Tag: COVID-19

• May 10, 2021

  The Art of Traveling During a Pandemic

  

  If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a year, you know I love to travel. When COVID-19 shut down all non-essential travel in 2020, we were forced to cancel our planned Hawaiian vacation and postpone any and all of our travel plans for the foreseeable future. We’ve done our best to be safe and follow health authority guidelines and we’ve been lucky not to get sick thus far. Earlier this year, we decided we were ready to go on our long-delayed trip to Maui, but we knew we couldn’t travel the same way we did in the before times. We were itching to get out of the house, but at the same time, we wanted to do what we could to minimize the risk to ourselves and the people around us. It was a tricky balancing act. Here’s how we did it:

  Understand the Risks and Take Appropriate Precautions

  One reason why I felt more comfortable traveling now than I would’ve a year ago is because of how far our understanding of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has evolved. We now know that the virus spreads primarily through airborne particles. We know that masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of those particles and protect those around you. We also know that most super-spreader events occur indoors in poorly ventilated conditions. With this information in mind, we were able to decide on some parameters for our trip to keep ourselves and others safe.

  Choose the Right Location and Method of Transportation

  

  We chose to pursue our cancelled visit to the island of Maui in no small part because we were unable to get refunds for most of our trip expenses, just vouchers for later use. Still, there were a few factors that made it easy to get there while prioritizing safety.

  The first thing that makes Hawaii a great choice right now is that its case numbers are low compared to most states. Hawaii has been requiring out-of-state arrivals test negative for COVID-19 to bypass a mandatory quarantine, (and has since added an extra rapid test upon landing), so we felt reasonably assured that most of the people on our flight would not be carrying the virus.

  The second mark in Hawaii’s favor is evidence showing that ventilation and air filtration on commercial airplanes is actually quite good, offering an extra layer of security should someone on our flight contract COVID in the narrow window between receiving their negative test result and boarding the aircraft.

  Third, Hawaii’s tropical climate and wide array of outdoor activities and dining options allowed us to spend very little time indoors with other people. We purposefully chose takeout and outdoor dining options whenever we could, stayed in a small bed and breakfast instead of a busy resort (which was also way cheaper), rented a car to explore on our own rather than joining a group tour, found quiet beaches away from crowds, and wore our masks whenever we couldn’t physically distance (this was only ever really a problem in the airport, where we chose to double-mask).

  Prioritize Getting Outside

  

  Maui was made for adventure. Whether you’re driving the winding road to Hana, standing above the crater of Haleakala, or laying on the beach with a good book, it’s easy to find things to do outside on the island and easy to avoid crowded, indoor spaces. Sunny skies and warm weather make it an easy place to physically distance and enjoy a break from reality. Even if you’re not planning a trip to Hawaii, this is the kind of vacation I’d recommend during the pandemic. Instead of worrying about all the things you can’t do, now is an opportunity to embrace all the activities you can do safely right now. I’ve been so grateful for the ability to get out for my daily walks to keep my sanity this past year and our visit to Maui offered new and exciting ways to experience the beauty of nature.

  Guidelines for Traveling Mindfully

  

  Being able to travel is a privilege, now more than ever. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic which has upended the lives of nearly everyone, so expect that things will be different — and you will also have to act differently. If you’re in the position to be able to travel right now, keep these guiding principles in mind:

  You Are Responsible for the Health of Everyone Around You

  When traveling to an isolated area, remember that you can have an outsized impact on the community you’re entering. Places like Hawaii have limited medical facilities that can be easily overwhelmed. They may not have the resources to care for you if you become ill or if you infect others. We all have a responsibility to care for one another, so don’t go if you’re experiencing symptoms of COVID or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive. You may also want to reconsider your plans if there’s a sudden surge in positive cases in your community or the community you’re visiting. A stranger’s health may depend on your choices and that’s something you have to take seriously. If you’re not going to follow mask guidelines and basic hygiene practices, don’t travel right now.

  Be Patient and Generous

  The tourism, food service, and hospitality industries have all taken a beating this year and many low-wage workers have struggled to provide for their families and keep themselves safe. Travel is only just starting up again, so it’s important to be patient and understanding. Prices are high, supply chain disruptions have caused shortages, hours for many businesses are in flux, and staffing is limited even as demand is surging. If you aren’t going to be patient and respectful in your interactions with staff, supportive of local businesses, flexible when circumstances change, and as generous with your tips as you can be, don’t travel right now.

  Put In the Extra Effort

  Maui was breathtaking and I’m glad we went. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected and COVID-19 forced us to change plans several times, but we were able to unplug and treat ourselves to some much-needed relaxation while also helping the local economy. Only you can decide if traveling right now is worth the risk for you and there are many more factors to keep in mind than I’ve gone into here. Also, I’m not a medical professional, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But, if you’ve got the itch to see more of the world than the inside of your home and you’re willing to put in a little extra effort to do so mindfully and safely, I think you should definitely consider booking your trip.

  Have tips for traveling in the age of COVID-19? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, three typewriters, and a puppy. His fiction has been featured in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine and All Worlds Wayfarer. Read more of his short fiction, follow him on Twitter, and subscribe to his monthly email newsletter.
• March 17, 2021

  A Different Kind of Pandemic

  

  Right now, the Internet is awash in think pieces on the anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. One year ago, the world changed overnight, but not in the ways I thought it would. By early March 2020, where I live in Washington State, it was obvious that we were on the precipice of some kind of disaster. The first documented coronavirus case in the United States had appeared just 60 miles north. I was wrapping up my certificate program, where my final project was a plan for communicating a COVID-related closure of my workplace. There were rumblings that we would need to quarantine for 2-3 weeks, so I went to the grocery store and stocked up on shelf-stable food, frozen meals, Theraflu and toilet paper. I woke up on Monday morning to discover that my office was closed until further notice.

  I remember being worried about the future, afraid of contracting the virus and terrified that I wasn’t sanitizing my door handles enough. But in the back of my mind, I was also primed to expect a very specific kind of catastrophe — the kind I had seen and read about in movies and books for years.

  In the 2007 movie I Am Legend, loosely based on the novel by Richard Matheson, the last human in New York City lives under constant attack from vampiric mutants infected by a re-engineered measles virus. In the 2014 novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a troupe of Shakespearean actors travels on foot between isolated communities after a flu pandemic has wiped out much of humanity. Without a real global epidemic in recent memory, these were my templates of what to expect in a pandemic: a fast-moving virus devastates the world overnight, society crumbles, and the survivors are left to wander the wasteland.

  This has been a very different kind of pandemic. Society didn’t collapse, but it did fray around the edges as we confronted a chronically under-resourced public health system, political divisions between those who believed the virus was a threat and those who dismissed its severity as hundreds of thousands of people died, and systems of inequality that insulated those with privilege from dangerous exposure to the epidemic at the expense of marginalized groups who were already at higher risk of complications. It may not have been the apocalypse as we imagined it in works of fiction, but it exposed our vulnerability and exacted a terrible cost in human life and livelihood.

  Everything is different now. Physical reminders of the reality of this pandemic are scattered around our house. There’s a pile of freshly laundered cloth face masks on top of our dresser. I keep an extra mask and a small bottle of hand sanitizer in my car. I follow the one-way arrows in the grocery store aisles, though it feels like I’m the only one. A package of Clorox wipes, purchased at great expense in those confusing early days sits mostly untouched in a closet. The world didn’t end, but it did change.

  I’ve written before about my fascination with dystopian fiction, but now that I’m living in an actual dystopia, I’ve realized that these stories don’t have to accurately predict the future to offer valuable insights. At their core, these stories aren’t about killer viruses, they’re about humanity and how we cope with the unimaginable. Our real-life pandemic isn’t over yet, but fiction can still help us imagine how we can rebuild, preserve our humanity and find hope in hopeless situations.

  After a year of living under the specter of COVID-19, I could use a little hope. I think we all could.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, three typewriters, and a puppy. His fiction has been featured in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine and All Worlds Wayfarer. Read more of his short fiction, follow him on Twitter, and subscribe to his monthly email newsletter.
• December 31, 2020

  Hindsight is 2020

  

  There is a phenomenon in psychology called “hindsight bias.” It’s the tendency for humans to believe in retrospect that events were more predictable than they actually were. It’s the feeling we’ve all had that we could have done something differently if only we knew then what we understand now. This bias isn’t always a bad thing. It allows us to derive lessons from the challenges we face in our lives and prepares us mentally and emotionally to tackle similar challenges in the future. But in a year like 2020, when normal life was upended, it can cause us to oversimplify reality.

  They say that hindsight is 20/20, that when we look back, things will seem clear. This year, that sentiment couldn’t feel farther from the truth. 2020 feels like a constant upheaval, a never-ending tidal wave of change. At times, I felt like I was being swept away with the current and no matter how hard I tried, I could not reach the shore. When COVID-19 reared it’s ugly head in Washington, I stocked up on canned goods and sealed myself inside my house, afraid that I might be unknowingly spreading the virus. When my workplace was closed for six months, I lost my job and feared that I would never get back on my feet. When Black men and women were killed by police and people took to the streets to demand justice, I felt helpless to combat the plague of white supremacy and the entrenched racism that tilts the scales in my favor. When attempts were made to undermine our nation’s democratic process, I wondered if we’d ever recover from the blow. Looking back, it’s hard to see how any of these things could have been predicted or how I could have done anything differently. So much was out my control and the waves of change are still washing ashore.

  

  And yet, despite the fear, the anger, and the uncertainty, there was beauty. There was stillness and peace. Not since I was a child have I spent so many sunny hours outside as I did this summer. I read books on the back patio. I tried to rid the lawn of creeping buttercup. I mulched and graveled and weeded. I went on long, meandering walks through the neighborhood. I refinished a staircase and my writing desk. I wrote short stories and audio drama scripts and worked on my novel. We adopted a dog — the best dog there ever was. When she was still small, she would chew on sticks in the backyard while I stretched out between two lawn chairs and let the sun bake me while I read. When she was tired, she’d curl up in my lap and take a nap.

  My world for much of the year was small. I observed the turning of the seasons. I felt the warmth of summer fade into cool autumn breezes. I watched the leaves change color in real time out my window. I baked bread. I did the shopping and made dinner. I listened to podcasts while I hammered out resumes. I started a freelancing business. Sometimes, I did nothing but sit in stunned silence and fret about the dystopian state of the world. In those moments, I felt trapped, but grateful for the relative safety of my own four walls.

  In hindsight, would I have acted any differently? Would I have tried to go on our cancelled vacation before the shutdown? Perhaps. Would I have slept in more before bringing a puppy home? Definitely. Would I give up the time I was gifted for house projects, writing, cooking, and reflection? Not a chance.

  

  As I try to remember dimly the events of 2020, the burden of hindsight is too heavy to carry into next year. If there are lessons to learn, they are so simple that I’m embarrassed it took a pandemic to bring them to light: Let go of the need to be in control. Be kind. Put the needs of others before yourself. Slow down.

  2020 was bewildering and heartbreaking and quietly breathtaking. I don’t think we’re out of the storm yet. Not by a long shot. Together, we depart 2020 a little shaken, but (hopefully) not broken, and with a steadfast intention to make things better in 2021. Here’s to that new year. Sláinte!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. His newest short story, Firemaker, is now available to read in the current issue of All Worlds Wayfarer. Why not resolve this new year to follow him on Twitter or join the mailing list?
• July 20, 2020

  New Short Story: Bad Air and Bitter Herbs

  

  It all started when I fell down a rabbit hole of links learning about the history of the plague in Europe. It was a dark impulse in the middle of a modern-day pandemic, but I became fascinated by the plague doctor costume, a head-to-toe covering designed to protect the physician from infected patients. Through my research, I learned that the costume itself may not have been widely used, but those who adopted it reflected a new wave of understanding infectious disease in the West — the personal protective equipment of the day.

  The mask, while turning the wearer into an ominous looking bird, was meant to filter out contaminated air (“miasma”) with strong-smelling herbs and spices. The gloves and robes prevented the doctor from physically touching their patients and the staff may have allowed them to give direction from a safe distance.

  Over the years, as our understanding of disease prevention and treatment evolved, so did the protective garb employed by doctors and nurses to mitigate infection. Gradually, the plague doctor uniform disappeared…

  …but what if it didn’t? That was the starting point for the short story that been published this month by Creative Colloquy. In this story, I update the plague doctor for today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Now, I know we’re all awash in coronavirus anxiety, so I promise this will be my only pandemic-themed fiction for a while. But, I hope you enjoy my twist.

  READ “BAD AIR AND BITTER HERBS” BY JONNY EBERLE

  Please let me know what you think in the comments, thanks for reading, and please wear a mask and wash your hands. Thanks!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, three typewriters, and a puppy. His fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in Creative Colloquy and Grit City Magazine. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to the monthly newsletter for exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
• April 23, 2020

  C’est la pandémie

  

  It’s been 38 days since the COVID-19 pandemic became real for me. That was the day I started working from home, the day most businesses in Washington closed their doors, the day my knuckles started to crack from the sheer amount of handwashing I was doing, and the day that the numbers of the sick and dying starting to skyrocket across the country. It was the day that I realized this was not an isolated, regional outbreak. This was going to change our lives.

  A week later, when we ventured out to pick up a pint of local ice cream, we walked by a string of empty businesses with boarded-up windows. It was a Friday night and yet no one was out. It was surreal, like a scene from an apocalyptic story; the kind I usually enjoy reading and writing about.

  Rarely do we actually have the awareness that we’re living through history as its unfolding around us. But this is different. For over a month, I’ve lived with the heightened awareness that these days will come to define this chapter of my life; that someday, our homemade face masks will be in museums to teach children about the great pandemic of 2020. I thought, early on, that I would take copious notes during this time and I might even be able to write about the epidemic in real-time, producing a defining work of fiction based on true events.

  That’s not what happened.

  It’s been 38 days since I’ve been able to write coherently about anything. Instead of tapping into an endless fountain of inspiration unleashed by the chaos around me, the well has run dry. I’ve barely been able to answer my emails and text messages. I’m not even close to being in a space where I can write something insightful about the current situation.

  A lot has been made about the fact that Shakespeare wrote some of his finest plays while in quarantine. But Shakespeare lived in a very different world. The plague was a fact of life, an illness that recurred every few years in Elizabethan England. It may have been disruptive, but it was also a part of everyday life in a way that the coronavirus is not in our world.

  Far from an excuse for downtime that’s conducive to creative output, COVID-19 is putting us through trauma as a slow-motion disaster rips its way through our fragile society. Psychologically, most of us (myself very much included) are dealing with grief — and it’s hard to focus on anything else.

  So, as I’ve sat safely in my house, in a good neighborhood where I feel safe walking around, with a fast internet connection and streaming services at my fingertips, with the luxury of going to the grocery store every other week and having food delivered when it’s too much to cook after a long day of telecommuting, I’m still processing. I think I’ll be processing for a while. While I’m processing, I’ll waver between hope, despair and exhaustion.

  Only once I’m done processing do I expect to have the capacity to write the way I used to. I hope the day comes soon when we’ll be able to step out of the shadow of grief and into whatever comes next.

  Stay home.
  Stay safe.
  Wash your hands.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. He lives with his wife and three typewriters in a 110-year-old house. Follow his quarantine thoughts on Twitter and sign up for the newsletter for exclusive content.