I’m in room 1402 on a Saturday morning, happy that the traffic in the Lincoln tunnel was light coming in. I’ve bought my coffee, and surprisingly, I have some minutes to spare. I hang my blazer on the back of my chair and start wiping down the whiteboard, which has remnants of a previous classes’ discussion on it[1]. There are no students in the room yet, but soon they’ll file in, dump their backpacks, and go visit the restroom. In New York, restrooms are a rare respite, your only chance for privacy, and to sit unharassed, out of anyone’s way, not required to buy something. My students trek from New Jersey, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, Brooklyn, Connecticut, on long subway, train, car and bus rides. One even comes from Pittsburgh.
Outside the 14th floor window, the Garment District blares, beeps, honks, and roars as always. It’s a good day to be on time. Alex, the president of the non-accredited educational institution that employs me, is in the office. He’s a pretty easy-going guy, and not unhappy with my performance, but it never hurts to look good in front of the boss, right? In fact, here he is now, coming into room 1402, a tall, trim man in his fifties, white-haired, baggy eyed, but handsome and wearing a friendly smile.
“Hey, Ben, I’m just going to wipe down the tables with sanitizer.”
“Good idea. That’s great.”
All we know at this moment is that “it” has reached the U.S., this thing that we don’t yet fully understand, that prior to now we’ve only seen depicted in sci-fi books. Corona beer memes are fresh, and speculation rages about this place in China called Wuhan. Some rumors are more macabre than others, having to do with Ozzy Osbourne or something.
Conditions aren’t severe yet, though I for one sense that they soon will be. Who knows, sometimes it’s hard to discern what’s fact-based and what’s click-bait, what’s politically motivated, and what’s sheer paranoia or conspiracy theory. But we are in the fourth year of our president’s term, and by now we all understand that perfidy is his default setting, so when he says, “This is just going to go away on its own,” we all take that with a dump-truck-sized grain of salt[2]. The U.S death count, a fun new term in our lexicon, is still zero. And though we feel apprehension, outright fear lays far ashore still.
Five days later, I’m in a Zoom with Alex and other administrator, learning that all classes are moving to Zoom. Like so much else, this will be done indefinitely.
AFTER A MONTH OF TEACHING in Zoom, being in the house, no more trips to the city, my wife and I discuss the fact that, since she her work has move to remote as well (broadcasting a live radio show no longer from a Kingston studio, but from our dining room), we are free to locate ourselves somewhere else if we would like. Yes, the pandemic has brought fright, even terror, but perhaps, we think, it might also offer some unexpected liberty. Everyone’s talking about the housing crunch upstate, as New Yorkers flee north. The effect on home rentals is a huge leap up in rates. In the past, we’ve rented our house at Christmas and when we’ve traveled abroad. Now we talk about renting it again. Where would we go? It’d have to be her parent’s place, in Wales, Wisconsin, a rural town beyond the suburban sprawl of western Milwaukee. If we rent another place, that’ll crush our profit margins. It’s not safe to be on the move in the pandemic, and parks and public sites are closed, so an RV-type trip is out of the question.
It sounds like a wild idea. Stay at the in-laws’, eh? Of course, I love Susan and Gerald, my wife’s 70-something parents. But five nights during the holidays is one thing, and a multi-month stay is quite another. On the other hand, their house is comfortably big, and they have told us in the past that we’re welcome any time. Getting there is not an issue; we’ve made the drive several years at Christmastime, other times flying.
Within a week, we decide. Like the bougie capitalist pigs that we are, we cash in. We open our Airbnb listing and very soon June and July are both fully booked. Then we open it up to Aug. 8 as well. Holy shit, we’re spending the summer at my fucking in-laws!
THERE ARE a few variations on the route you can take, mainly on its Eastern branch, in New York. The time differences are small. But either way you’re in hilly woods the first 7 hours, either NY or PA. Then you dip to Ohio, where the meaning of flatness is truly revealed, and then you pass into Indiana, where the cornfields start. With the exception of Chicago, they never stop, all the way to my in-law’s front door.
I like road trips. I like eating snacks and drinking coffee and talking with my wife and playing music and seeing the open spaces. There’s the freedom to move about, and place names to think about, other lives to imagine, and then it gets boring, and I get this terrible pain in my hip. Then I have to pee, and the 88th driver to come up behind me and press arrives exactly on cue as I try to get around a semi-truck that’s struggling to climb a hill. These are the moments that road trips aren’t so fun. And then there’s always a point when my wife or I get hangry and we lose a cell signal and we’re on some back road being glared at by a scruffy white man in a huge truck with a gun rack and all that, or a restaurant is closed, and bam, we get in fight and have to pull over and I get out and go sit on a picnic table for 5 minutes to cool off, wondering how much further until I can get out of the car.
That night we stay in a Comfort Inn Suites in Toledo, Ohio, and in the blessed sterility of its massive bed, I tell Theresa that I’m touch with Dr. Krasner from the press, and preparing the documents for his review.
We stay in hotels, sensibly splitting the trip up into three days’ driving. We don’t kill ourselves behind the wheel, ending after 7 or 8 hours. We see places like Oneida, Youngstown, and Elkhart, in each of these towns we create a “mission impossible”: finding healthy food. Panera is the benchmark and often our lowest, and most regularly fulfilled, expectation. When your eyes have been trained on roadway all day, it’s relaxing to lay on king size bed, watching alien shows on TV.
The car is loaded to the gunnels. Acoustic guitar, ukulele, a 38-inch diameter gong, clothes for 2 for 2 months, and many gastronomic supplies that my wife’s mother will not have in stock: like three pounds of dried chickpeas, yellow lentils, dates, spirulina, maca powder, and things that my wife would rather use than let the rental guests use up: such as a big container of coconut oil.
Our car looks like that of a no-name folk band reuniting for its smallest-ever tour of kombucha bars and juice shops.
Multiple podcasts on cults, which has been the frequent topic of discussion on the radio show my wife hosts. Also Q-Anon Anonymous, with its breathtaking accounts of the conspiratorial fringe. Ram Dass’ “Here and Now.” And “Conspirituality,” which my wife consumes for reasons of schadenfreude. Also Russel Brand’s “Under the Skin[3].”
What lays ahead, during our time in Wisconsin? How will this go? Will we survive? What will we learn?
[1] When I replace the foam pad on the ledge, it holds inky filaments as tiny as dust particles which were once words but now are smears of waste that will never mean anything again.
[2] Really, for some, the precedent has been so well-established that a sensible habit has formed of banking on the truth being closest to the full and direct opposite of what this man says.
[3] At this moment in time, Russell is more often side-splitting in his rants, and not always overweeningly intellectual.