As I sit writing this, Fall is coming upon us to bring along with it all those part of its season that we love. Colored leaves, pumpkin lattes, apple cider, cool crispy air, and a shining glimmer of hope seeded within the existential dread birthed from a dark world in the grips of a pandemic. For many a (ludicrous) reason, the USA has done very poorly when it comes to combating COVID-19. Despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the country has developed a mentality (reluctant or otherwise) requiring the social and economic systems function more-or-less the same as before – which ultimately means that everything that stressed us about life before corona-virus remains, but with one of the four horseman parading throughout the land. We’re particularly looking forward to the holidays this year because they’re often a time to unwind and forget about the stressors of life. Whether they will provide that function remains to be seen.
While we await those results, let me take you back over the past 6 months to see how I handled the pandemic! My Summer 2020 was just as boring and complicated as all of yours, and I haven’t written an article in awhile. So lets head back to April of this year to see what I was up to at that time and the things I did to preoccupy my time and while away the hours.
After several months out in the world and four weeks of quarantining first in NYC and then at an AirBnB in Lakeland, New York I found myself back at my parents house. My mother is one of those a part of the group that is extra susceptible to the virus, and at the beginning of everything no one wanted to be anything but careful, so it took me a month before I was able to get back into the bedroom I called home for most of my pre-adult life. It’s barely changed at all, and night after night I would lay down here, morning after morning I would get up here to go to…
…HERE! This was my “working” corner. Two computers. One for streaming music or Netflix, one for “work” (Video Games). I was lucky at the start of the pandemic to have Bannerlord release after years of waiting. So to start, that took up my time. I also continued to read and meditate while telling myself constantly that I was going to write my novel this year. But alas, I’ve always found it a massive struggle to write at my folks’ house. The ideas flow, but the MSWord pages do not.
Every night – or at least 5 out of the 7 – I would set off outside around 8pm and run down this road. I can’t recall exactly, but I know at one point I figured out that 6 full laps were around 2 miles of running. So I tried really hard to make that mark every night, and sometimes a little over that as well. It, without a doubt, helped me keep off the corona-calories! Without the exercise, I would be a whole lot flabbier than I am now.
On the off chance I needed to go somewhere, I would drive this. Mom and Dad call it the Terrain, but I’ve always just called it “the red car.” The red car has satellite radio and built-in wifi capabilities. So when the weight of the world that was my tiny bedroom became too much to bare I ventured out on lonesome car rides just to remember that the sun still shined, the air was still breathable, and the trees still grew green. Those happened maybe once or twice a week, and they were really good for resetting my anxiety when it could ramp up from an uncertain future.
And of course, who would I be if I didn’t take these opportunities to practice my cooking skills. At this point it had been well over a year since I’d been cooking regularly. The last place I lived in Shanghai didn’t have a good kitchen, and then traveling the world leaves you yearning for the local food you find that can’t be bought at home which means eating out. And then in quarantine, I elected for the most basic of basics for food having only access to a toaster, meaning peanut butter on toast save the few times I bought pre-cooked sausage from the dollar store nearby. Above you’ll see dumpling in a sauce I myself made, pork burgers that everyone raved about and made me wonder why our HAMburgers aren’t actually made out of pork, and finally Shanghai Style Chow Mein! Two of these dishes required shopping at the nearby Asian Food Market; can you guess which ones? Of course, there were other things I cooked up, BUT, none of them were as pretty as the shots above and you don’t want to spend all your time looking at my food do you?
Then here’s the part where my summer may have been a little different from yours. By July I was in a bad way. I had a terrible case of cabin fever and needed to get out of the house and thought about living in my car to drive up into the Adirondacks. As luck would have it my friend Bryan told me our friend Nina was going to be bringing them up to her study site for a camping trip. See, Nina is a Masters’s level Botany student who goes around the southern reaches of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to rip plants out of the ground and make a catalog of species that live within a certain area. It’s all very nerdy and I only understand half of what she says but she does a good job. With only a week to go before they headed off for camping in the mountains, I decided to hop on a plane for Cali!
Here’s Nina eating a s’more I made. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s the only photo to have survived the great purge on my phone. I didn’t take too many photos anyway solely because we spent three days in an area with no cell service and no way to charge our devices. Let me tell you, that s’more was a whole thing. Nina tried and failed to make her own super s’more, then I stepped in to help and when I passed it off it fell on the ground. Then when we finally got the third one made and ready to be eaten (cracked none the less), it dripped onto her shoe. Maybe it doesn’t sound funny but this was over the course of like 10 minutes and maybe you had to be there but it was what kept us in stitches for the remainder of the trip.
Anyway, Nina works around the Domeland Wilderness in California, a beautiful area not too often visited. It looks like the photos above because that’s what the photos are of. It’s got visitors alright, but it’s not constant. And unfortunately the area has been on fire for over a month as I write this article. Which certainly sounds bad, but Nina assures me that some plants there require the fire to germinate. Life will find a way, it’ll just take some strain before it gets back on track. I tell you, though, the region gave me more than a few ideas as far as worldbuilding goes.
Above you’ve got the Camp Creeps. We were the four who ventured into the mountains to camp! You may be puzzled, though, to discover that behind us is the ocean and not in fact the Sierra Mountains. Why would that be, you might even be asking… well, Bryan was reminded by his girlfriend Gaby that they were planning on heading to Santa Catalina Island for the fourth of July just after the camping trip – it had slipped his mind when we first discussed camping but he didn’t hesitate to invite me along once it came to his attention. And so the day after we returned from the mountains, we went off to enjoy the island on Gaby’s parent’s boat.
The small community at the ferry drop off is all connected to the boating. There’s not a lot of water on the island, so permanent habitation is difficult to maintain, but they were in full swing for the holiday – with proper safety measures on the entire island regarding the pandemic. I was wonderfully enchanted here and really appreciated the time we spent there walking around and gazing at all the touristy shops that were open.
We had a grand ol’ time while Nina and Gaby drove us around the island in a golf cart. There wasn’t a terrible amount of things to see beyond the town but Nina kept us all entertained by pointing out interesting plant species and explaining random factoids surrounding them. And the natural beauty was a great enough attraction on its own
Bryan and I drank Whiteclaws from the back while listening to music. The ladies insisted they drive and we were all too happy to oblige!
It was about three days of sleeping, boating, walking, and partying. As you can see from the above photo, some of us got tuckered out by all the fun that was being had. We kept proper social distancing, mask, and cleanliness guidelines in our habits while on the island, so don’t worry about us! We mostly just stayed on the boat itself. In the end, none of us got sick, so I figure we did a good enough job of it. We also took second place in a dingy float parade – everyone went the basic “American flags and streamers/red, white, blue” route but we decided to celebrate the other cultures that make up our country while endlessly singing Kokomo by The Beach Boys. Some evidence of that float can be seen in this photo, but, alas, photos of the float itself don’t seem to have been taken.
After the holiday weekend, we didn’t have much time left before I went off back to New York, but we did have one evening available. For that evening we decided on a classic American and LA experience by going for a movie at the drive-in! The place was pretty impressive, with about four screens of various kinds of movies playing. Bryan requested the horror screens due to his personal passion for the genre. They weren’t classical horror in tone but he seemed to enjoy them, and so the experience was worth it. The cars were even socially distanced too!!
We proceeded to take band photos of everyone who met up to enjoy the outdoor cinema. I even got to see my friend BK after originally thinking I wouldn’t get the chance on this trip out there – a pleasant surprise that warmed the heart. It was a very nice way to finish off the Cali trip, something that lasted about 10 days. I was worried about the possibility of corona the entire time but in the end, I didn’t end up getting infected. It wouldn’t mean, however, that I wasn’t safe about my return to NY.
A part of being safe was quarantining so that I wouldn’t potentially infect anyone else. Here’s a photo of me living in a car. It wasn’t the red car because that doesn’t have a big enough space in the back to stretch out and sleep, but the blue car is almost as good as the red and it did right by me as I lived in the thing for three nights while I waited to grab a COVID-19 swab test for free out in Rome, NY. Needed to protect my family from any possibilities. After those few days, I was able to quarantine from my room again – several medical staff let us know that would be fine.
During those few days I drove around, checked out the various small communities (from the safety of inside my vehicle), and parked the car to sleep in various Walmart parking lots because apparently that’s legal in most Walmarts across the country. Above is a photo from up at Lyons Falls, NY. If you can’t tell it’s a waterfall on the Black River and it runs all the way through Watertown to Lake Ontario. It’s an old power station dam alongside what was once a canal lock that helped provide transportation from the Mohawk River to the St. Lawrence River. The entire thing started construction way back in 1837, but by 1900 this leg of the canal was abandoned.
Once my quarantine was finished I decided I’d spend my summer exploring various state parks to take advantage of the natural beauty. Here you have Green Lakes State Park, renowned for its green water. The lake is meromictic, which is a fancy science word that means it has multiple layers of water on top of one another that don’t like to mix. It also has a ton of minerals that don’t typically show up in lakes because of the groundwater coming in through the bedrock. Some of the minerals happen to be sulfur, a fact that was directly observed by myself when a massive downpour began out of nowhere, upset the surface of the lake, and caused the entire area to smell like rotten eggs. Imagine running through a rainstorm as trees collapse around you while it smells as if someone just farted in your face. That was an interesting afternoon.
I also became obsessed with Netflix’s DARK, a German-language sci-fi horror thriller. I won’t spoil it at all but you need to go watch it if you have the service. It was my favorite media of the summer by far.
And then somewhere near the middle of August Nina decided to come out to NYS to visit family! When she got the free time we decided to continue our hiking adventures begun in California by heading to Naples, NY, and Ithaca, NY. At Naples we wandered around Grimes Glen Park and enjoyed some delicious Pizza at a local place. Then we drove over to Cascadilla Gorge for an evening walk and a look at the waterfalls. Nina’s family dog Penny came along, and she really enjoyed the whole experience. As far as I can tell, so did Nina and me. It was some awesome hiking, if a little simple. But boy was it beautiful. Photos below!
And this was a majority of my summer. Mostly sitting in my room, mostly doing very little. One trip out west that was a blast, followed by more quarantine. Then Nina blew into town and made things interesting and fun for a few days with more outside adventures. And since then I have been working the Census and not doing much else.
I did, after a full year of growth, finally decide to cut my hair. I didn’t hate it long, but by a substantial margin I prefer it short. Maybe you have a different opinion? Let me know if you do. Maybe if everyone tells me my 70’s look was better I might try to go back to it.
There was also a wonderful weekend in which the entire family could be in the same place at the same time. Given all the craziness this year it was certainly a feat, but I was staying with the folks and Josie got away for a brief time from the city to come up and chill. We got to have a few meals together, we went up to Mexico Point and took that photo, and we all had ice cream on a warm summer evening to encapsulate the feelings of the season.
Overall the past six months of quarantine haven’t been great, but they certainly could have been worse. I’m about to begin another journey in the field of academics: I will be learning to speak Chinese before hopefully moving back to China next year. But between now and then I have some other plans that include studying online. If you want to know more come on back to AJourneySonder.com for the updates to read about my life as it moves forward!
Stay tuned…
So glad to see and hear more about your Summer adventures in and around Covid – and, even though it wasn’t always exciting, it was a joy for us to be able to spend some time with you.
Congratulations on your truly excellent adventures!!
Wonderful to have the opportunity to read about your journey again. Always enjoy it since I live vicariously through you. You have the same adventurous leanings that I always had before I got sick. So, yes, yes, yes….thank you! Ask your mother about the week we spent exploring state parks when on vacation in Eastern PA. Some big surprises were involved. Love to just get in the car and explore – no plans (because God always laughs at me when I make any plans) – just go and see where you end up. Big smiles from me when I read that is exactly what you were doing this past year. Great experience – thanks, again for sharing. BTW: I like your hair either way but always say it is the person who has the hair that should make the decision – how YOU feel about it is more important than what anyone else thinks.