On the Road Again
I took a trip. And I have some thoughts.
Last Spring my wife and I planned a trip to New Orleans to celebrate a milestone birthday of hers. It was somewhere she’d never been and always wanted to go and somewhere I’d been to a bunch. I planned the trip months in advance and had to cancel it because of the initial Covid outbreak. This past weekend we cashed in our deferred reservations and went. I thought I’d share some thoughts on the experience of traveling on the tail end of the pandemic.
For context we’re both vaccinated. And it was the first time either of us had traveled anywhere outside someplace we could drive to in a day in 15 months.
Here’s a few observations:
-The airports were packed. I flew through two major hubs, one each way, and they were full. Security lines were long but moving efficiently. Many of the shops and kiosks were closed but every gate was full to the extent that there was nowhere to sit and all four flights we took were completely full. I’ve heard that there are less flights so it has increased utilization for those still flying, but you wouldn’t know that from the airport.
-We’ve been trained to follow the rules inside an airplane. In the airport there’s some mask resistance. People are supposed to wear them but they take them off to talk on phones or to each other. Some folks just wear them below the nose and mouth. But on the plane, they were on and I didn’t see a flight attendant have to remind anyone. There’s something about the proximity of people on a packed aircraft that makes you feel obligated to keep your face covered. Related: I can’t imagine getting on a plane without a vaccine at the moment.
-People tell you how they feel about politics…and therefore the rules of pandemic with their t-shirts, hats and the sorts of masks they wear. It’s hard to tell if someone is in the military or just on cultural team military. I have lots of awkward moments if I get deep enough into a conversation with someone for them to find out I’m a vet and then surprise them that I have somewhat divergent views from the vets they are listening to on vet podcasts, even if I know the podcasters personally and consider them friends. There’s probably an essay on this worth writing.
-The vaccine made me and others feel safer. We stopped to grab a drink in the restaurant bar after dinner. The seats at the bar were spaced out. There was one alone in between two couples. When I moved one next to it so we could sit down, the bartender told me we couldn’t. Both couples on either side said it was fine, they were vaccinated. We said we were too. The bartender said if they were good and we were good, he was good. But he did say the management would get on him for fear of “shutting us down” if we didn’t spread the seats out a bit.
-A large bouncer who views challenges to the rules as direct challenges to him is effective across a broad range of rules.
-Lower end establishments have lower adherence to the rules. The situation I described above happened at a fine dining restaurant. The next morning we had breakfast at a hole in the wall that, true to New Orleans, had a bar open at 9 AM. The bartender wore his mask dangling off his face and told us the rules were stupid and that the mayor was stupid and that his advice to tourists was that they should “mind their fuckin business” when it came to the rules. Everyone in the place seemed to agree. It was also the only bad food we ate the entire time we were there. They knew it too as they apologized in advance for the slow service and new cook staff as the one they had before wandered off when they shut down and they don’t know how to find them.
-Not wearing a mask outside is a bigger positive than I thought it would be. I’m a large and a little bit menacing looking man. Smiling at people I meet is something I’ve grown used to doing to let them know that I come in peace. It was nice to be able to do that again.
-Restaurants have long waits and short staffs still. Capacity has come back but hiring and training staff seems to have lagged a bit. Again, this is something less apparent in higher end establishments. Highly qualified bartenders and servers are worth their weight in gold for high end restaurants. And they appear to have been able to hire their professional staffs quickly. Everywhere else “this is my first day/week’ was the norm.
-I paid my way out of queues, waits and crowds where I could. We had been sitting on this trip for a year and had spent zero money on get away vacations during that time. Paying for “safety” replaced paying for convenience in my mental calculus. Those two factors meant that upgrades were the norm.
-There is no pandemic for the homeless and destitute. Just another in a long list of things to die from.
These are mostly surface level observations that drove home two more foundational thoughts:
The first was that much of the safety measures and regulations regarding Covid are at least as much about symbology as they are actual safety with the exceptions of masks and vaccines. When people got very close to each other in places they couldn’t avoid, they wore masks without hesitancy. And I never would have even considered the trip if I weren’t vaccinated. And so these feel like two very strong institutional muscles to develop now that we understand exactly how crippling a global pandemic can be. Reasonable masking norms + broad vaccine development and distribution capabilities seem like no regrets societal investments.
It’s reasonable to say that if you want to be in close proximity to other people during or in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic, you have to wear a mask or be vaccinated. Traveling for a few days drives home just how unreasonable people who refuse BOTH are being.
The second foundational thought is that the impacts of the pandemic are, like most things, not equally distributed across income levels. You can file this under stating the obvious but it’s worth saying it out loud. People and institutions with less margin, economic health or otherwise, aren’t in great positions to just shut up and deal with things. If you can’t understand why X person won’t just do Y so we can all get through this, it’s possible you might not understand what Y actually does to X. The Zoom class changing their profile to “stay the fuck home” wasn’t helpful.
Again though, this doesn’t refer to vaccines and masks. Why X person refuses to wear a mask or vaccinate is because they’re irrationally concerned with the wrong things relative to the risk to themselves and others. Or they suffer from the sort of personal political rot that has warped their value systems. In May, we’re going to tip over 600k American deaths in 14 months. That’s the same amount of deaths as the four year American Civil war…in a quarter of the time. Don’t let revisionist history let us wander away from what we learned.
Masks and vaccines. Masks and vaccines. Masks and vaccines.
Masks when you have to be inside with other strangers during a pandemic. And vaccines the moment they’re available to you.
And then there’s no more pandemic. And we’re all free.
Thanks for the thoughts. I'm not going to lie when I saw your pics of bourbon street it was really weird.