Prologue
Have you traveled much lately? By “lately,” I mean in the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. I confess to not having ventured far between the springs of COVID, what with all the restrictions and requirements that began in March, 2020. But fully “Pfizered” and packin’ a mask in case I encounter a mandate of some sort, I now venture about almost as freely as I did in those blissful pre-pandemic years.
The pandemic shut down our primitive nomadic heritage. We were from the start wanderers driven by wondering: What else is there? Where else is there? Traveling, we left Africa and spread around the planet and now spread, also, off the planet, soon, maybe even to wander around Mars and definitely to re-wander the moon.
Oh! Sure, we could do our wandering via technology. We’re on Mars that way as I write, roving about and even helicoptering over the Red Planet. And we’ve even traveled to the ocean depths in semi-autonomous robots, our wired avatars. But as various writers, beginning with Thomas à Kempis in the nineteenth century and in sundry renditions by others in the twentieth century, have said, “Wherever you go, there you are” From place to place, we find ourselves: “find” in the sense of self-discovery and in the sense of “a continuum of Self.” We can change the place and still find the one constant: Who we are.
Plus, there’s nothing like being there. Nothing like being everywhere or having been almost everywhere. To label someone “well-traveled” is to acknowledge his or her “cosmopolitanism.” And now with excess wealth and multiple conveyances, we have transformed travel from need into a manifestation of will. We don’t need to move about in search of food and shelter as our ancient nomadic ancestors did. We travel for the sake of travel.
Travelogue
I-77 is a north-south river of cement that in West Virginia overlies the Appalachian Plateau before cutting through the Valley and Ridge’s folded mountains and running over the ancient and metamorphosed rocks of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. On the southeastern side of that billion-year-old mountain ridge in Virginia, the highway cascades toward North Carolina and affords a scenic eastward view of the adjacent Piedmont and distant Upper Coastal Plain.
Seemingly fixed immovably in place, the rocks that make up the Blue Ridge were themselves once ancient travelers whose origins lay in a long-gone Iapetus Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. As they moved on the conveyor belt of a spreading seafloor, they eventually collided with juvenile North America, today’s East Coast a South Coast at the time, the baby continent lying on its side. Both juvenile North America and the Blue Ridge met as travelers, once strangers to each other, but since their meeting, long-term traveling companions now riding on the North American Plate.
The Blue Ridge is an allochthonous terrane, or allochthon, a section of Earth’s crust displaced and subsequently emplaced by the planet’s active tectonics. Crustal collisions during emplacement generated both heat and pressure sufficient to change its rocks, just as our meeting strangers changes us, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes radically, but always crystallizing something from the encounter. Thus, in melding with the young continent, those much older original rocks of the Blue Ridge underwent metamorphosis. That cascade of I-77 falls over such metamorphic rocks, crystalline enough to offer morning travelers a second visual treat opposite the eastward view. The morning sun reflects off dewey crystals in the road cut on the northwestern side of the highway—that is, when upslope fogs do not shroud the mountain.
As a traveler, I have both driven along and crossed the ridge many times, often stopping to sample rocks and local culture. On my latest “pandemic” trip on I-77, my spouse and l did what many, if not all travelers do: stopped at rest stops along the way to stretch legs and use public facilities. Resuming our journey after one stop, she mentioned a conversation she heard in the women’s restroom between a mother and her young daughter.
Dialogue
Mother: “When we get home, we’re going to schedule that hair appointment. What style do you want to get?” Was the comment made so that others could hear the level of sophistication the child had attained?
The little girl, maybe five, responded by holding some of her hair at her shoulder, saying: “I want this,” presumably meaning the length she wanted. Precocious child, indeed, already aware of fashion and already taking charge of her life. Except…
And then my wife said: “The little girl was in bare feet. Bare feet in a public restroom at any time isn’t a good idea, but in a time of pandemic, in a time when most people in the American South are running a bit scared of the Delta variant the government says is spreading rapidly, that’s about as far from prudent parenting as one can get. Why wasn’t that part of the girl’s intellectual development? If we teach invisible tooth fairies and haute couture, can’t we also teach invisible bacteria and viruses?”
Monologue
I’m wondering whether our concerns were unnecessary. Maybe she and I were over-reacting. It is possible that the little girl suffered no ill effects from walking barefoot in a women’s restroom. Of course, it is also possible that she carried millions of bacteria back to her car, where she might have touched her feet as she rode and then stuck her fingers in her mouth or nostril or handled some food. Yuck. My thinking, however, is probably influenced by a year-plus barrage of messages about sanitizing everything and standing six feet from other feet—especially bare feet that have traipsed across a public bathroom floor. It is also possible that any bacteria the girl might have put on her body made her sick temporarily and allowed her to build up immunity that is lost in mandated isolation. If so, then maybe a walk barefoot through a public bathroom might be good for everyone. But I don’t think so.
Nevertheless, when I think of what I have seen in other countries, I recognize that although I would almost certainly succumb to Montezuma’s revenge or to any other water-borne microorganism currently alien to my body, I would likely develop some level of immunity through exposure as long as that organism wasn’t inescapably lethal. Truly deadly organisms and viruses do, in fact, pose a threat if they latch onto a little girl whose body might not have the time to develop defenses.
When we travel, even on our home planet, we risk running into organisms both large and small that can jeopardize our safety. No doubt in peopling the planet, millions of our forebears—or “fore-bares”— died by “walking barefoot,” that is, unprotected in strange places where we were ill-prepared alien intruders, succumbing like H. G. Wells’s Martians to invisible native organisms.
Gosh, living and traveling is a risky business, really risky. Wear your shoes, and watch where you step.
Analog(ue)
At times, all of us step in “it.” As evidenced by our having this little chat, however, you and I have survived by avoiding or protecting ourselves from ostensible and invisible threats. Our survival is remarkable in the context of the latter. All those unseen critters make living very much like walking barefoot through an unlighted public restroom.
One wonders, then, why anyone would purposefully make a microorganism, even an “inert” one, that might wander the planet on the bodies of human travelers to infect humans everywhere. What possible gain is there in biological warfare, since the inventors are themselves human and thus susceptible to an infection of their own making? Can you imagine being one of those early humans set to leave Africa saying, “You know, we don’t really know what’s out there, maybe unknown beings that can harm us. ‘There be dragons,’ I’ve heard. But, hey, here’s an idea, in case the world isn’t dangerous enough, why don’t we make a new dangerous critter to increase our risk? I think that’s a good idea. What do you think? It isn’t inevitable that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ We can avoid our self-made risks.”
Didn’t some of the World War I German soldiers say that about poison gas right before the wind shifted? Did the people of Wuhan utter the same confidence about their lab and their “gain-of-function” research on bat viruses?
Even traveling rocks are subject to change and destruction. The Blue Ridge survived, however, by hardship, by being tested during ineluctable convergence as it was welded onto nascent North America in a process that involved earthquakes, faulting, crushing, warping, overthrusting, and superheating that baked them into crystalline stone; other terranes weren’t so lucky, undergoing not just deformation, but destructive subduction. They, like our ancient traveling ancestors and our 2020-2021 traveling companions, now lie buried.
Being a stranger in a strange land comes with no guarantees. Every journey comes with risks.
Epilogue
Who am I to judge a mother who lets her five-year-old walk barefoot in a restroom? But the juxtaposition of a traveling young girl walking barefoot in a crowded public restroom along I-77 and the enduring ancient traveling rocks of the Blue Ridge hardened against the onslaught of destructive natural forces over a billion years seems to beg a comment of some sort, if not in judgment, then in philosophical musing.
There’s as much risk in staying put as there is in wandering because we share a planet with accidental and purposeful travelers inimical to our health whose paths cross ours. That we choose to add moveable new risks like COVID to those already in the inventory of dangers indicates that regardless of our claims on wisdom, we’re not really wise. Risk comes our way whether we’re stationary or mobile.
And so, again I mention that this is not our practice life. Now, if I could just convince that mother that her little girl requires guidance and protection, knowledge and understanding, and prudence, her daughter might live a long life regardless of the strangers and strange organisms she might encounter. Or if I could just convince those who devote their lives to inventing new dangers for the sake of some government’s military leaders that all future little girls depend on those in charge to oversee their safety by protecting them from unnecessary risks, then only the naturally occurring risks would be the focus of our concerns. Like the collision between the ancient Blue Ridge and developing North America, natural risks are ineluctable. And like those melded crustal units, people have and will continue survive collisions with strangers, albeit in altered form. As a species, we have already crystallized our defenses against many threats, but crystals take time to grow. The Blue Ridge’s rocks had tens of millions of years to crystallize through metamorphosis. How much time does a little girl have? How much time do you have?
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