Month: April 2023

We were two weeks exploring the vast geography of the American southwest. It’s not the first time. I’ve passed through some combination of Utah, Arizona and Nevada three times before – once on a 9000-mile three week family odyssey in 1988, once on a cross country jaunt in a grief-fueled fugue state in 1998, and once on my way out here for good in 2004. This was a COVID-delayed road trip, something we’d wanted to do for a while, a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to a big trip abroad that would preserve our flexibility to maybe meet up with friends later in the year. Of which.

We took the hybrid, not the EV. For good reason. There is a realistic ceiling on how far you can reasonably drive in a day and it’s around 400 miles or so. While the EV is a fine vehicle in its own right, its maximum range is about 270 miles, and that’s not freeway mileage either. Which means you have to be able to start from a full battery every morning, drive about three hours, and then be prepared to stop and power up to full again. I can’t see doing this kind of trip with an EV until charging is extremely fast and very ubiquitous – and in places that can only be very charitably described as purple, don’t hold your breath.

Honestly, I was expecting a lot more foolishness. I only saw maybe half a dozen Trump shrines, almost all along I-40 between San Bernardino and Kingman, in exactly the sort of meth-desert you’d expect to find the hardcore. Then again, Utah doesn’t seem like the kind of place that is all in on TFG anyway (I have my opinions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they do not reflect well on my tolerance or equanimity, and I am working on that, but I will allow that they are not the Trumpy sort). In any event, we managed not to disappear into Ameristan for two weeks, and that’s not nothing.

The big mistake, though, was that I predictably overpacked. You have a little more wiggle room with a car – take the extra pair of shoes! You can have more than one ball cap! – but when I’m emptying the enormous duffle bag and finding things I forgot I packed, I clearly overpacked. I could have and should have cut my loadout in half and I would have been bang on perfect. As it is, I have once again managed to rack up several things that are 90% of what I need in a failed quest to find something 100% (in this case, the blue Uniqlo blazer from NYC eleven years ago that went missing. Would that I’d lost the white one instead.)

I was expecting more trouble from my bad shoulder with all the driving, but I think having a new mattress at home helped. There were also a couple of really nice beds. Then again, there were some very not nice beds, including one at a Best Western near Bryce Canyon that provided me arguably my worst night’s sleep in 40 years. After that, I almost felt entitled to the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas with its cushy bed and whirlpool tub. But all that is neither here nor there: I survived two weeks on the road in better shape and at an older age than my parents handled that three weeks in 1988.

That’s another thing: that trip was two-thirds of my life ago, and I spent most of the trip playing classic alternative on SiriusXM that evoked memories of those long-ago days. And I remembered how I finished reading “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” the day before we reached Little Big Horn, and remembered how I got to be the way I am. That length of drive gives you too much time to reflect, something I’d forgotten in the last twenty years or so, and I don’t think I’ll be behind the wheel for more than three or four hours at most for the foreseeable future if I can help it. (Or wearing socks. It’s summer now.)

As for the trip itself, the two best parts were the train into and out of the Grand Canyon (if you’re not a hiker, the canyon itself is an overnight at the very most, and it could just about work as a day trip from Williams) and the experience of Zion. Springdale Utah is a delightful little tourist town of maybe 500 residents, amply equipped with everything you need to spend a day or two drinking craft beer and riding your e-bike up the canyon and back, and it’s like an alt-version of Yosemite Valley. Of everything we saw, it’s the one place that I immediately decided I would go back to no questions asked. Everything else was very nice – Moab, Bryce, the Grand Canyon itself – but is mostly meant for people with abs more washboard and calves more cantaloupe than I am ever again likely to possess. I am not a particularly outdoorsy person, and my idea of camping these days involves one of the wood cabins at Yosemite – or better yet, the Ahwanee.

To be honest, though, the best part of the trip was just being away for two weeks. Away from all the stuff of the last six months or so, able to call time out on a world where concrete goals seem to be turning into fizzled-out letdowns one after another. Of which, as I say, more later.

Three weeks.

Three weeks seems to be about the maximum time we can handle an interruption to normal service. March Madness. the World Cup. By the third week of the Olympics, people were calling the local affiliates to complain about not being able to see their stories. And in 2001, it took about three weeks after September 11 before white women were complaining about having to go through the bag search at the airport.

This came to mind recently because of two separate bits of British media. One is Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Kitchen Disco”, a radio show based off her Instagram broadcasts with her kids during the early days of lockdown. The other is “Staged,” a mostly-two-handler wit David Tennant and Michael Sheen and their families made with iPhones and Zoom in the first three months of the pandemic. Both capture that feeling of the days when the streets were empty, grocery shopping was a commando run, sports had vanished from TV other than Korean baseball and the World Series of Bags, and normal service had been most decisively interrupted.

One of the reasons we failed after the attacks of September 11 was that we said we were at war without doing anything to reflect that. In fact, we were told not to change our lifestyle in any way. No cutting back on our gas use to take the money hose out of the hands of our Saudi enemy (who we refused to acknowledge were our enemies). No push for national service, let alone a draft. We were supposed to act as though 9/11 changed everything while simultaneously changing nothing. (When in fact, the only thing that was intended to change was to adopt the belief that only Republicans were fit to hold power. How you square that with being the ones on watch when we got bushwhacked I am keen to hear.)

By contrast, the pandemic was very much a war, and required wartime sacrifice. You can’t go where you would like. You can’t get everything you want whenever you want it. Normal service is very much interrupted, and we do not have a date certain for its restoration. Survival and victory are absolutely dependent on whether we can all pull together in a common cause against a foe that cannot be negotiated with, cannot be reasoned with, must be thwarted, and hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance. Covid-19 was the real 9/11, and once again, we absolutely blew it because no one was willing to live in wartime.

Well, the war is over. We lost. The wife and I have both shaken our bouts with the virus (hers worse than mine, although mine was worse than my first asymptomatic exposure last year). And yet, on April 11, California will formally surrender. The US as a whole follows in May. Even the elderly Asian folks at the Sunday morning farmers market aren’t bothering to mask up any more. We have given in and we have given up.

Which…I mean, my wife and I have had five shots apiece, and the SARS-COV-2 experience was no worse than a bad cold. Which was the point, I guess – use the vaccines to beat it back to the point where it was no longer a life and death situation. On that front, we succeeded, and I suspect the death rates for the unvaccinated are not dissimilar to flu deaths if we were to look back at this winter in a couple of months. So maybe we did manage to turn it into just another seasonal virus, but not before we clocked a million or more surplus American dead since 2020.

We lost something vitally important at the turn of the century. We had one political party revert its entire reason for being to preach that “you don’t have to care that there’s other people.” If something big enough and serious enough comes along, it can hit us hard enough to know better, and in our panic and bewilderment we’ll so what we’ve done since the cavemen: try to huddle along with our fellows and help each other grope out of the darkness for a bit.

But the bit only lasts three weeks.