The family vacation in Covid mode is a fraught, joyful, and terrifying experience. I’m at the beach right now. I am no longer home. The other night, I slept in a bed other than my own for the first time since February, when I went to Europe on assignment for a magazine and got back to America just under the wire.
My wife and kids hadn’t slept away from home since Christmas. We had been on lockdown all spring, dreaming of it ending one day. In my mind, I had visions of a vaccine or a miracle cure quickly coming to market and wiping out all of my newly acquired germophobia, allowing me to roam the world as I pleased.
Those miracles have yet to come to pass. But America has more or less charged ahead and reopened anyway, abandoning coronavirus prevention. This is because we are impatient, jealous, and ignorant. Also, since the Trump administration never bothered to hand down a national order to, say, wear masks, our national quarantine has been overseen by a hodgepodge of governors and mayors with conflicting interests and varying intellects. That’s resulted in places like Georgia — which is batshit insane — hanging a “mission accomplished” banner across a Covid-19 spore and reopening itself in an act of collective suicide. Even places that have been purportedly responsible about managing the pandemic, including my home state of Maryland, have followed suit. Because if everyone else is dry-humping at the Lake of the Ozarks, why can’t the rest of us?
I was jealous of all that brainless reveling, too. Judgy but also quietly covetous. It’s not like those Lake of the Ozarks yahoos looked like they were having a bad time giving each other lungpox. Quite the contrary. I had done plenty of Covid-shaming at home and online. But really, I just wanted to live again. And so America’s “fuck it” response to the lingering pandemic forced me and my wife to rejigger our risk calculus. Could we go to the beach? Does the ocean have Covid swimming around in it? What if the beach was overrun with out-of-town rednecks and other MAGA shitbirds who think masks are for pussies? Would the beach town have actual safety measures in place, or would they just let it be Covid anarchy? Most importantly, did we really want to stay in our house all goddamn summer without seeing anything different?
If everyone else is dry-humping at the Lake of the Ozarks, why can’t the rest of us?
We did not. We did our homework. The beach town required masks in shops and on the boardwalk. The state we were going to visit, Delaware, had a seemingly reasonable governor, and its line graph on the Times website had the precious flattened curve. America has now been definitively split into places I trust and places I do not. I’ve already accepted that I’ll probably never be able to go to Florida ever again. Florida, along with Texas and Georgia, has rendered itself radioactive for all time thanks to its criminal idiocy. Delaware, by contrast, seemed trustworthy. Safe. Or, at least, as safe as we would find out in the wild.
I daydreamed about the beach all last week. I felt like I was eight years old waiting for Christmas morning to arrive. I still had my Covid paranoia strapped on tightly. The day before we left, I went on an errand, and a salesman cheerfully greeted me but got way too close. He was wearing a mask, but even then I could feel his voice on me. I shrunk away, and he looked hurt, which was the first time since the outbreak that I felt like someone was offended by me keeping my distance. Oddly refreshing.
We had rules for the beach. We weren’t gonna go to restaurants. We weren’t gonna go to the boardwalk. We were gonna keep to ourselves on the sand and set up shop away from every other family. This is not the easiest thing to do at the beach, even now. But if we had to walk a goddamn mile with all our crap to stake our claim, we would. Also, we would not wear masks at the beach. I’m as judgy about masks as any other sane person, but I know that outdoor transmission is a far less acute danger than indoor transmission. I also know that wearing a mask at the beach defeats the purpose of going to the fucking beach.
We left four hours earlier than originally planned because I couldn’t wait any longer. On the drive, I stared out the window like I was seeing the outside world for the first time. I saw cows grazing in pastures and industrial corn fields being watered, and I felt joy on an elemental level. Quiet elation. “Oh wow, kids, look! A billboard for a casino!”
We got to the rental, unloaded all our shit, and then I went to the grocery store to stock up for the week. I’m used to my grocery store protocol now: wear a mask, wipe down the cart, touch the keypad only with a wipe, etc. It was still not a relaxing experience. Anytime I’m in a retail space now, all I wanna do is fucking leave. The longer I’m stuck inside a place, the more fervent that desire becomes. This grocery store had one cashier and a line that bisected the entire floor plan. You know how hard it is for people to maintain social distancing in a line — you can never tell who’s in the line and who isn’t. I wanted to bolt.
I did not bolt. Instead, I bought croissants.
Then I came home and took my kids across the street, over the dunes, and out onto the sandy expanse. Barely anyone was on the beach. Heading there at dusk has its advantages. My 11-year-old started kicking his soccer ball around. My 14-year-old climbed up a decommissioned lifeguard chair and leaped off of it. My eight-year-old ran into the ocean, temperature be damned. I was all set to join him. I’m a dad, so I pride myself on being the family’s majorette for ocean entry. In reality, I’m still a little kid who needs to get his balls cold and wet before he’s willing to subject the rest of his body to the water. So I put off going in until it was too late and the boy had already reemerged.
I went in the next day, though. The beach was a little more crowded but not to the point where anxiety sets in. I go to the ocean every year because I have to. I’m primordially lured to it. I want my ashes sprinkled into it. In my dreams, I live on the ocean with a bigass infinity pool overlooking that shit. But for now, merely gazing at the ocean again was enough. I would’ve cried at the sight of it, but I felt too goddamn normal to.
The first night here, we let the dog sleep in bed with us, which he never gets to do. He was ecstatic for the company, and so were we. This will not be our last time breaking quarantine. We’re planning to visit my parents next month. We have a whole pre-quarantine plan in place to make it work. We’re all gonna shelter in place hardcore for two weeks before getting together. I need to see my parents again. That might make me cry. I haven’t touched anyone outside of my wife and kids since this all happened. But I hope to break that streak when I see my mom and dad. I’m gonna hug them so tight they can’t possibly get away.