On March 21, after loading the car to the gunnels in Florida, we drove to St. George, where we are presently hunkered down. It wasn’t our plan.
For two years, Marsha, who has muscular dystrophy and now requires a walker, has flown down and back while I drove. This year I flew down with her and asked a young man who was courting next door 40 years ago to deliver our car and worldly goods both ways. I realized I had to fly: On my last drive home I made a couple of mistakes and realized that I’d have to be crazy to risk it again.
We’d already self-quarantined ourselves for a week when, on March 20, my young friend had wits enough to call and say that he wasn’t flying down.
So driving was our only option. Here’s why. For years we’ve wintered on a friend’s lot in his neighbor’s fifth wheel trailer. It’s made for young people and because of the increasing difficulty that Marsha had crawling four steps up to bed, months ago we wished we’d stayed home. We knew we could never come back.
Although we’d driven home in April for many years, this was the first time we took the dozen or so rolls of toilet paper Marsha always keeps on hand. According to the news, there was none to be had in stores. On our last trip to town we’d seen the empty cereal shelves in Walmart. My wife always has a 60-day supply of everything and there was a can of corn in the cupboard that had been back and forth to Maine so many times that all I had to do was open a bag by the cupboard door and it jumped in.
Marsha always packed three days of food for our trips, which were more like mobile picnics. There were always sandwiches and the cooler full of shrimp and crunchy veggies.
Except for the three stitches in my right palm and numb, arthritic fingers, this trip was about the same as 38 or so others: We stopped only for gas, restroom areas and two very expensive hotels. If we were to get the virus, we wanted it to come from the likes of Tom Hanks or Prince Charles.
I wore gloves to pump gas but could have used a pair of pliers to insert and remove my credit card. You don’t realize how many things you rub in the course of a day until you try to avoid touching. We soaked in hand sanitizer after every contact, but how can one be sure?
Hundreds of Canadians in campers were fleeing Florida, most probably going home weeks early because of the pandemic. Last week the U.S.-Canada border was closed to all non-essential travel.
On Sunday morning in South Carolina there were many white illuminated highway signs flashing, “Stay Home – Save Lives,” and within miles we saw two church parking lots crowded with cars. And in North Carolina, one more.
Did you see the governor of Oklahoma poking fun at the disease by going to a crowded restaurant with his young family?
Does this lack of concern originate at the top? And is this lack of concern contingent on your source of information? You perhaps read that an anchor on one TV network claimed that all this talk about the virus was a liberal plot to remove our president. Many Americans who disregard science still believe that.
Do you remember seeing our president on TV talking about this country’s “15” cases that “within a couple of days (are) going to be down to close to zero”? And “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”?
Did you even later hear the man we elected to lead our country say that if people lose their jobs, “You’re going to have suicides by the thousands”? Bill Gates said that our country’s priority during the pandemic should not be money but people, because you can always get money but dead is dead. I survived the Depression.
For the record, from March 21 through 23, the northbound traffic by way of 95, 17, 81 to Scranton and home on 84, 691, and 495 was light and moving nicely. We didn’t see the usual truck zoo on either side of Harrisburg, and even east of Danbury, on the antiquated 84, was doable without the usual need for resuscitation. The rest stop-restaurant on the Mass Pike just coming off 84 was practically deserted. McDonald’s was open, but the lobby was empty.
As I remember Almond Hall ringing the church bell at the end of World War II, so will many young people always remember our great land reeling beneath its greatest disaster in 100 years. To compound matters, the coronavirus struck at the same time.
The humble Farmer can be heard Friday nights at 7 on WHPW (97.3 FM) and visited at:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html
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