Reflections: Quarantine, How do I love thee?

Reflections from the Publisher

Visiting Australia During the Pandemic

By James Fox-Smith

If you read the “Reflections” column in last month’s issue, then you’ll know I’m writing this time from about as far from Louisiana as it’s possible to get. If you didn’t see last month’s column, then what you missed was CR Managing Editor Jordan’s elegantly-wrought stand-in Reflections, which she wrote at the eleventh hour and under considerable duress, since the usual columnist—for the first time in twenty-six years and about three hundred issues—was nowhere to be found. Well, actually he was on a plane somewhere over the Middle East on his way to Australia, where a bit of a family emergency was unfolding. Then, and in the weeks since, I’ve been back in my childhood hometown of Melbourne, Australia, helping my parents following a pair of hospitalizations that have rocked their ability to live independently.

You don’t need a very firm grasp of geography to know that it’s a hell of a long way from Louisiana to Australia. In the best of times you must first get to a hub like L.A. or Dallas, before settling in for the fifteen-to-seventeen-hour flight across the Pacific, and these are most assuredly not the best of times. To travel to Australia right now, you must first convince the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs to grant you an exemption to its blanket international travel ban. And since struggling airlines aren’t in the habit of flying empty planes nine thousand miles to countries with closed borders, there aren’t many tickets available. In fact, there were no major carriers operating flights on the usual routes out of the West Coast of the US, which meant going around the other way. That meant not one but two fifteen-hour flights—the first from Dallas to Doha, Qatar, then another from Doha to Sydney. And trust me when I say that there’s not enough TV on Netflix to make that itinerary fly by. But it’s when you arrive at the (empty) airport that the weirdness really begins.

Since early in the pandemic, Australia has taken extreme measures to keep the virus at bay. There have been curfews, border closings, months-long mandatory lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing, and an effective shutdown of international travel in and out of the country. But for those bound and determined to come, there’s quarantine. This isn’t your wishy-washy “I-promise-to-stay-homeand-not-kiss-anyone-for-a-couple-weeks” quarantine. We’re talking “military-bus-from-airport-to-specially-designated-hotel-for-two-week-solitary-confinement”-type quarantine. Nothing says “Welcome to Australia” like being met at immigration by uniformed soldiers, frog-marched onto a bus, then driven off into the night—destination unknown. After driving around for awhile, the bus carrying the forty or so passengers from Qatar Flight 95 stopped in front of a Marriott near Sydney’s Circular Quay, whereupon we were laboriously checked in by PPE-swathed hotel staff and escorted to our rooms by more soldiers, to commence a fourteen-day quarantine.

Ever passed two weeks without seeing another human soul? It’s peculiar to say the least. For a few days there was some small novelty to passing whole days within a 10’ x 15’ space with noone to answer to but one’s self. There were articles to write, reading matter to catch up on, taxes to file. But after a week, when you’ve finished all the tasks at the bottom of the “to-do” list, called everyone you went to school with, and rendered yourself temporarily disabled by trying one too many YouTube yoga videos (because remember, you watched everything on Netflix on the plane coming over); when it’s 2 pm in the afternoon and everyone you know in America is asleep and you’ve still got eight hours to kill before you can reasonably go to bed … that’s when it gets weird. Mercifully the room had a view.

On the other side of this strange experience lies the undeniable reality that quarantining an entire population does actually work. On day fourteen, blinking like a badger emerging from hibernation, I exited the hotel into a Sydney afternoon teeming with maskless people strolling through Circular Quay, filing on and off trains and ferries, and piling into cafés and restaurants. It’s been the same in Melbourne. With essentially zero viral spread, the twenty five million or so people who live here are getting to enjoy life normally, albeit unencumbered by the usual throngs of international tourists. When meeting people, it’s been fun saying “Hi, I’m James and I’ve just arrived from America,” and watching them take three quick steps backwards. Getting a seat in a crowded bar has never been easier.

Arriving from free-wheeling, “notthat-good-at-rules” Louisiana, the contrast between the US and Australian responses to the pandemic has made the distance between the place I once called home, and the place I now do, seem greater in more ways than one. Right now, with a week to go before climbing onto the first of those two fifteen-hour flights that will bring me from my childhood home back to Louisiana, I’m finding myself pondering the nature of what makes a place “home” more than ever. You might think that two weeks alone in a quarantine hotel room would be enough to figure out an answer to that existential question after all. But perhaps it takes a lifetime.

Greetings from Down Under, from the Mr. Fox-Smiths.

James Fox-Smith