It has to be said. Some of our fellow countrymen are wimps.
They are afraid of a little mask, or what it represents to them beyond the wearing of what is at least a partial protection from an enemy unseen. They may say they are standing up for their “rights” as an American, making a stand against government intrusion, or not bowing to The Great Unidentified International Cabal.
Bull. With inalienable rights come inalienable responsibility. We do not have the right to murder, rape or rob others. By choosing to become Typhoid/COVID Mary, some Americans are effectively murdering their fellow citizens.
There is truth to the belief that a cloth mask may not give you 100% protection from every tiny invading virus. The best riposte I have heard to this line of reasoning is:
"I'm going to have a random person fire 100 rounds at you. You can stand out in the open, or you can stand behind that wall over there."
"What? I'm not standing behind that wall, it has some holes in it! I'd rather take my chances out in the open so I can see better."
Dumb.
Any combat veteran will tell you that you cannot know for certain that you will live through the battle. But taking every precaution you can — be alert, stay low, use ammo wisely, etc. — will give you an edge. Everything you can do, do.
Just because an enemy is unseen does not make it less an enemy. Ask anyone who has seen a comrade in arms slain by a sniper. COVID-19 is a sniper. Worse, it is an entire army of snipers. We need to take this threat seriously and stop being the willing carriers of this disease.
On a recent road trip, my wife and I avoided the big cities and instead enjoyed the smaller communities and rural areas of the Great American West. Perhaps because they are naturally more spread out, these places do not see the terrible tragedy of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and children struck down by the COVID sniper.
But they are beginning to.
I regret to report that in too many small communities we visited we were the only ones wearing a mask or staying physically some feet apart. People standing inches away asked us, when they heard we were from a relatively rural area, why we cared about masks in the fresh air. We were equally surprised by their nonchalant attitude. Unlike many cultures where this would be difficult for many people; in the US 3 feet or more is a typical distance for conversation with strangers anyway.
When I was an attaché in Myanmar (Burma) the average conversational distance was about 6-12 inches. It was always fun to watch western diplomats or military new to the country try to maintain their more comfortable 3 feet or so. This was considered quite rude by the Burmese, who like to be much closer. If they like you, they will touch your arm while speaking to you. The terror this engendered in newbies as the Burmese advanced and they retreated — until they hit a literal wall and merely sweated it out while these strangers(!) invaded their personal space.
It just is not that big an adjustment for Americans to go to 6 feet apart. Yet we saw a cavalier attitude that this was a big-city issue. Recent information shows that it was just a matter of time as Wyoming, western Colorado, et al are being hard hit during this second wave.
Of course, just as there are snipers shooting at us, so is there body armor we can wear. It is called a mask. Speaking from experience I can tell you it is lighter weight than body armor, does not make you as hot and sweaty as body armor and, because of its lighter weight, is not as fatiguing as body armor.
Such a simple solution to such a dangerous killer: wash hands, wear mask, distance when speaking. Repeat. Repeatedly.
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Moving on from what some of our fellow citizens may or may not be doing right, I am pleased to report the countryside is doing spectacularly well. Read on only if you want a recent travelogue rather than a national affairs article…
My wife and I just finished a 20-day autumn color trip through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. Two things:
God, this is a big country.
God, this is a beautiful country.
Our trip was COVID-smart. We needed to use or lose two banked timeshare weeks. We did one at our owned-week at Park City, UT, the other at Steamboat Springs, CO. This meant we only had to get food at a grocery store and, even at our interim hotels, we had a kitchen to do our own cooking if we chose to.
It was a wonderful epiphany to discover that American capitalism is working better than the gloomy headline-mongers would have us believe. Yes, many restaurants, retail stores, etc. have gone out of business. But even in a “good” year, something like 30% of small businesses fail in their first or subsequent years. Everywhere we went, take-out and delivery were available from on-the-ball restaurant owners, and we saw the same with the small-town museums and retail stores. Many were open, all were interesting, and most asked that people wear masks. (A few, still too many, were blasé about it.)
Never disparage some of these small museums that those who don’t do road trips would overlook as insignificant. Here are just two examples:
Fort Bridger, Wyoming is being brought back to life. While all but two of the log buildings are gone, this amazing and important stopover that kept the Oregon trail, the Mormon Trail and the California Trail emigrants re-stocked and gave them respite before the hardest part of their journey, has successfully restored much of the rest. After being a trading post and Mormon fort, the US Army took over; many of the stucco-type buildings remain from that time.
You are free to roam over every acre of the place and learn its fascinating history within the small museum. The mountain men who founded and populated the area had little or no problem adapting to the Amerindian cultures all around them. Only later, when it became an Army post established to resettle the various tribes, were there problems — all honestly chronicled and discussed. (One of the early laundresses for the Army there, Martha Jane Cannary, later went by the name of Calamity Jane.)
Just down the road, in Rock Springs, we entered the local museum. Who knew?? Most local residents would not work in the coal mines – and the Union Pacific wanted nothing to do with unionization – so a mélange of Slovakians, Serbians, Chinese, Japanese, Irish and more than 50 other nationalities worked and lived in Rock Springs, a veritable United Nations within the United States.
But not always. The city was also the site of one of the worst ethnic massacres in United States history in the 1880s as whites attacked and killed 28 Chinese immigrants and wounded many more whom they feared were taking their jobs in various occupations. This, too, is honestly chronicled and discussed.
Many of the current generation living there have no need to keep great-great-Grandma’s Serbian wedding dress or great-Grandad’s rusty old Colt so they have freely donated them to the local museum, which gets about 1/100th of the visitors it should. You want to see the melting pot that was America? Go ahead, try Rock Springs, Wyoming. Who would have thought it?
Both these, and many more, are just a few minutes time off Interstate 80, yet most people whizzing by taking happy-snaps of the amazing landscapes, but never take the time to detour for “the rest of the story.”
Speaking of the landscapes, the United States is a seriously big country. The west is interrupted by occasional cities that are linked by miles upon miles of endless vistas. We specifically took two “Wild Horse Refuge” self-guided tours over many miles of dusty, sometimes gravelly, mostly rutted, dirt roads with nary another car in sight from horizon to horizon.
The journey was worth it even though there was a dearth of horses visible during the midday, when we happened to make both drives. Probably not unusual – if I were a horse with a zillion square miles to roam, I probably would not be much interested in humans either. (An impression later disproven on this journey.) We only saw three wild horses in both reserves! But what beauties they were. This particular bad boy did a little prance for us – from afar – high-stepping it all the way as if he were trying out for the Lipizzaners. When we inched closer, however, to be within closer camera range he turned his back on us and refused to move. Stupid humans.
After traversing America’s *second* loneliest highway, from Rock Springs, WY to Sunbeam, CO, where we were the only car in Irish Canyon, we could walk right up and take a photo of petroglyphs. Thankfully, the vandals who might otherwise destroy this heritage given to us, would find this road too boring to take. As a result, the petroglyph below is readily accessible for our admiration and astonishment. This was not taken with a telephoto (but it is only about 12” high.)
The hiking was superb at both our destinations. One of us is an ocean and mountain person and we are both running water and mountain people. It was fall – nice and crisp in the mornings in the high country, warming nicely as we got into the hikes.
20 minute drive from Park City
15 minute drive from Steamboat
We left Steamboat to begin our purposely slow-paced journey home. Our first stop was breakfast at the Shooters Grille in Rifle, Colorado. Rifle has not yet been changed by an influx of city folk who want to “get away from the city but make everything just like the place they were trying to get away from.” Further, like most of sparsely-settled western Colorado and unlike the various People’s Republics east of the Front Range (!), these are people who need their weapons as tools for their farming and ranching activities. Concealed carry is legal, as is open carry. Shooters Grille must be one of the safest places to dine in the country – all the waitresses open carry and stay current with range time. Here was our booth there:
Also in Rifle, CO…
We know the Western United States. This was not our first road-eo. Still, every single trip we find all-new vistas, all-new wonders, all-new places. It is Big Sky Country from Montana to New Mexico, Nevada to the Dakotas.
One surprise, given that we often take fall trips to avoid crowds. Not in the time of Covid. We were astonished at the higher number of crowds than we expected once we left our meandering route of loneliest highways and visited national parks and drove the interstate highways. If we had kids I imagine, with home schooling, we too would be taking them to get the best education they could – by seeing the grandeur of this great nation. Without learning government or civics (or civility or critical thinking, but that’s for another article) in school, let them see e pluribus unum for themselves.
By getting up early, however, we still saw so much before others inundated the national parks and scenic byways. Colorado National Monument, just 5 miles off I-70, should be a National Park. We arrived late in the day to see this…
…and this:
…and went back early the next morning to meet these magnificent ladies and gentlemen:
We went the back way to Arches NP which, it being a weekend and most kids being home-schooled, had reached capacity and was not accepting any more visitors (yes!), so we went on to Canyonlands instead and felt the awe of the power of Nature and Time to sculpt breathtaking vistas that lead one’s thoughts to the elemental and the eternal.
Along the way this trip, we saw bear, coyote and deer, but that is not unusual for us. We see them in our backyard in the high country of Tahoe all the time. But we also saw moose, badger, antelope, wild horse, and desert bighorn. We are not on this earth alone and we need to respect, care about and, when necessary, care *for* our brothers and sisters of other species.
*About those wild horse refuges… we saw 3 horses in the official refuges, but coming home on what *used* to be “America’s loneliest highway,” US 50, we saw scores of wild horses ‘round every bend. They were not in an official refuge. They were just living free and taking advantage of the (limited) food and water out there. There is a lot of land in Nevada.
The BLM puts up barbed wire on public lands fronting Hwy 50 to prevent animal deaths. I am not saying these are wild horses since they came from a half mile away when I worked my way down a steep embankment to say hello. But I don’t know any rancher who would leave their horses unbranded and unshod in that terrain. Maybe they were thinking I had food — but after sniffing me for food of which, alas, I had none, they still stayed a long time for a little inter-species conversation and physical contact.
As any trip through the American West will remind you, there is a lot of wildlife — and a lot of country — in this country.
© 2020 JL Shaefer