But 2019 became 2020, the year of our marriage and departure. Our government reached the height of it’s dysfunction, we were forced to leave the home we built, and the pandemic began. Cities and countries and borders locked tight. Our jobs evaporated. Three elders in my Grandmother’s home died while someone on the television was telling my parents to disinfect every surface, every parcel, anything that entered the home. The virus was transmitted, they couldn’t quite say how, person-to-person. So we all looked at each other differently, suspiciously, from the recommended six-foot separation. Businesses and schools closed, and we went into hiding on our little mountain.

     Our flights abroad disappeared unreimbursed into an airline bankruptcy and my in-process passport stopped processing. News reports showed Italian soldiers erecting roadblocks and excavators opening mass graves under fields in New York City. Almost overnight the virus was in, taking lives in, every country.

     The dried hillsides came back with vigor. There were no cars on the roads or planes in the sky; the birdsong was deafening. Madeline and I retreated into a quiet, blissful time. My wedding band came in the post, then my suit, and, at last, her dress. Each was opened right there on the curb, we couldn’t wait. We had the mountain, the cabin, the orchard, the sea, no internet or television, and each other. We fell into healthy habits, loved one another, worked energetically through the spring on the conviction that the borders would open, at least for us, and we’d find a way. 

     We wore masks all the time, and it quickly felt normal. The same with empty shelves in the supermarket, with social distancing, Zoom meetings, misinformation. The President said a lot of nonsense; you couldn’t trust him.

     We planned, planned, planned. For everything. For a wedding, a route across the Silk Road, even a magazine, a radio show, a cookbook, a house, a family. None of it’s come true. When it does, it won’t be how we imagined. The car broke down one day outside of Guadalupe; while we waited we got a call. Our parents couldn’t risk flying to the wedding. Our best-laid plan. Well, we took a walk there on the beach, talked it through, turned it all around, called back.

     Rather than fly to Britain, we’d pack that car and drive across the country to be with them– we’d start a circumnavigation. California to California. Pacific to Pacific, overland. Into that wind we’d learn to tack, to gybe, to keep changing those plans, to keep moving.