Open Roads, Closed Doors
By Andrew Dendy
Act I: The Promised Land
Mid-March, 2020. A time I am sure we all remember - the COVID-19 lockdown shaped the trajectory of billions of people’s lives. We will be bringing it up at family gatherings, friendly reunions, and parties for decades to come. “Where were you when shit hit the fan?”
Watchmen Campground in Zion National Park is toward the south end of Springdale, the small town that hosts the park’s many patrons each year. One of my best friends and I had set up camp here sometime around March 11th, 2020. (Spring Break for Auburn University).
It was tranquil, temperatures in the high 60s and breezy. We had perfect views of the striated rock walls painted naturally in orange, brown, and beige hues; peppered with desert greenery and circumvented by all the indigenous bird species that call Zion home.
The author (left) in Zion National Park, Utah.
The modernization of Zion via the Springdale community has made it somewhat cushy… We had plenty of cell service and got craft beers and elk burgers at a trendy restaurant in town.
COVID was definitely on our radar for months prior to this. Mason and I were in our fifth and final year of college, we both encountered changes in our academic path and were taking advantage of one more Spring Break before we graduated to the reality of corporate servitude.
Scrolling through MSNBC and Politico articles with startling analytics being displayed, we were definitely getting nervous about the state of things. The peril was capitalized by the fact that we had chosen to take this 1800-mile trip by car.
Our reward for car-living for a week was going to be an air-conditioned stay in the town of Fairfax, AZ on our way back home, where we would enjoy the food and drink the hip mountain town had to offer before grinding our way back to the Southeast. An ER nurse happened to be our host, and as we settled into our tent the night before our trip to Fairfax, we received a message from her through the Airbnb app.
Her message was calm and cordial, saying we could still come if we wanted to, but she was advising against it as she had been exposed to COVID patients. After a week of scanning infection rate charts on our phones, our families texting us with concerns, this was an extremely poignant moment. We got a glimpse of what our world was about to turn into.
We decided to bail on the Airbnb and head home a day early. The next sign of dystopia was an email from the university, stating we would not be returning to campus, and the rest of our semester would be administered through online classes.
Our first brush with the public since being on the open road was at a suburban Chick-Fil-A in Amarillo, TX.
It was eerie. The line to order had been completely altered so as to avoid close distances, employees were huddled by the condiment station and in the bathroom, wiping down every little thing we would touch as soon as we left the area. There were lots of families there, all nervously trying to act normal—the atmosphere indicated we all knew this would be the last time we ate inside the holy chicken restaurant for a while. The last supper.
We received so many phone calls from our parents during that 29-hour car ride back to Alabama, stopping in Oklahoma City to endure the most ominous stay in a hotel room I’ve ever experienced. The walls were melting with visions of an uncontrollable virus free-floating through the air. The sight of the water fountain in the lobby made me want to put on a hazmat suit.
The phone calls became more worrying. “We need you to stop and pick up toilet paper—people are hoarding it, and the stores can’t keep up inventory.” My parents had been taking care of my mother’s parents for over a decade, in one way or the other, and such daily amenities not being available was a nightmarish scenario for them. Unfortunately, Oklahoma and Arkansas are as full of insensible people as Alabama, and we were unable to save the day from our remote location.
This cascading series of events as we drove across the country was like being in the swell of a crashing wave. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being on the run. Cross-country road trips come with their own psychological battles, so the added spice of a global pandemic’s impending doom was a quietly harrowing experience.
Quiet. A quality Mason and I share. We are both fairly softspoken, and we remained that way throughout the journey back even with all the signs of terror popping up on the lock screens of our phones. Just internal panicking, very healthy.
It’s kind of sad to experience the hysteria of a pandemic while driving through the American landscape. Seeing New Mexico’s mesas turn into grasslands and rolling hills of Texas, the windmill forests of Oklahoma, stumbling into the Ozarks’ greenery in Arkansas, and crossing the bridge over the Mississippi River into Memphis as the gateway to the Southeast, which has always been home.
I was perplexed by how beautiful my surroundings were despite the awful things I was having to read about, hear about, and prepare for.
Act II: The Doubt
By the time I got to my apartment in Auburn, it was already a ghost town, and I got out of Dodge to recluse with my parents as soon as the sun rose the next day.
School was a joke from here on, I easily finished out my last semester and Auburn sent me a box of superficial shit commiserating my wonderful achievement. The task at hand was clearly to stay physically and mentally healthy and try to maintain a sense of community at a distance.
At home during the pandemic.
The stress that I once experienced during a challenging Information Systems Management curriculum shifted to that of needing a job. I was doubtful that the market would be hot with business shutting their doors. I was hanging on to the notion that Big Tech’s heart would keep pumping blood (and money), to professionals like me during the unprecedented times.
I feverishly shot applications into the voids of LinkedIn and Indeed as I sat in the bay window of my family’s kitchen, praying to the filter gods that my resume got siphoned onto a human being’s desk.
My childhood home, where my parents still reside, is nestled in a cul de sac of a suburb in Huntsville, North Alabama. A small creek runs behind the heavily shaded backyard. Out the front door you’re greeted by the backside of Monte Sano Mountain on the horizon.
It was a good place to grow up, and a good place to be quarantined for a few months. I spent my time there sweating, playing with the dog, worrying with my parents, and discussing the political climate over drinks on the back patio—so much was unknown back then.
Waking up to protests and riots on TV, yearning for news on vaccines, horrified by the numbers and charts flashing on the screen. We were unified in our strong sense of family and our common values.
Every day was kind of a round table of keeping each other sane through it all, which isn’t all that fundamentally different than the way we supported each other in previous stages of life.
My mom and dad had been taking care of my grandparents for many years already before the pandemic hit. They both battled long-term health issues. They needed groceries delivered, pill calendars filled. This would soon become a precarious task, with a disease floating around that tended to take the lives of the elderly.
These were the two things I juggled mentally on a daily basis. Obviously, I worried about my own health and my parents’ health, but my “next steps” and my grandparents were what I really fixated on.
Act III: The Commencement
Video chats with the family during quarantine.
The more I’ve meditated on this, the more it kind of begins to feel like they are tied together inherently. My grandmother, Sport, was a beautiful and caring woman. She and her husband (Poppy, to us grandkids), were extremely good with their finances and were always passing down lessons about how to take care of your money, and in turn, take care of yourself.
Poppy was very invested in how my education was going and what I wanted to do with my life, even when he had begun to dwindle a bit. Sitting in his recliner with the TV at jet plane volume, he’d still always ask me questions regarding my plans for a career within minutes of me sitting next to him—offering guidance and encouragement.
On May 5th, the Tuesday after I graduated, I got a call while driving to the store that awarded me my first position in the corporate world. I’d be relocating to Birmingham, Alabama to work from home in hopes of a short pandemic and eventually moving into the office there. (I work from home permanently now and live in Asheville, North Carolina).
I called my grandparents, and they were as elated as they possibly could be, softly cheering for me over the phone and telling me they knew I could do it the whole time.
On my last day in Huntsville, a 5’ x 8’ U-Haul already latched to my 4Runner, I visited my grandmother in a hospice care center.
The author holds his grandmother’s hand in the final moments of her life.
She was barely conscious, on her way out of the world after fighting ferociously against her ailments. She had primary sclerosing cholangitis for over a decade, a rare liver disease with no known cause. She went through treatment, but it isn’t curable at this time.
I sat at her bedside, holding her frail hand in mine. I could feel her squeezing all her body’s remaining energy into my palm, her skin was jaundiced to an extreme shade of yellow. The contrast of our skin tones made it hard to fathom we shared blood, but I felt our spirits remained kindred in that moment of embrace.
She was still able to hear, and I spoke gently to her, telling her how much I loved her. With a sudden surge, she stirred awake and whimpered out, “I love you,” and was soon again unconscious. My mom was in the room, and we began to weep. She told me: “You did it,” through her soft tears.
It was probably the most stirring moment of my life, but soon after, I was back on the road, driving towards a new leaf.
We lost both Sport and Poppy in 2020, the year of the lockdown, one within a few months of the other. It came with a sad sort of relief for our family. It was good to know they were at peace, but hard to lose them at the same time. That kind of thing leaves a big hole.
My mom and dad had retired from the unfortunate but meaningful task of caretaker for people they loved (the new task being tending to the home and estate was left behind). At both funerals, my mom stood strong in front of a small audience of my father, sister, our pastor, a few close family friends, and myself, delivering the most beautiful reflections on her parents’ lives and the way they impacted ours.
It captured the present situation. It’s us four now, living our lives not only as parents and children, but as friends. All in our own places with our own goals, but with a comforting connection to carry us through whatever hardships lie ahead.
Act IV: The Reflection
My parents are still in Huntsville, my sister is in Nashville, and I’m in Asheville. My mother often texts us after a visit and says, “We’re all back in our ‘ville’s!”.
The history of the suffix (-ville) became increasingly common after the American Revolution. While originally it was often used in to name a location in honor of an individual (ex. Louisville, Kentucky, after King Louis of France XVI), soon it simply came to describe a place in which people settled.
The revolution of the pandemic took me down so many roads, closing many doors and opening many new ones, all over the past two and a half years. This all lead to the development of my own ‘ville, and I think most of us who have lived through this time can probably say the same.
The ‘ville of a new career, a new family layout, and a new perception of the delicate fabrics of our national and global community.
Andrew Dendy is a young professional balancing an active lifestyle with his work-from-home career. He enjoys running, weight training, playing the drums, the outdoors, and the company of friends.
