Open roads to closed doors: A family reunion
Letter From the Road #62, Epilogue
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife Katie and boys Henry and Oscar back in 2019.
I am telling this story in weekly-ish installments, and I feature the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the Letter.
This is letter number 62, the final letter. The little tale of our road trip is not quite finished because something happens that extends our time together for just a bit longer. You know what they say, after the party is the after party?
I’ve had some people ask me what’s next? Tough question. It doesn’t make much sense to continue sending letters from the road when we’re no longer on the road. Or does it? I could just continue sending regular dispatches. After all, the road keeps going, just in new directions.
I’ve also thought about going back to Letter #1 starting over again, but this time doing audio versions. I’ve read that the world has reached peak podcast, so this seems like a good time to get in.
Your thoughts?
More importantly, would you pay to subscribe?
Lastly, I want to thank you all. Whether you’ve only read one Letter or all 62, it’s been really wonderful for me, and I know I would not have pushed through to the end without you.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 61 letters here, working from home.
All the best,
Luke
Our journey didn’t really end when we parked the car in Melbourne. The first month was a frantic whirlwind of trying to piece together something that resembled a stable life: jobs, school, and a home, and couches and televisions to fill that home.
Katie and I immediately went to inspection after inspection in the hopes of finding a rental in short order, which is no short order.
Those were precarious days, with Katie and I spending many hours out of the house while Henry was free ranging and Oscar was at home sick. At some point he came down with a stomach flu that left him confined to a bed that was adjacent to the bathroom. It was excruciating, leaving him at home by himself in that state. He would keep us updated by sending text messages with vomit emojis or tidal waves while we were out going through the grim job of inspecting houses and crappy apartments.
After a long hard week of looking, we found a place that was located on the same street where we’d already lived twice before. It was the most expensive place we’d ever lived, and also the most dilapidated. But it would be a start.
I knew we were really getting somewhere when one day the boys were out wandering the neighbourhood and found a television by the side of the road. Once they shook all of the cockroaches out of the innards, it was a happy addition to the living room.
That sorted, Katie went back to work, returning to her old job earlier than she was expected. It’s funny the things and the ideas that look good to us when we’ve been standing on one side of the fence for a long time, and your pasture is looking a bit sparse and weedy.
By the end of January, it was all happening, our old life was back on again. The boys were back in school, Katie was in the thick of her old job.
That just left me, trying to find work. It was right around that time when I received a phone call from my old friend Dan. I had chatted to him on the phone back in Alice Springs about his whimsical fantasy of starting an electric bicycle business with his brother. They now had a website, an airless office in the back of a bike shop, and a shipment of 50 bikes on the way. It was really happening, and Dan wanted to chat about having me writing a couple of blog posts for them. A couple of blog posts wasn’t much, but like our dilapidated townhouse, it’d be a start.
After just four weeks back home, it looked like things were nearly settled, back into a life that looked somewhat normal. It had been happening slowly over the course of the month, but I remember sitting at our kitchen table in the quiet house, looking up from my computer and being struck by the silence.
We had been living together in close quarters for so long we’d become some sort of Family molecule, one that’s a bit misshapen and wobbly, and always dreaming of breaking apart, but nonetheless tightly bound. And then, like some sort of planetary movement, cosmic explosion, galaxy being created, we were blown apart into more distant orbits, and I was alone.
February came and went fairly quickly. Henry was introduced to high school by getting into a punch up with the class bully. Oscar was enjoying being back with his old friends back in Grade 6, but bored and spending his time finding the obscure on the internet, like a random name generator for uncommon atheist Slovak names. Katie was back into her job at full tilt and wondering why she went back early, and I was continuing to scramble for writing jobs.
At the end of the month, I got sick. It was novel being sick, because in all of 2019 there was only one time when I was remotely ill, and that was a very minor bout with something that I picked up when traveling back to Melbourne at the start of our road trip. It was also novel because as I lay in bed with a throat that felt like I’d swallowed a handful of tortilla chips without chewing, that I was thinking about a place called Wuhan.
15 March 2020 - Home
Around the beginning of the year, (or so, don’t actually remember the timing) news came out of China about some virus that popped up in a city called Wuhan. It’s not one of the main cities, never heard of it, but just read that it is the ninth biggest city in China at 11 million people. They don’t do small in China.
News continued to pop up now and again, the virus was spreading, seemed to be causing a few deaths, and they pinpointed that it came from a big market.
The news kept coming in bits and pieces. Things in Wuhan were getting worse, more people were testing positive and it was becoming apparent quickly that the mystery virus was very contagious.The Coronavirus, they called it, sparking jokes featuring a guy dressed up in a Bud Light costume, with a caption something along the lines of ‘the cure for the Corona-virus’.
That’s funny. It wasn’t funny when China said people couldn’t travel for Chinese New Year, which is the biggest human migration in the world. Then they started to tell people to quarantine themselves at home. Then they pulled something uniquely Chinese, building a new hospital in eight days. It would take Australia a couple years to do something similar.
Still it kind of remained fringe news to most people. It’s happening over in China, who cares? Just stay away from Wuhan, you’ll be fine. The news agencies were reporting on it plenty, as they love a good deadly virus to keep the columns filled, but most people read with not that much interest, like a natural disaster in some far off land: interesting, but only in the moment.
Slowly it began trickling out of China. South Korea. Japan. Interesting, but nothing in Australia. And the US was more interested in the presidential primaries and Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash.
Then, sometime in the last 4 weeks or so, things started getting really interesting. People were taking notice. Cases in China kept spreading, and things were getting crazy - total lockdown quarantine, pictures of empty streets and a story about people getting harassed by drones if they left the house. A cruise ship docked in Japan and several people tested positive for the virus, so no one was allowed to disembark. South Korea was blowing up. Italy, of all places, had a case confirmed.
Meanwhile, coverage kept ramping up. The top story every day in the New York Times newsletter was about COVID-19, which they have started calling it. Qantas and other airlines started modifying flights to China, not wanting to allow people to travel with it.
Coverage was everywhere when I got sick. The first cases had shown up in the US, Washington State. Things in Italy - Italy? Really? - were getting bad.
Apparently COVID was much more harmful on old people with already weakened or compromised immune systems. Some people could actually have the virus but not even realise it, and still pass it on to everyone around them. So I worried a bit when I was feeling horrible. Two days on my back, leaving bed only for the toilet and a couple hot baths. My head hurt, I was feverish, and I had a sore throat that eventually migrated to my chest for about 12 hours, then took up residence in my nose and had me sneezing like a broken record.
At one point I was lying on my back in our living room when Katie, who was sitting on the couch, said ‘I don’t even know what the symptoms (of COVID) are.’ I did. I had been researching. Sore throat. Fever. Flu-like. Dry cough. Tick tick tick. Not much of a dry cough, though, which gave me hope.
After a few days of tortilla chip throat, wicked canker sores, and waking up in cold sweats, I went to see the doctor. Australia had been a COVID bystander up until then, just watching from afar on our big isolated island. But there were signs at the doctor that things might not always stay quiet.
There were signs posted everywhere at the doctor’s office, basically saying that if you have certain symptoms (I did), and you’d been to Asia recently (I hadn’t) then you shouldn’t come to the doctor. You need to call somewhere else and get assessed. I hadn’t been to Asia, so I saw the doctor.
The doctor looked unimpressed, sending me away with a recommendation and a prescription ‘if you need it’ in about 6 minutes. I was feeling slightly better at that point, so probably no COVID for me? Or maybe I was just one of the lucky ones who was fighting it off better than others?
I couldn’t be sure. There was no easy way to get tested for COVID at that point, and people in Australia didn’t really care anyways. COVID was like Masterchef, something you’d watch on TV every night and be mildly entertained and depressed at the same time.
A few days later I was feeling better, so I took care of one of the last pieces of unfinished business related to our trip. Russell Bates, my former coworker and Melbourne cowboy who’d loaned us most of the tools and spares and outback survival knowledge that we’d taken on the trip, arrived at our house in one of his old Toyota Landcruisers. He was wearing the same dusty boots as when I last saw him, and sported the same trucker moustache. After loading the gear into his truck, most of it completely intact and unused, our conversation turned to the virus.
Russell, if you remember from one of my first letters, is a well connected man in Melbourne. He’d been working in construction for many years, and had worked with or for just about anyone you could think of. So he talked to people, he knew things. Or at least he thought he did.
‘Listen, Luke,’ he said, lowering his voice as if someone were possibly listening. ‘I reckon that the COVID is something that China got from the animal research lab in Australia, and that they’ve spread it on purpose or accident. See, they haven’t given out the genetic information of the virus to anyone, and that’s because they know that if they do then it’ll be traced back to the lab in Australia, and then they’d be in trouble. Trust me, I once did work on the labs down in Geelong.’
He finished up by telling me that this is a good time to buy property. Interesting. That was the first I’ve heard that strange Asiatic flus make for good property opportunities.
And then, and then, as things started to spread and escalate in the US, even though news was relatively quiet about anything going on in Australia, shit started to get weird. You can’t buy toilet paper at the grocery store, I overheard people saying. People are buying it all up because of COVID.
Now, I’d been following the news kinda closely, more closely than I normally follow the news. And I’d not read anything about the virus giving you the shits. No shits, no runs, no loose bowels. Nothing. Yet some crazy fucker took it upon themselves to buy up the toilet paper, and then some muppets saw it happening, panicked, and decided that they needed to buy as much toilet paper as they could, and it has snowballed from there. There are videos online showing people fighting over it at Woolies.
Katie came to me last week, looking worried. ‘We’re down to our last four rolls,’ she said with concern.
‘Don’t fall for the crazy!’ I told her. Unfortunately the reality is that, crazy or not, if we can’t buy the stuff and we run out, that’d be bad.
I dug up some notes from the strategy course I took in business school, and weighed my options. I chose to target demand. At dinner one night, I instructed the boys to only use the porcelain at school, and Katie at work. Oscar refused, saying the bathrooms at his school were grim and horrible, frequented by short, distracted people with poor aim. Henry said that the high school bathrooms were only used for lighting fires and vaping. Katie also refused, though like the team player she is, did offer to steal toilet paper from work.
Since my family could not be counted on, I resorted to plan B, a distant plan B under the circumstances, and increasing supply.
Between yesterday and today, Oscar and I went to six different stores and found a single place with toilet paper, an IGA on Lygon selling single rolls for the exorbitant price of $1.75 each. I bought three rolls and some paper towels. I’m not happy that this is something I had to spend time on.
And now Katie’s sick, though I think she’s on the up and up, but things have only gotten crazier. Japan cancelled school for a month. Just Friday the US banned all flights to the US from Europe for a month. The NBA postponed their season. Baseball spring training shut down and the start to the season has been delayed by two weeks. The NCAA cancelled all spring sports. The stock market has totally tanked, erasing a year or two’s worth of growth.
People have started dying in the U.S.
They cancelled March Madness. Madness indeed.
Up until this week, Australia was doing OK so far, with very little in the news until Friday, when the big headline was that Tom Hanks tested positive for the virus. In Queensland.
Then things here started getting cancelled, and a ban on gatherings of over 500 people was put in place. School is still in, but I am expecting that to change in the near future. Some workplaces have instructed people to work from home. My friend Joe’s employer told all of its employees worldwide to work from home until further notice. They are not a small organisation.
More offices will no doubt shut, universities and schools will probably do the same. I don’t think Australia could pull off quarantining people to their homes like China did, but they might recommend it if things get bad. People won’t have to, but they will because they are scared. No going to restaurants, no going to bars and breweries, because they are scared. Or maybe the people who work at these places are scared.
Then where will we be?
I’ve never seen anything like this, ever.
I asked Oscar if he was worried about the Coronavirus. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But I am hoping we get out of school, though.'
That was in mid-March of 2020, and people in Melbourne were still acting normal aside from their shopping habits and a few conscious souls that would go to the park and stand around in awkwardly large circles when chatting. I was avoiding people, but had a feeling of anticipation in my gut, like the one I used to get when I was a kid and a big snowstorm was on the way and there was the possibility of a snow day. Or when I lived in Florida and hurricane watches would cause people to go a little manic and party like the world would soon be ending. Something was coming.
A week later it came in the form of a ‘semi-lockdown’, which I still cannot explain, other than to say that non-essential shops were asked to close and people were asked to give themselves a haircut or tattoo at home instead of going out. People didn’t really heed the warnings, going about their business as usual, but in a worried and agitated manner. The city was on edge, and even though we hadn’t officially locked down, things had begun to go haywire.
Oh and the grocery situation has gotten out of hand. I was in both Woolies and Coles today, bad idea on a Sunday, and it was weird, sad, aggravating, frustrating, maddening… all at the same time. Toilet paper is still all gone. Knew that. Expected that.
But crazy people have moved on to buying out all the tissues, paper towels, pasta, all the rice, all the hand soap, box milk, and then things like diapers and tampons were in low supply. And of course if you are going to have shit-tons of pasta, you need sauce. All the pasta sauce and passata is sold out.
A week after that, on 11.59 p.m. on the 30th of March, Melbourne entered the first of what would be 6 lockdowns, the most of anywhere in the world, and Oscar got his wish. The boys would return to school in June, Oscar got his wish again in July, and then they went back to school again at the end of October. By the time the kids were asked to stay home from school the next February, I think even Oscar was tired of it.
God and government, an inconvenient pandemic, something no one could have foreseen, had brought us all back together again, under the same roof, from dawn until dusk.
The following weeks and months became one hazy period of days spent waking up, drinking coffee, watching my beard grow longer, drinking something stronger, and then going to bed. One morning not long after lockdown started, I came upstairs early to find Henry lying on the couch playing Playstation while swigging pickle juice out of the jar.
I wondered what party I’d missed the night before, and gave him a ‘what the hell are you doing drinking pickle juice at 7 am?’ look - you know the one. To which he says, as if I’d asked him why he was wearing pants, ‘What?’
I was immediately reminded of something Oscar said to Katie back on day 5 of our trip. ‘Do you think we’ve had enough together time yet?’ he asked. I looked back at Henry, who was giving me a sideways glance while continuing to drink the fluorescent green liquid, and thought to myself, yes, I do think we have had enough together time.
But if there was one thing that we’d learned from going on a three month road trip, driving 16,516 kilometres crammed in the same car, waking up next to each other in a tent for 93 straight days, was that we could handle being together. We might even enjoy it.
Brilliant Luke! I’ve loved following along on your trip. Miss you Katie!