Because I Guess We Just Live Here Now

Note: The date for this post is June 12, 2020, despite the fact that WP wants to date it differently. I wrote this weeks ago, but due to the lag in getting my website up and running (in other words, due to my procrastination in getting my website up and running), things have changed in NZ; as of this note, we’ve gone 22 days with no new COVID cases, there are no active cases in the country, and we moved to Level 1 five days ago. Still, I want to post this piece.

Around the time I began to devote myself to creating this blog, it was mid-summer of 2019 in the US, and I was preparing to embark on a lengthy period of travel.  Germany, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Bali…they were all on the agenda. I’d sold my house, sold my car, arranged care for my pets, stuffed all of my belongings, save what could fit in two backpacks (one to check, one for carry on) into storage units. I didn’t know for how long I’d be gone, or what it would be like; I had plans to meet up with—oh, what shall I call him? For now, I guess I’ll use “companion” (no label really seems to fit)—for portions of that time, but for the most part, I was on my own, creating my own itinerary as I went, eventually incorporating Australia and New Zealand on my list. 

And now, I’m doing something I never could have imagined back then:  writing my first actual post from a coffee shop in Christchurch, New Zealand, where, due to the global COVID pandemic, we’ve just emerged into Level 2 (this means things like stores and restaurants and gyms and libraries are open, but with restrictions) after over six weeks at Levels 4 and 3 (Level 4 being a strict lockdown where only essential services were open and travel outside the home was severely restricted; Level 3 being basically like Level 4 but with things like takeaway and delivery). 

After months of traveling the world, going wherever I wanted on my own timetable, intoxicated by the openness of the world, suddenly I find myself grounded. The world is shuttered and closed for business, fleets of airplanes sitting abandoned on their tarmacs, flight after flight cancelled, countries allowing into their borders only their own citizens, with no indication of when things might change. And I feel grief.

Even typing that, I feel embarrassed by the privilege it reveals. I know well that there are people the world over who are losing loved ones, who are suffering and in pain, who are dying alone, who have lost their jobs and are struggling to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. And yet I sit in a comfortable booth, drinking my Americano, feeling sad because the plans I had (a return to Bali, probably a trip to Thailand), are on indefinite pause? Am I no better than that guy on Twitter who complained because Pottery Barn instituted appointment-only shopping and started closing two hours earlier than the mall?

About two and a half months ago, my companion and I were in Sydney together, trying to decide where we might holiday together for two weeks before he flew back to the US (we’re both American citizens) and I traveled back to Bali. New Zealand, where we’d already spent the New Year’s holidays, seemed like the best bet. The pandemic, by that point, was ravaging its way through Italy and Spain and the UK, and was on its way to exploding in the US (though no one knew, at the time, just how big that explosion would be). 

On the other side of the globe, Sydney was bustling with life; by all appearances, COVID seemed like a problem for other parts of the world, not one for Australia. Cases were low, the streets were thronging with people, the beaches were swarming, Hyde Park was strewn with sunbathers and picnickers, music poured onto the sidewalks from the clubs lining Oxford Street, people lounged on bar and restaurant patios, soaking up the sun and laughing over beers and glasses of wine.

Only two weeks before, Sydney’s annual Mardi Gras parade had wound its seemingly never ending way through the streets, drawing crowds that packed the sidewalks on both sides of the street from Hyde Park in the CBD to Moore Park in Paddington. We’d watched it from the front porch of our apartment building on Flinders, the street in front of us a constant stream of light and music and movement. I sent a breezy WhatsApp message to the manager of my favorite guest house in Ubud, telling him I’d be in touch soon to let him know when I planned to return to Bali.

We decided to depart on March 15th, getting in to Christchurch shortly before midnight, and we booked our flights on March 12th. By that time we’d come to realize that it might be best to spend more time in NZ, waiting for things to calm down. Too much travel seemed too risky until this thing was under better control, we agreed. It would be better to give it a month or two (jeez, were we naive). And so, as proof of our onward travel, we booked a flight from Auckland to Fiji for May 14th.

The next day, I ran errands all around Sydney, which was still conducting business as usual, feeling detached from American friends who were sending increasingly alarmed messages from the US, warning of catastrophe.

How could it be that bad, I wondered, as I strolled the by-now-familiar streets of the city, stopping in for a long black here, nabbing my favorite facial oil there, stocking up on essentials that I knew wouldn’t be available once I got to Bali, window shopping amongst the high end shops on George Street. The bushfires that had raged for months were no longer burning, the sky was a glorious, cloudless blue, the sun was out in full force, but it wasn’t a hot day. If I didn’t read the news, I wouldn’t have even known there was a global crisis.

As I write this and reflect on my mindset at the time, it’s hard to believe how blithely complacent and naive I was, how isolated from the horror unspooling in other parts of the world. Sitting down at one of my favorite coffeeshops, bright sunshine spilling through the windows, the espresso machine whirring in the background, a fresh breeze blowing in from the open door, it felt almost impossible to imagine a darker reality. Sure, we regarded hand sanitizer as an essential item, and we wiped down our surfaces with disinfectant wipes, but there was still a certain sense of invulnerability. 

On Saturday, the day before our flight, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced that anyone arriving into the country after midnight on March 15th would be subject to two weeks of self isolation. After a call to NZ immigration to understand what that meant (did the flight have to land on NZ soil before midnight, or did we have to clear customs to get in before the deadline?), we confirmed that unless we cleared customs before the clock ticked over into a new day, we would be subject to the self isolation rule. 

Even then, the gravity of what would soon become our reality didn’t register. The next several hours were spent in a flurry of phone calls and long hold times. Could we rebook our existing tickets and take an earlier flight? Could we fly in to another city on another airline? At every turn, we were thwarted; everyone else seemingly had the same idea, and no seats were remaining. 

We finally found one flight that still had seats, but the price would be an exorbitant $1000 extra. At the time, it seemed (to me) perfectly rational to take it, to pay the extra $1000 (money, I should add, that I really couldn’t afford to spend) to avoid being locked down in a foreign country, unable to leave our Airbnb guesthouse even for essentials like food. “Let’s just book it!” I barked to my companion. He was set to do it, riding a secondhand high from my mania, his hand hovering over the “confirm” button, but at the last minute, his calmer head prevailed, and he said, “This isn’t worth it. I think I’d be happier with the $1000. Let’s take our chances.”

So we did. And lo and behold, the next day, the day of our departure, it was announced that the deadline would be extended to 1 a.m., presumably to accommodate flights like ours. We rejoiced at the news, clinking our plastic cups of wine together on the plane, celebrating our good fortune. When we touched down in Christchurch, the plane, stuffed to the gills with last minute travelers, erupted in applause, thanking the captain and the crew for getting us there safely, even a little early.

When we passed through customs, I responded to the agent the same way I would when entering any country. “What are your plans?” she asked. “Oh, we’re going to hang out in Christchurch for awhile, then probably shoot down to Queenstown,” I said. When she asked about my last visit to NZ, I told her we’d been on the North Island, and she cheerfully shot back a joke: “Oh, so you came back to see the better island!”

Apart from the airport agent who pressed a COVID checklist into my hand, this was no different than any other experience I’d had when entering a new country. And why worry? Sure, the self isolation requirements were kicking in, but New Zealand only had a handful of cases. It was safe. The idea that our plans in New Zealand might be derailed still seemed an off chance possibility. 

In the next few days, however, cases in New Zealand rose sharply. When we’d booked our tickets, NZ had a total of five cases. Within days of our arrivals, the number of daily new cases was consistently in the double digits. The next announcement that came from the Prime Minister was one of border closure:  New Zealand was closed to anyone who wasn’t a New Zealand citizen, and even those returning citizens would need to self isolate or even be quarantined. Australia soon followed suit. What had seemed unthinkable just days before was suddenly governmental policy. 

Walking the streets of Christchurch in those first few days of our arrival felt eerie. The pandemic suddenly felt very real and present and menacing, and though children still went to school and shops and cafes were still open, I was unable to be in an enclosed public space for very long without a feeling of panic and claustrophobia descending upon me. Downtown at night, Cathedral Square was abandoned, restaurants sat empty, the few people on the streets bustled by with their heads down. 

I began obsessively refreshing stats on my computer, watching the numbers surge in the US, in Australia, in NZ. And then, a week into our stay, it was announced that they were locking down the country in 48 hours. The US State Department encouraged travelers abroad to return home if possible. Flights were quickly diminishing, being cancelled left and right, with the few remaining flights to anywhere that still had open borders going for exorbitant prices.

We had to make a choice:  do we stay or do we go? The idea of returning to the US, where cases were rising with a speed that seemed incredible (I remember in one of the earlier days of our time in NZ, my companion had commented that he thought the numbers of undiscovered cases in the US had to be in the five digits at least; I said I thought it was at least in the six digits; two months later, the US is at over 1.5 million and still climbing), felt risky, even if we could manage to make it out. So, we stayed.

We locked down with 5 million New Zealanders, watching, along with most everyone else, the daily 1 p.m. briefings from the Prime Minister as she convinced a country to stay a difficult course.

Trips to the grocery store (an essential service, and the only store open besides pharmacies) became excursions, expeditions. People lined up dutifully outside, careful to keep their distance from one another, as staff kept a strict “one out, one in” policy. Upon entry, sanitizing your cart or basket, then sanitizing your hands, was not just the norm, but the requirement. Meticulously placed tape on the floor indicated where you should wait in line, and announcements over the loud speakers admonished shoppers to keep careful distance from one another and reminded us that only one person from each household should be doing the shopping. 

Masks became ubiquitous. The streets were quiet. Storefronts that advertised end of season sales were locked down tight, even as a new season was upon us. The occasional city bus would trundle by, most often empty, sometimes with one or two masked passengers sitting many rows apart. How surreal it was to think that only weeks earlier, our biggest concern was whether we would have to self isolate. It’s almost—almost!—funny.

We hunkered down in our guesthouse, and I couldn’t make sense of the disconnect between what life was now and what it was only weeks before. We played a lot of boardgames (Scrabble, nabbed from Kmart in those 48 hours before Level 4 kicked in, and a few games loaned to us by our generous Airbnb hosts and a lone friend in Christchurch) and drank a lot of wine and watched movies like Moneyball and The Big Short on Netflix.

I marveled at how freely characters moved from one location to another, at their quickness to shake hands, at their ability to drive a car or to congregate at a bar or to visit a baseball stadium. While watching The Big Short, I was struck by how the GFC of 2008 suddenly seemed like a mere blip on the global radar, something that felt small, some strange and fleeting quirk, in comparison to what was now happening. I felt disoriented, some sort of pandemic version of Rip Van Winkle, waking up into a reality that felt light years distant from the one I’d been living only days before.

The reports coming from the US felt like one transmission of disaster after the other. Cases and hospitalizations and deaths surging. PPE shortages and makeshift hospitals in Central Park. Refrigerated trucks to keep the bodies, because no morgue or funeral home could possibly keep up. It was like receiving messages from a far away battlefield.

Tucked away in our Christchurch suburb, it was hard to fathom, and I found myself imagining scenes from post apocalyptic films:  people dead and dying, armed militiamen storming streets and capitals, empty streets and food shortages. At night I cried, worried that my mom, who is a cancer survivor, and my dad, a diabetic, were inevitably at risk.

These days, I no longer weep with worry at night (well, sometimes), but I have days (like yesterday), when I feel a suffocating heaviness and sadness when I ponder the uncertainty of everything.

I’ve never been good with ambiguity, have always found it challenging to surrender to what is. I prefer to feel some semblance of control, however illusory. Even with this past year of travel, giving up so much structure and rigidity, entering into a flow state of no set routines or plans, I still had the ability to create my own itinerary, to decide where I wanted to go and when.

Now, everything is ambiguous. How many more people will die? (I worry about this especially in the US, where there’s no indication that things will be even somewhat contained any time soon.) How many more people will be unemployed? What will happen to global supply chains? What will happen to the global economy? What will happen to the US economy? When will I be able to return to the US? To hug my dog again? When will I be able to travel anywhere again? 

I think longingly of my daily walks in Florence, of watching the sunsets over Bali. I think of the ease with which I could pull up Google flights, select my destination, and buy a ticket. The other night my companion and I were talking, and I mentioned sitting on a plane from Athens to Rome, listening to the latest National album. I had forgotten, for a moment, that there is no current reality in which such a thing is possible. The memory was sharp and clear, and I realized that was only last October. But it still feels so very far away, a part of the beforetimes.

Before I started traveling, I had imagined things would be hard. They weren’t. It was easier than I could have imagined. I booked a flight, I got on it in one country, wheels went up; wheels went down and I was in another country. Customs forms, baggage claims, SIM cards, ATMs, ground transportation…it became routine, something I barely thought about. Another day, another plane, another train or bus. That’s gone now. Visa on Arrival, you say? No such thing. Not now.

In that same conversation, where I mentioned the Athens to Rome flight, we were talking about our next trip to Greece, how we should also visit Turkey and Egypt. And as we talked, I felt a pang of discomfort, of pain. That will be possible again, someday. But when? One year from now? Two? What does the world look like then? What does travel look like then? 

Right now, I feel lucky to be in New Zealand. Lucky to be in a place that made decisions that have led to the virus being almost eliminated. Lucky to be able to be typing this post from a coffee shop, and doing so without much fear that I’m risking my health to do it. Lucky to be in a place that is often breathtaking in its natural beauty (how many beaches have we gone to, how many lakes, how many mountains?). 

Right now, I’m still a traveler. We’re getting a car and taking advantage of the time we have here, especially now that regional travel is no longer prohibited. But when our visa extensions are up, what then? Until then, I guess what I told our very gracious, kind Airbnb hosts is true:  “Apparently we just live here now.”