Life is good. We are healthy and even happy. But we are waiting. Waiting for CoVid to end. Waiting for herd immunity. Waiting for schools to reopen. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting to meet friends. Waiting for November. While life continues.
The furry family members are the big beneficiaries of this ersatz living. They have us around all day. While the cats will probably not be unhappy when in-person school starts, Ouiser will be devastated. Every time one of us disappears into our room for a few minutes or we leave for a trip to the grocery store without her, she greets us when she sees us again as if it has been after days. I’m not complaining – I don’t mind a huge tail-wagging welcome several times a day.
We are settling into a bit of a daily routine for the first time in over 12 months, mostly because of a new brilliant policy for screen time that Jo recently came up with. iPad time can be earned in increments of 15 minutes up to a maximum of 90 minutes daily by spending the equal time first by being outdoors and engaged in something active. So Evan wakes up, trudges outdoors, practices soccer drills for about 30 minutes, plays pickle ball with me for about another 30 minutes, and then swims with Ouiser for the last 30 minutes. By 10:00 am most mornings, before it gets horribly hot outside, he’s earned is full allotment of iPad time and gotten it by being outdoors. No arguments, no negotiations, and almost fully self managed! Aunt Cole bought him a watch so that he would know exactly how much time he earned at any point without having to ask me or go indoors to check the time. It has been much harder to train Vivian.
We are cautiously socializing at a distance. Family and friends visit around the swimming pool and have camped in the yard overnight. We spend time with friends outside around the pool and the grill and the ice cooler and the pickle ball court. We meet friends at the lake and go for a swim. Our kids have been to sleep away camp with their friends. We take some risks. Here are my Rules of Quarantining:
If you are taking more risks than me, you are making poor choices. Be more careful.
If you are being more careful than me, you’re a scared hypochondriac. Loosen up dude.
There’s a meme making the rounds that sums things up pretty well.
Coronacoaster (noun): the ups and downs of a pandemic. One day you’re loving your bubble, doing workouts, baking banana bread, and going on long walks. And the next you’re crying, drinking gin for breakfast, and missing people you don’t even like.
We are trying to stay on the “One day” side of things. There was an initial spike in number of wine bottles that were being hurt during any given week, but I’ve have settled down into a more sustainable lifestyle. We are going on walks and baking a lot of banana bread. Vivian has been baking other things too and is trying to master making macrons. Yesterday she had me take her to the grocery store in the evening (Sunday evenings are the best time – the stores are almost empty), started baking at 8:00pm, and had a box of chocolate coffee macrons and a clean kitchen by 10:30pm. We’ve dabbled a bit in cooking new things too – like Nigerian meat pies, gumbo, Emeril Lagasse’s dirty rice, and slowly smoked pork shoulder. I smoked the pork for 20 hours, waking up through the night every hour or two to pop another log of wood into the smoker’s firebox, but hey, I’ve nowhere else to be. Unrelated to this, and unintentionally, I also smoked the Land Rover’s engine. I filled up the coolant and forgot to close the coolant tank. Small detail, major mistake. About 10 miles later the Land Rover’s engine was damaged beyond repair. The car is as useful as an anchor and worth less. I felt bad for a day, mostly for Jo because she did like that clunker. The LR4 did a great job of getting us from point A to point B safely and comfortably, and we will miss her.
We got news about the death of a friend. She was living alone in California and it appears that she may have had a heart attack. Her family had spoken to her the night before. She was gone by the time the police did a welfare check the next day. Jo and I, like everyone else, are deeply shocked. We remember her always smiling face and her zest for life. A life cut short, probably needlessly. With no public funeral and not even a comforting hug, life during in the times of CoVid keeps pushing us into uncharted territory.
Einstein taught us that time is relative. If I’m hurtling towards a black hole near the speed of light time will slow down for me compared to you if you’re watching from earth. The quarantine is like a black hole. It has fucked with my perception of time. Our pool guy comes every Thursday. Sometimes I wonder why he is here two days in a row because the week has whizzed by. But it feels like we’ve been here in Canyon Lake f-o-r-e-v-e-r. So I counted. It’s been 84 days since we left Chile and landed here. Only eighty four days. Or eighty four days in which America has descended into a shit spiral.
Almost everyone, even those who didn’t disliked the idiot-in-chief from the outset, had hoped that he would make it through his mid-week vacations to the White House without actually having to do anything. But as luck would have it 2020 didn’t cooperate. First there was the CoVid. Whatever else you may say, the idiot’s response to CoVid has been consistent. From the start and at every turn he has completely fucked it up. The nation is rudderless – no – more like with a mad man at the helm just when we need a leader. While Americans watch in horror and die in record numbers the world has come to a grim realization that no answers will be coming from here. When I talk to my friends in India, Singapore, Dubai, or London their attitude towards America has changed from envy/praise/disgust to pity, pausing briefly at ridicule along the way.
To be fair, the idiot or his base didn’t sign up for this. CoVid popped out of nowhere and upset the global applecart. He didn’t have the strength of character to set it right. Just when it looked like he couldn’t do any worse, he said “Hold my diet coke”. The cops killed George Floyd slowly in broad daylight. It was the last straw. I’m quoting Ibram X. Kendi writing for the Atlantic:
No-knocking police officers rushed into your Louisville home and shot you to death, but your black boyfriend immediately got charged, and not the officers who killed you. Three white men hunted you, cornered you, and killed you on a Georgia road, but it took a cellphone video and national outrage for them to finally be charged. In Minneapolis, you did not hurt anyone, but when the police arrived, you found yourself pinned to the pavement, knee on your neck, crying out, “I can’t breathe.”
The Black experience of policing in America is extraordinary. But Floyd’s killing wasn’t just the last straw. There were no excuses this time. They treated him like less than human and when they noticed they had killed him they acted like they had just finished a box of donuts. Unknowingly, these four cops pitched the second curveball of 2020 to the hapless idiot. The idiot swung and missed. Yes – he didn’t choke Floyd. He has said and done plenty of racist things and every neo-nazi white nationalist fuck supports him. But that doesn’t imply he is one of them. He could have got his shit together and done the right thing and led the nation at a time of crisis.
I first heard the story of the scorpion and the frog in The Crying Game almost 30 years ago. You’ve heard it a hundred times, but just incase Evan hasn’t and he’s reading this post 50 years from now, I’ll summarize it (adapted from http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html):
One day a scorpion wanted to cross a wide swift river. He saw a frog and decided to ask for help.“Hello Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”
“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.
“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”
Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. So he agreed to take the scorpion across the river. The scorpion crawled onto the frog’s back, and the frog slid into the river. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.
“You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?”
The scorpion shrugged, and said, “I could not help myself. It is my nature.”
So the idiot stung a tense nation that was looking to him for help. Over and over again. He lashed out at everyone. He even tried to poison the military – one of the few sacred cows in modern America.
Listen to the idiot’s supporters. They too were unhappy about the way Floyd was killed, they said. They too support the right of angry blacks to protest, they said. But then came the riots and the destruction of property. And finally, the looting. That is inexcusable they said. I too wish there hadn’t been looting. But for all the Rolex watches that were looted you can’t give Floyd back to his six year old daughter. As for the rioting, right after I first saw the video of Floyd being killed, I wouldn’t have argued if they had burned it all down. Now I’m able to more rationally condemn violence.
I don’t dislike cops. I haven’t had one bad experience in my 35 years in this country during my numerous traffic stops (shamefully I admit due to my speeding habit). I will even throw out that absurd line: I have friends who are and were cops. They are very good cops. They stop and help old ladies of all colors cross the street. They protect everyone. They are decent humans. Yesterday evening when we were walking Ouiser, JoEllen observed that police in America are the counterparts to our teachers. We have bundled up all our societal shit and years of bad policy making and moral laziness and politics and handed it over to our police men and women and our teachers and told them to fix it. We are asking our police to do an impossible job.
Our kittens needed behavior modification the other morning. They have slowly but surely taken over the house. They opened the chess box laying on the dining table and threw the chessmen down on the floor for Ouiser to chew. Then they climbed up the screen doors like geckos. When I drew the curtains across the screens they ran up the curtains like devils. We tried to reason. “No Skittles!” “No Zeus!!” But they didn’t give a shit. So Jo got a misting bottle and filled it with water. When we need to incentivize them to stop doing something we give them one puff of mist. It works. Then Jo gave Evan the mister and asked him to keep an eye on the kittens. Evan adores the kittens more than anyone in the family. When they sleep on him he remains in an uncomfortable position for hours rather than disturb their rest. But once he got that mister he turned into Dirty Harry with a magnum 50-cal in his hand and a swagger in his step. “Go ahead, make my day”. Power corrupts instantly. Giving a man a gun and power over his fellow men is a recipe for instant asshole. It is a testament to their strong moral fiber that most cops are good. But even one asshole is too many. We ask our police to deal with life and death but we don’t commit to training or salaries like we do with brain surgeons or pilots. To quote Chris Rock:
“Whenever the cops kill an innocent black man, they give the excuse, ‘Oh it’s just a few bad apples.’ Bad apples? Some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good.
Like … pilots.
“American Airlines can’t be like, ‘Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.’”
Black lives matter. That is a pretty low bar and we are still failing. Before George Floyd’s public state sanctioned execution I have argued that Black Live Matter is a divisive label. Not because of the semantics of whether all lives matter or not (of course they all do) but because it is a racially charged statement (perhaps that’s the point). Replace Black with White and suddenly you’re a racist and that is, or was, the source of my discomfort with the line. To be clear, my beef was only with the name, not the mission. Since the killing of Floyd, I understand the pettiness of my arguments about a name. Only someone willfully disingenuous or unable to understand facts can ignore systematic racism in America. When Jo and I explain it to the kids we use the analogy that someone posted years ago. It shows the video of kids lining up to sprint. But instead of lining up at the start, you get a “handicap” based on your race and wealth. If you’re black and poor you have to be exceptionally good and exceptionally lucky to win. If you’re rich and white you lumber across the finish line without breaking a sweat. With black household wealth at one tenth the average white household wealth, a lot of black kids are lining up way in the back. This is a shitty way to conduct an athletic event or to organize a just society.
Why should I give a fuck? Two reasons. The first is personal and emotional. My nieces and nephews are black. Evan and Vivian’s dearest friends are black. We’ve watched them grow alongside my kids. But when they leave the house for a date or a movie we gulp down that wave of anxiety. Elizabeth Stone said that having a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. But some of those hearts are in much graver danger. In a fair society no parent should have to bear this extra burden because of the color of their child’s skin.
The second reason I give a fuck is philosophical. From Darwin to Peter Singer, we have understood that certain people around us have a higher moral value. They are worthy of our moral consideration. The boundary we draw around them is our moral circle. The relative sizes of the human newborn’s brain and the mother’s birth canal means that mothers need help to birth and then raise this underdeveloped human baby. Mothers have to build a moral circle large enough to ensure the survival of their offspring, and thereby the species. Civilization is an exercise in enlarging the moral circle while carefully balancing it with our own survival. As we individually feel safer and more secure we aspire to expand our moral circle to include our family and non-kin and friends and neighbors and fellow believers (or fellow atheists :- ) and tribe and race and countrymen and eventually humanity. And other species sometimes. Whole Foods charges me a scandalous amount for my pork because I like that during its life the pig lived like a pig should (unfortunately I eat the pig to sustain my life while a vegetarian doesn’t). But in the geometry of modern American society moral circles rarely intersect race lines.
This isn’t a criticism of America though it sounds like it. I hold that Americans are among the least prejudiced people in the world. My personal experience as a dark skinned man in America guides me to this conclusion. But we can do better. If we wish to extract ourselves from the shit spiral we need to do better. I must do better.
Everyone Evan and Vivian know has been acquiring pets like the flood is about to come. Vivian’s best friend has a dog, as do each of her three other siblings. It’s been raining cats and dogs at Evan’s friends’ homes. His cousin got three kittens. Several months ago, I think it may have been in Athens, a city overrun by cats, the kids started asking for pets. I casually said, sure – after we finish traveling. Because that seemed far away. Jo was less comital. Then, in Puerto Varas, the very last place we visited before CoVid forced us to abandon traveling prematurely, we found Mocha – our neighbor’s dog who adopted us. She was such great company, we felt like we could actually live with pets again.
I’ve grown up with dogs in India and Jo with cats. In Austin, except for a short stint with dear Stevie, a blind cocker spaniel that I didn’t (couldn’t) give back after my fostering responsibilities were done, I’ve been a cat person – Socrates and Abe and Crazy. Vivian wanted a dog. Evan a cat. Jo rightly pointed out that now is a good time. We’re all stuck at home and no one’s got to be anywhere.
So on Monday we drove an hour and a half to Poteet to meet Katie, the rescue lady. She met us with Ouiser in her arms. We had all agreed beforehand that we’d politely say no thank you if we thought it wouldn’t work (or if Ouiser’s profile pic, like a Tinder photo, looked nothing like her). It took one one second to say yes.
So Ouiser (pronounced Weezer, named by Katie, the rescue lady, after a character in Steel Magnolias) said goodbye to Nellie the Sheep and got in the car with us. She had thrown up before we got back onto I-35. Vivian thought it smelled like seaweed, one of her favorite snacks. And Jo didn’t mind that the dog had thrown up in her car where the kids aren’t even allowed to eat or drink. So I knew Ouiser was going to be OK. And in the minutes after we got back home she melted our hearts with her frowny face and puppy dog eyes and her floppy puppy ears and her disjointed puppy walk. We bathed and walked her, fed her, and Vivian and I set up a rotation for her to be taken out at night to wee wee.
We woke up to sweet Ouiser next morning and that afternoon the kids and Jo drove off to pick up the kittens from Cindy, Nicolle’s friend. They returned with two tiny kittens (Ouiser isn’t small – at 13 weeks she tips the scales at a robust 25 lbs). Evan named the calico Skittles and the black and white one Zeus. I fully understand why cat videos rule the internet.
Jo set up the laundry room for Skittles and Zeus with their own baby gate that they can get through but it keeps Ouiser out. The kittens are adorable individually and utterly captivating together.
It’s been four days now with our new extended family. The good news is that no one has eaten or injured anyone else. There’s one roll of toilet paper missing, which was chewed up by Ouiser when we weren’t looking. Precious as TP is, we are grateful for the limited property damage so far.
As I type this blog, the kittens are playing around my computer. Before that Zeus was taking a nap on my feet. In a few minutes I’ll go take Ouiser outside for her first night break. Life has gotten messy. But in a chocolate sundae kind of way where messy isn’t bad. Not since Crazy went off to meet her maker back in the summer of 2016 has the pitter patter of animal feet graced our lives. And we are thankful.
Vivian got to celebrate her 13th birthday in Japan. Evan was really looking forward to celebrating somewhere fun. But that was in the Before Times. On his big day a few of Evan’s friends called in on Zoom after school. Family sent him texts and emails and cards and Auntie Beth sent a gift. And later that evening, his Grandma and cousins and aunts visited and we sang happy birthday outside, standing sufficiently far from other familial units, and we ate ice cream cake.
Poor Evan knows that we live in more complicated times now. But also simpler times. We stay at home. About 3 million people have been diagnosed or tested with CoVid. Two hundred thousand humans have died. A third of all diagnosed infections and a quarter of deaths worldwide so far are in this country.
But Evan is lucky. His life hasn’t changed very much from when we were traveling. A couple of hours of school in the morning followed by Jo’s three C’s in the afternoon – create, connect, and contribute. His contribute is to load and unload the dishwasher. We tried to get him to wash dishes or use a broom but he succeeded in doing everything badly – perhaps his strategy to get the easy foolproof jobs. For connect, he and a friend Zoom each other and after a few moments of what pass as niceties for 10-year old boys, they settle into playing video games together. Evan’s create has been fun to watch. He goes to the Inktober website and finds a word from their 2019 list and sends it out in a group chat to his grandma, aunt, and a few of us. And during the day we send in photos of sketches of whatever that word inspires us to draw. We’ve been doing this for about a month, and it’s been fun. Most of Evan’s sketches are from the universe of Minecraft, but hey, a boy needs to get his inspiration from somewhere. I’m enjoyed sketching too. Here’s my entry for “ripe”, and homage to the $120,000 banana taped to the wall at Art Basel last year.
Jo got Evan a hoverboard for his birthday. He had tried his cousin Cade’s a couple of times, and apparently when you are ten that is all it takes to learn. The first time he came down the hill on the driveway he was tentative. But now we joke that he is going to forget how to walk. He uses the hoverboard to get everywhere and balances like an expert. I tried and stayed on it for one femtosecond before I violently succumbed to gravity.
Evan – you will remember 2020. But I hope, along with the gloom that will tint the memories of this year after it is long past, I hope you remember some of the fun stuff. Staying in bed and reading till 9am. Zipping around the house on your hoverboard. Inktober sketches. The mask your grandma made for you. The first three months of traveling. Zooming video games with Luke. Walks with your family. Donuts from Sweeties. Wildflowers.
We’re home. Sort of. The White Wooden House is rented out till mid-July. So we are out near Canyon Lake about an hour and a half away. Carol moved last year and the house was sitting there empty. So we drove there from Bergstrom Airport and unpacked and settled down. Nicolle had bought us some milk and eggs. We’d done a hurried round of groceries on our way to the house. And there was enough toilet paper by chance to last us for a month. Never before, since humans started collecting in groups, have so many of us just stopped. A small strand of RNA embedded in a glob of fat has outsmarted us all in about 100 days.
At this point I’m going to stop, stare at the screen like Dora, and ask “Are you OK”? I won’t get a reply, but no worries, I’ll smile and hope that you and your loved ones are safe. But seriously, call if you’d like to chat. Turns out I’m not busy now. Or later.
After a week of being shut in I left and went to socially and emotionally distance myself by camping and hiking. I was supposed to go to Big Bend NP but they closed down overnight stays rather suddenly as did all of Brewster and Presidio counties. So instead I meandered my way through three different state parks – Enchanted Rock, Cap Rock Canyon, and Palo Duro Canyon. Spring in Texas is a beautiful time to be outdoors.
Upon my return I found that as expected the little bit of RNA was wrecking havoc. It turns out that some people were easier to outsmart than others. Unable to hold even one full thought in his head for a few seconds, our stable genius contradicts himself and bullies his way through the crisis which is crying for leadership. In a month we’ve gone from disregarding it to becoming the global epicenter for the disease. One indicator of how badly countries are doing is to compare the number dead – the Covid shithole countries. While we are busy winning that distinction, we bought up eight months’ supply of toilet paper in four weeks and shut down abortion, but kept gun stores and churches open. Boy, I miss traveling abroad.
We keep ourselves amused by doing what we did for the past eight months – not much. Except that we are doing that in one place. The four of us hang out and annoy the fuck out of each other. The kids study a bit. Jo and I spend some time outside working. There are dead trees and weeds and malfunctioning garden machinery and run-away vines and swimming pool plumbing leaks and clogged gutters that will keep us fully occupied for months, especially at our skill levels. We go to grocery stores in the neighboring small towns for supplies and water and wine. We take Carol her groceries and chat with her from 2 m away. Carol sewed us masks to keep us legal in Texas. Jo keeps Jeff in the gravy by ordering a steady stream of matter from Amazon. We bought Evan a bike from the Target in town and fixed up three other bikes from the garage that hadn’t been operated in years. So we can go on family bike rides. But we’re on a hill with steep drop-offs in all directions so no one bikes too far because we are lazy. Like everybody else we bake. Jo borrowed her cousin Brian’s banana bread recipe and is killing it. Vivian has baked baguettes, macrons (which involved making meringue without an electric mixer), and blueberry biscuits. We’ve never eaten at home so much ever before. We are being forced to try new recipes along with the usual fare. We watched the first season of the Mandalorian and the Hunger Games trilogy+1 and the Maze Runner trilogy and Jo and Vivian are working their way through the cinematic remakes of the world of Jane Austen. We visit with Nicolle’s family from a distance when we drop off groceries for Carol. The other day we went to Sweet Berry Farms to pick strawberries at the same time that Tim and Karen and Ava and Z drove up from Austin and we sat away from each other on a glorious spring afternoon and ate picnic snacks and chatted. The children and Jo and I are engaging in the zoom / Facetime habit with friends near and far. This evening for instance, there’s some concern about the potential shortage of bandwidth because Vivian, Jo, and Evan have video calls all scheduled at approximately the same time. Thankfully, the kids aren’t drinking too heavily during their zoom get-togethers.
In other words, we are well and are comfortably sheltering in place.
Those that are lucky are working long hours from home while sitting their kids in front of their devices so they can “go” to school. Others are dealing with loss of income and worries about their shuttered businesses, big and small.
Then there are the people who are essential – while we sit at home and pick weeds and movies, the essentials are out there on the front line. They are building offices and homes that may never be filled and upgrading our internet connections and bagging our groceries and picking our lettuce and slaughtering our pork and serving in the military and police and saving our sick friends and families. Many of them are undocumented. It is estimated that over 60,000 DACA workers on the medical front lines are saving our Covid asses while filing their paperwork to not get deported. Half of farm workers are immigrants or undocumented workers with no medical insurance and won’t be getting any of the $1,200 checks with His Toddlerness’s signature.
Then there are people living in slums like Dharavi in Mumbai and Mathare in Kenya – imagine almost the entire population of Austin crammed into two square kilometers. With limited access to water to wash their hands and no way to socially distance themselves and no jobs to go to, what must they make of WHO and government safety guidelines?
Then there are the migrant labor who have no place to rest. Their jobs disappeared when the economy closed. They have no money. Transportation networks are shut down so they can’t get back to their villages and homes and families. They are walking across the countries but towns and villages along the way are shunning them because visitors, whether from Wuhan or New York, are more likely to bring the virus with them.
And strangely, for the first time, we are realizing that our well being depends on all these people being well. So cheer up and find a good movie on Disney Plus.
ps. this is my first post from a computer since I left my travel chromebook on the flight from Cape Town to Frankfurt back in September 2019, back when we hugged strangers and ate at restaurants. I’ve finally been reunited with my trusty MacBook. Feels very strange to type on a key board and look at a computer screen after tapping away with my thumbs and squinting at my iPhone 7 for so long.
Once we decide to head home the rest is easy. Drive for four hours from the Lake District to Temuco. Fly to Santiago, Then to Toronto to Austin, and finally drive to Canyon Lake. Jo abbreviates this as drive-fly-fly-fly-drive. The only long stretch is the ten hour Santiago-Toronto flight.
We wake up to a beautiful dawn with volcan Osorno standing clear and almost cloudless. Nice day to hike around here. But we say good bye to Mocha and try unsuccessfullyto avoid Bianca’s goodbye hug and drive into our first obstacle – getting out of Puerto Varas and on to Ruta 5, the tollway that will take us all the way to Temuco. It’s Saturday morning and the only road out of town is temporarily closed off for an event. The officer from the Carabineros del Chile, the national police, walks over to tell us something. I roll my window down and greet her in English. Then I roll down Evan’s window and point in his direction, with my usual “por favor no habla espanol”. The officer is taken aback for a second but then chats with Evan. We find out that it’s a bike event and it’s going to take some time and to be patient! She tells Evan that the bike ride starts at 08:30. That is only 15 minutes away.
It takes a little longer than that. The tollway speed limit varies between 100 and 120 km/h, so I work my way along close to 130 km/h, and after a coffee stop we get to Temuco airport in good time. Someone in a red Avis shirt meets us curbside at departures and helps us unload and then drives away in the rental. Jo wonders aloud that his investment in an Avis shirt has paid off well as we hurry inside (but my Avis app pings me with a checkin notification a moment later, so all is good). We’ll be inside airports or airplanes for the next 30 hours now.
The view from the Temuco-Santiago flight is stunning. Dozens of snow capped volcanoes ring the horizon towards the east and a fabulous coastline is below us on the west. You can see the entire width of Chile – from Argentina to the Pacific, the whole way.
The Santiago-Toronto flight is a sardine can. About 400 of us packed ass to ass into a 777. We are obviously hoping we haven’t picked up the coronavirus up until now. But this flight couldn’t have been designed any better to be a virus incubator. Everyone else seems to have just finished cruises which makes us cringe even more. I feel bad for the cabin crew.
My morning coffee from the gas station on Ruta 5 is still working through the overnight flight but Vivian sleeps a bit. Three movies (I like Motherless Brooklyn best) and two wine servings later we are in Toronto. Vivian and Evan are pretty chipper. They are seasoned travelers by now. We get a nice sit down breakfast and then clear American customs and immigration in Toronto airport with zero lines which is good because it’s the first day of the freshly constituted health inspections in the US and the news is full of stories of 4 hour waits in crowded lines at every major American airport. Our Toronto-Austin flight is empty and the airline has spread the few of us out through the airplane, we assume for the sake of social distancing.
We take a cab to Jen’s, greet her from a distance, pick up the Land Rover, get some groceries at the Fiesta (thanks to a great tip from Jen) and drive to Canyon Lake. We have rice, dal, and keema for dinner. Vivian tucks in and says she’s missed home cooking. We’re home!
The Chilean Lake District is a panorama of soaring snow capped volcanoes and deep blue lakes. Picturesque towns with black sand playas dot the shores. Dramatic waterfalls tumble down carved volcanic rock. Towering emerald forests blanket the valleys. In a few days we fly further south to Punta Arenas to explore the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.
Our days in the cabin on the shores of Lago Llanquihue are idyllic. But as the coronavirus spreads we discuss our options. We sit out on the deck by the lake while Mocha lays on our feet and we ask where would we hang out for 3-4 months to ride this thing out.
We like where we are. The cabin is secluded and reasonable secure. It has a wood burning stove and sits beside a clean fresh water lake. And it has Netflix! The town is sufficiently near and far. Evan’s Spanish is getting us by. We have a car. Chile has fewer Covid-19 cases than Texas and we’re in a sparsely populated area with few visitors. Disadvantage: 1) winter is approaching in the southern hemisphere; and 2) we’re in somewhat unknown territory. The other option I put forward is Canada. Advantage: 1) closer to the US in case we’re needed back; and 2) Canada is English speaking. Jo thinks we should return to the US if we’re going to take the trouble to go to Canada. But I counter with two facts: 1) no TP shortage in Canada yet (is the average Canadian smarter than the average American?); and 2) better leadership (the average Canadian is smarter than the average American). We decide that tomorrow Jo will ask Bianca about staying here at the cabin for a while. But we’ll go ahead to Torres del Paine and probably even the Atacama desert and return here in a couple of weeks.
The next morning we wake up to more coronavirus news. Trump incoherently announces travel restrictions. More are surely coming. Italy is struggling to meet the medical demands of thousands of infected people. China is coming out on the other side of this. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan show how leadership and smart policy can slow the outbreak. Argentina closes its borders. American Airlines cancels its DFW-Santiago flight indefinitely due to a lack of demand. It’s dawn outside. We decide we need to go back. Not two weeks later, not three months later but now. We’re ok here but our families are back in the US and it will get increasingly harder to go back to them. Jo gets on her phone and an hour later she has booked us tickets to Austin. We depart tomorrow and fly via Toronto. When the kids wake up we tell them our new plans. They are sad. We all are.
We drive halfway up volcan Osorno to where the ski lifts start. The lifts gently sway in the wind, empty and waiting for winter. Above the tree line the black volcanic soil crunches under my hiking boots as I walk up a steep slope. In a minute I’m met by three dogs that materialize out of nowhere. They like me to pet them and stay close but they aren’t clingy. I enjoy walking with them. The view is stunning.
Then we drive a few miles to Saltos de Rio Petrohué – waterfalls on the Petrohué river between Lago Todos los Santos and Lago Llanquihue.
Tomorrow we’ll leave early. I try to finish the bottle of local Carménère wine which is very good. Jo has a couple of drinks of her pre-made pisco sours. We eat home cooked pasta with local smoked salmon and watch a few short movies on Netflix. The kids pack. We feed Mocha her dog treats. It’s suddenly the very last night of our adventure.
This was the view after a long travel day. We left our Airbnb in Austin at 11:00 last week on Wednesday. More than 24 hours later, after two flights and two drives we arrived at the lake side village of Villarrica named after the huge snow topped smoldering Volcan Villarrica and on the shores of Lago Villarrica (when you find a good name, stick to it).
Evan and Vivian are earning their keep by translating. It must look odd: imagine checking out at a grocery. A local asks a question. We say “por favor no habla Espanol”. Then we find Evan and put him in front. He carries on for a while. And then we’re magically done!
Chile is amazing. The Lake District is pure Chile but you can approximate it as a mix of Switzerland and Italy and New Zealand. The food is delicious – grilled meats prepared on fiery parrillas, great wine and craft beer, fresh local salmon, and more good quality bread than I’ve seen anywhere (yes, anywhere). The people are lovely. In the Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve where there was no internet, we found our cabin by asking a lady for directions who stopped a jogger on the sidewalk who in turn hopped into our car and took us to her sister who,it turns out, was the owner of the cabin. And at tiny Puerto Fuy we asked a girl who was swimming in the lake about kayak rentals and she informed us that she would be happy to rent us kayaks after her lunch swim.
There are more lakes than you can shake a stick at and each one is prettier than the last.
A couple of days ago we arrived to our cabin on the black lava shores of Lago Llanquihue about 20 km outside the town of PuertoVaras. Stately Volcan Osorno stands guard over us though her snowy top is mostly hidden in the clouds. The neighbor’s dogs immediately adopted us. Mocha is a Great Pyrenees and we’ve named her sidekick Latte. The black sand beach leads from the back deck to the blue lake. Sometimes the lake is placid like when we went paddle boarding and swimming yesterday. Today the waters are streaked with white waves and breakers are crashing on the beach. It is sporadically raining which doesn’t bother Mocha – she is laying out on the beach.
While the lakes are beautiful our thoughts keep returning to the coronavirus pandemic. Are our friends and family safe back home? Do we quit and return to Texas? Should we make a base somewhere in South America and ride it out? How bad is it going to get before it gets better?
Meanwhile, the grocery stores are normal down here. There’s plenty of toilet paper and wine on the shelves. I hope things are fine with you dear reader.
The easiest way to get to South America from Japan is to fly through LAX or DFW. South American countries are increasingly aligning with China in terms of trade and tourism. But there are no direct flights from Asia to that continent. One reason is the distances involved. The Pacific Ocean is big. Tokyo to our destination Santiago is longer than the longest commercial flight service which runs between Singapore and Newark. So we picked to fly from Tokyo to DFW to Santiago. And when you’re that close to Austin, you take a break and visit friends and family.
We landed at DFW at sunrise and drove to Canyon Lake and visited Carol first. On Saturday we helped Nicolle and Michelle tear down some cabinets and walls as a part of their remodel. On Sunday Aaron came over with his kids and we had an almost full complement of Texas cousins in one place (except for Peyton who is at college who incidentally was born in Okinawa). There’s no internet at casa Canyon Lake so the kids had to entertain themselves. Vivian improved her sketching skills and Evan hung out with Cade (and they didn’t fight!).
Then we moved to our Airbnb in Rosedale and within hours had friends arriving with drinks (keeping it weird, they bought hard Kombucha). Evan’s calendar had a sleepover, two birthday parties, and a full day at school with his buddies. Vivian had two sleepovers planned. Jo had made plans for dinners, breakfasts, mani-pedis, workouts, and hanging out with friends. Which led Evan to observe “Daddy has no friends”. Boo hoo. Luckily, FT was visiting Austin on business and dropped by. And Alu and Michelle jetted in for 36 hours in Austin. So I managed to make it look like someone was glad I was back.
The sleepovers and parties must have been a blast because we didn’t see much of the kids. Evan went to his first paintball event and got a bruise on his ribs from a short range shot but had loads of fun. Vivian practically moved in with her friends. And then it was time to get back on the road again.
Meanwhile, Italy and Iran are having major coronavirus outbreaks and the little bug keeps spreading and doing its thing. It has arrived in America. We’re going to keep traveling unless we are boxed in by the disease. Here we are about to board at DFW.
Vivian took this photo of the morning sun over the mountains as we came in to land in Santiago about 10 hours later. Hola Chile!!
After our drive around the inland sea of Japan and our trip to Okinawa we are back in Tokyo for a few more days. On our first morning back Jo took us to the Shinjuku Gyoen park. It is famous for its early blooming cherry blossoms.
We spent some quality time sitting among the blooming cherry trees. Then Evan really got into it and planned our walk around the huge park and through its various sections. Just when it looked like we would spend the rest of our lives at this wonderful park, Vivian appealed to Evan’s baser instinct and eventually got him to leave by promising him lunch. Google and Jo found a Vietnamese restaurant close by and we had pho, probably Evan’s favorite food, for lunch. Then we went back to Harajuku for more giant cotton candy.
The highlight of our second time in Tokyo is a trip to an exhibit space called TeamLab Borderless. It is a mix of visual graphics, art, and interaction between the real and virtual worlds. In one place, Evan drew a snake on big sheet of paper. When his artwork was scanned in to a computer, his snake wriggled into the exhibit space and joined the myriad other creatures projected on the walls and floor of the space, till it was eaten by a giant salamander, someone else’s art.
We loved our time in Japan. As we prepare to leave we will miss our Seven-11 cashiers and onigiri. And the best taxi drivers in the world. And super clean and warm toilet seats. And an amazing transportation network. And the quiet clean narrow back streets of Tokyo filled with tiny restaurants. And polite people who tried to take over the world a mere eighty years ago. Goodbye Japan, we’ll miss you.
Meanwhile, the threat of the coronavirus grows steadily while the panic it sows rises exponentially. China has thousands of confirmed cases and has locked down an entire province. But this cat is out of the bag, this genie isn’t going back into the bottle. There is an outbreak in South Korea and there’s a giant cruise ship docked in Yokohama with three hundred infected people quarantined in there along with the rest of the few thousand passengers and crew. But we are still at a stage where we can count the infected and the dead. And a world that watches, unprepared.
It is with these thoughts swirling in our heads that we board an American Airlines 787 at Narita at 11:30 on Friday, February 21st for a 12 hour flight.
And suddenly we face a more immediate crisis – without doubt the worst airline food we’ve seen anywhere!! Luckily we have eaten a big breakfast and it sees us through till we land at DFW at 07:00 on Friday, February 21st.
Notes from Dad 