course I realized that everyone would have some justifiable reason for travel like this and I began to wonder how many other people were creating reasons for themselves to get on a plane that they weren’t telling anyone else about?

I got my answer at the airport. Not in Humboldt, because this airport is tiny and under-funded, especially now that United has canceled about half their daily flights here. But at SFO, I guessed the numbers to be about half, or a little over half what they usually were. I could be way off here. Canceled flights could have artificially brought up the number of people in the airport or perhaps it was only in the domestic terminal and international flights were different, but seeing all these people at the airport made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one taking a risk here. Other families chased small, unmasked children through the terminals, young couples shared drinks in the airport bars—many incongruously still open—and harried professional in suits yammered into smart phones slightly louder through their masks while waiting in line for Starbucks. The scene in the airport was pretty much the same as it always was and seeing it, I couldn’t help but to wonder if this was part of the reason that COVID numbers in America were still rising. Perhaps it is not so much that we are selfish, freedom-obsessed dolts, but rather that we’re all able to find legitimate personal reasons for taking the risks when we dig deep enough and that, in the same way, we think we can be careful enough not to spread anything when we return.

Our flight schedule had been changed due to cancellations and we had to catch three, rather than two flights, which made for a slightly longer day, but our connections were smooth and short at each airport. We stopped at O’Hare to find the place looking as busy as ever, unlike SFO, it didn’t look affected at all. It probably would’ve been surreal to contemplate the sea of masked faces surging past us, but by then we’d become accustomed to it.

Despite the enforced social distancing, everyone in the airport seemed to share a kind of solidarity in finding themselves traveling during such a troubled time. My daughter, who’s spent most of her life walking rural roads and lingering near cow pastures, was overjoyed to see so many people and she ran around the airport waving at everyone who passed us. Most of these people eagerly waved back to her. Seeing this one innocent and unmasked face in amid the backdrop of anonymous rushed travel seemed to delight a great number of people and I couldn’t help but to feel proud of having such an enthusiastically happy daughter who found no difficulty in making strangers happy.

Of course, the people she made the happiest were my folks. When we arrived in Detroit, they were both obviously very glad to see her after so much time and remarked on how much she’d changed since they’d seen her last. Although they’d seen her on Skype almost weekly, they had very little idea what to expect in person and, like my ability to search homes and jobs without thinking of actually moving or taking a new job, my parents had been able to see their granddaughter without really being able to learn much about her. This is perhaps the problem with our information age in which ‘content’ has become a byword for ‘filler’. If the objective has been met, say in being able to converse with someone face-to-face, or walk around an old neighborhood using Google Maps’ street view, than we can consider the task fulfilled while, in reality, the heart of these interactions is based on ‘content’ not in the fulfillment of the object. In other words, it’s not enough to see. We must also feel and that’s something which is more more difficult to simulate.

We managed to stay pretty low key while in Michigan. I saw a couple of friends. We stayed outside, but the impulse to embrace after a long absence was too great. Again, I’m sure that most people are making this exception for the people they care about; it’s a very difficult temptation to resist.

Mostly, we hung out in my folks’ backyard. My dad had set a swing up for my daughter and she marveled at the possibility of having something only found in the park only for her personal use. It would’ve been difficult to get her away from it regardless of what was going on, but given the circumstances, we were happy she’d found something to distract her. The swing became the focal point of our visit. At any moment, someone was out there with her and everyone else was watching. There’s something healing in watching absolute contentment. My daughter could’ve stayed out there all day and she nearly did with everyone on shifts pushing her. Watching my mom push my daughter on the swing, such a simple thing, the reason for the risk seemed plain. We had to fulfill this human function. We had to see each other in person.

If the fault was anywhere, it was mine for moving across this vast country and having a daughter was has grandparents who live 3,000 miles from each other. Perhaps this pandemic will allow us to see that we have not yet conquered the spaces that separate us, though we have made a valiant effort with the mail, highways and internet. The space of America, after nearly 100 years, is once again proving to be something insurmountable. Many people of my generation, having lost their jobs in distant cities and worried about their aging parents are moving home again. Perhaps they, too have begun to feel all the space between families weighing upon them at night when they are lying in bed and tracing the steps of their lives.

…

Having already done it, traveling back felt much less risky. After just one trip, it felt routine and we slogged through the series of airports in reverse to arrive back home, no longer with the eager forward momentum of travelers, but with the perfunctory movements of someone making their way home again. I tried to read. My daughter slept on my lap and woke up and squirreled around before we landed back in SFO. At the gate for the last flight, they made an announcement about fog that could possible force the plane back. Even from the skies, the region where we live has an impenetrability about it, behind the coastal range, buried in the shadow of redwood slopes and the surging, tsunami-prone sea. As the last flight dropped down toward our tiny airport and entered a wave of wool-colored fog, I felt the traveler’s peace at returning home and the anxiety about leaving was gone. We had gone to challenge the space that both protects and alienates us: an American tradition and, like all traditions, one not easily subdued.

I’m still waiting for my test results, but already the distance that separates me from everyone else, from the rest of America, has begun to accumulate. At night I feel it weighing upon me and I watch the planes crossing the skies, knowing that everyone up there felt it, too and found a reason for defying it. I can only hope they all wash their hands as much as I did.