Roads Not Taken
(For Now, Anyway) STORY AND PHOTOS BY JULIE FANSELOW
IT
was March 1, and I was riding high on a connecting flight from San Jose to Seattle. I had just spent five weeks in Guadalajara, Mexico, getting a certification to teach English as a foreign language, and I was proud of myself for mastering a new skill while navigating life in an intense, gritty city. Looking back, I was aware that the coronavirus had arrived on the West Coast, but I was only slightly alarmed by two people coughing nearby: one directly behind me, the other beside me. Mercifully, I didn’t catch a virus on that flight, and as I write this in late March, no one I know well has fallen ill—a fact I pray will remain true as
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the tragic health tolls of this crisis are tallied. But for many of us who live to travel, being unable to do so has been a tiny death of its own. Just a few weeks into the pandemic, I had to choose whether or not to scrap plans I had made to visit Boise, where I would see my daughter and volunteer at the annual Treefort Music Festival in late March. The very day I decided to cancel my flight, festival organizers announced the event would be postponed until this fall, so I knew I’d made the right decision. Yet the festival was incidental, and the real question remains: When will I get to hug my daughter again?
Our travel plans are often tightly bound to life events, and many trips have been forsaken this year amid circumstances far more painful than mine. How many weddings, memorial services, graduations, and vacationsof-a-lifetime have been canceled
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