You’d think that someone who changed the domain name of her professional web site to reflect her focus on travel and who uses the word stravaig in the name of her personal blog and on her Facebook page would have already posted about being so upset about not being able to travel.
I haven’t, and I won’t, because… thousands and thousands of people are dying and people are being permanently disabled because of COVID-19. Talk with some hospital workers, look at the death numbers, read The Atlantic, and I cannot imagine anyone would be thinking about traveling anywhere in 2020 (and probably next year as well). I’m still just as locked down now, in August, as we were when we came back from Mexico at the end of March – I want to live, and I also don’t want to give anyone COVID-19.
I also don’t like focusing on what I cannot do. You can’t help doing that sometimes, but making that a priority just makes me frustrated.
I was thinking of writing a blog about things that a traveler can do now, when they can’t or shouldn’t travel, when they are taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously (unlike others), but I found this blog by Lonely Planet and it covers anything I would want to say in that regard, and some I didn’t think of. I like that the advice does NOT say, “Start planning for all you will do when this is over!” Because I think that creates frustration. We don’t know when travel will be safe. We don’t know when there will be a widely-available vaccine – or if there will ever be one. Pouring my energy into something that may never happen will leave me devastated to discover I don’t get to do it.
Not that I’m not planning. Travelers are always planning, always dreaming. It’s just that I’m not making plans for next year – I’m making plans for eventually. One of my dreams for eventually is to hike the length of most or all of Hadrian’s Wall. But I intend to do that once we move back to Europe, and I don’t mind glancing at some info and photos, but I’m not making actual plans.
I’m much more concerned about how long we’re going to have to go without collective experiences like going to the movies together, sitting and watching live theater or live music together, going to weddings and funerals together, playing games together, having meals together… it’s not just the singular acts of doing these specific things and enjoying them, and missing that enjoyment, it’s what I think happens because of them collectively, to all of us, things that are NOT happening now. I think the results of these activities, collectively, are things that keep communities functional and, without them, we are woefully and horribly dysfunctional.
What makes me angry is how much we could have if people would just fucking wear a mask and if we had immediate, on-demand testing for the virus, with results in hours, not days. That’s it, that’s all we would need to do in order to have all the things we want and NEED back in our lives. If every student would wear a mask – not just teachers – and schools were allowed to have classes outside as much as possible, kids could go back to school safely, without spreading the virus. Maybe I wouldn’t be so terrified of getting on a plane.
But until people decide to care about each other, or there’s a vaccine, this is the world. And I’ll continue to just try to live in it.
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