March Madness

March 19, 2020

Over the past month, I have been traveling—three different trips. The change in travel over this month is astounding.

My first trip was from February 18–March 1 to New Orleans to attend Mardi Gras for the first time in 40+ years. Crowds were out in the street, restaurants were full, and while the news broadcasts were talking about the coronavirus, no one was paying any attention. Mardi Gras 2020 was unusual, but for reasons having nothing to do with the coronavirus. The collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel on Canal Street—something I hadn’t heard about until I got to New Orleans—meant that traditional parade routes had to be changed. And the deaths of two parade spectators in two different incidents involving parade floats during the days leading up to Fat Tuesday prompted the mayor of New Orleans to order changes to floats—but not to cancel parades. So, despite these disrupting occurrences, Mardi Gras proceeded as usual until Ash Wednesday. I stayed on in New Orleans for a few extra days to sample more fabulous restaurants, visit the art museum and sculpture garden, and check out independent bookstores. Everything was open, everything going full swing. Coronavirus? Bah, humbug, seemed to be the general opinion.

Just four days after returning to Houston, I was scheduled to represent Bayou City Press at the first of two important conferences. The annual meeting of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs), was held in San Antonio from March 5–7. Billed as the largest annual writers’ conference in the USA, the AWP conference schedule was packed with panels I wanted to attend. The night before I departed Houston, I went online to make final panel selections. To my dismay, I saw that quite a number of panels had been canceled, but there were still plenty of panels from which to choose. Selecting from among the remaining events, I printed out my proposed schedule.

On Thursday morning, upon entering the extremely large San Antonio convention center, I asked myself Where is everyone? The arrival and registration hall was deserted. This first view of the conference was a harbinger of what was to come. In just four days, public attitudes had changed. San Antonio was reporting just one case of confirmed coronavirus, but that seemed enough to scare away many who had planned to attend.

It took me a while to find the room for my first panel, so I walked in a bit late. As I walked in, a few people were exiting. A man was standing up in the front of the room. He said, “Look, we’re all here anyway. Why don’t we just go ahead and talk among ourselves about the topic?” So that’s what we did. That man and an audience member who works in marketing served as panelists and responded to questions and comments from the audience. At some point during the panel, my writing colleague from Houston, Sean Carroll, used the term “pancake taco,” and subsequently it was suggested that we use #PancakeTaco as our Twitter handle for this pop-up panel. The discussion and comments were quite good, and I left the panel feeling that, even if the panelists had not shown up, the conference participants had made the session worthwhile.

On to my second session, which was a ten-minute walk away, given the size of the convention center. When I walked into the session room, it was the same story—there were lots of people in the audience, but no one seated behind the panelists’ table. When it became clear that no panelists were going to appear, I took the initiative and stood up. “Look,” I said, “the same thing happened at my last panel. A gentleman suggested we just continue, with the audience making up the panel. I’m sure we have enough people among us with publishing experience. Why don’t we just go ahead?” The audience seemed to agree, so I asked for audience members working in publishing to volunteer to be panelists. Three women stood up. I invited them to come up to the front of the room and take chairs behind the panelists’ table. They did, I acted as moderator, and we began. Each of the pop-up panelists introduced herself and explained what she was doing as far as opening up publishing possibilities for women (the topic of the session). We then opened the session for questions. A woman in the back of the room spoke what she has been doing to attract more minority submissions. Since we didn’t have a minority panelist, I invited her to join us at the panelists’ table, which she did. We now had a full panel, with me as moderator. As the panel progressed, I suggested, using two words that had come up during the discussion as our Twitter handle, so the panel was #MarginalizedCoyotes. Again, it was a lively session, one that I thought was worthwhile. At the end, I got a photo of the five of us panelists.

During conference breaks, I went down and met with Alan Bourgeois of Author’s Marketing Guild. My new book, Savoring the Camino de Santiago, was being displayed and sold from his table. We chatted, and I got to know Alan a bit better.

Scuttlebutt at the conference said there had been 12,000 registered participants, but all but 2,000 had cancelled. I can definitely say that more than half of the panels were canceled. It got to the point that after I went to one cancelled panel, then another, I just walked in the hall until I found a panel—any panel—that was meeting and went in and listened. Even on topics which didn’t initially attract me, I found that I learned something and felt good about attending.

Because of the dismal turn out of the AWP conference, I emailed the coordinator of the American Friends on the Camino “Gathering,” which I was scheduled to attend March 12–15, to make sure the Gathering was still going forward. “Yes,” Sara responded immediately, “we’re on. We’ve only had three cancellations so far.” So, I packed my bags again, this time for the second of the two important conferences I had planned to attend in March. The Gathering was being held at Zephyr Point on Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side of the state border. Flights to Sacramento from Houston were more numerous and with better schedules than flights into Reno, so I had opted to fly into Sacramento and rent a car to drive to the Gathering. This proved to be a fateful decision. I had seen on the weather channel that “snow flurries” might happen, but flurries didn’t scare me. It has around 80 degrees in Houston, so it was hard for me to imagine snow.

The Houston airport was bustling. My flight to Sacramento was almost full. If people were worried about the coronavirus, you couldn’t prove it by what I saw. Travel seemed to be proceeding as usual.

The journey from the Sacramento airport to the conference site only took me about two and a half hours, even though it was up a twisty mountain road. Some snow, but not much, still blanketed the shady sides of the road as I progressed up the mountain. I got to the meeting site in good time, still in the daylight, but the Zephyr Point Conference Center was not laid out in a logical manner, and I couldn’t find my assigned room before the scheduled first activity.

The first conference events were great, but I was distracted by not knowing when or how I was going to find my room. Conference attendance was down. The “only three cancellations” had morphed into many more. Conference organizers said there were 150 people present, but I think 120 was closer to the mark. Interestingly, the concerns expressed by the organizers had nothing to do with the coronavirus, but rather everything to do with the weather. We were urged to “elbow bump” rather than shake hands or hug, but mostly we just proceeded as normal.

So it was after the welcome reception, after the group photo, after dinner, after conference opening remarks, and after the first night’s evening entertainment before I finally stumbled around in the dark trying to find my room—which of course turned out to be the furthest possible distance away from the check-in area, with no unloading site and many stairs.

Since I was carrying many copies of my book, Savoring the Camino, to sell to participants, my suitcases were very, very heavy. I tried to map the way to my room with as few steps possible, but I didn’t make it to my room until after 9 PM. My roommate was there. She thought I was a “no-show” and had spread her belongings around the room. We regrouped, and I fell into bed right away.

On Friday morning, I awoke eager for the first session to start. The weather was unexpectedly nice, with beautiful views of the lake and encircling mountains through the conference room windows. Vendors like me, most selling books or essential oils or other natural products, were placed outside on the balcony, from where we could step into the meeting room when sessions began.

Sometime during that day, the president of the board of American Pilgrims on the Camino announced that weather conditions were worsening. The forecast for the rest of the weekend, and on into the next week, were poor. There was a window of opportunity to leave that night, so those who could do so might want to leave after the Friday evening events, to get down from the mountain while the roads were still open. Over the course of the day, the whole schedule for Friday and Saturday was reconfigured to try to cram in as much as possible on Friday. Beloved parts of the schedule, such as a silent auction and raffle, were moved up to that evening.

I thought hard about leaving Friday evening. I had just gotten there, my first Gathering, and to leave after only one day would be a big sacrifice. I called United Airlines to see if I could move up my flight, and was told that the wait time to speak to someone was two hours. I didn’t want to wait on hold for two hours and miss the Gathering. If I left, it would be a departure at 9 PM or later. It also meant I would have to drive on a dark, winding, mountainous, snowy road with which I was not unfamiliar. I elected to stay until Saturday to see how things developed.

The printed schedule was out the window starting on Friday morning. News reports about the weather—not coronavirus—were eagerly sought. With no television in the guest rooms, we had to go to the internet to seek weather updates. On Saturday morning we got a look at who remained. About 50 of us were still in attendance.

Some panelists who had not departed Friday night were asked to make second presentations, to cover for the panelists who had not come or who had left. As for the sessions, I particularly liked the ones focusing on history. The chair of American Pilgrims again suggested we might want to take advantage of a window of opportunity and go home on Saturday afternoon. I thought about it, and I again elected to stay another day.

By Sunday morning the snow had set in for real. It was, indeed, a blizzard, a blizzard for which I was not prepared. Because of weight, I had not packed boots or a heavy coat. I did have layers I could don, and my pilgrim hat, complete with a cockleshell, symbol of the Camino de Santiago, kept the snow off my head. The conference organizers, having maintained all along with the conference would continue through until its scheduled conclusion on Sunday afternoon, now said that the conference was cancelled. They were leaving, and we should too, though we could stay overnight Sunday if we preferred to wait another day (or more) to see if the weather cleared.

That settled it for me. With no conference underway, it was time to get out of Dodge. I went out to the car park and looked at my rental car, which was buried in about three feet of snow. Of course there was no ice scraper or snow remover tool in the vehicle. One of the things I had promised myself after my last winter in Washington, DC, was never to shovel a car out of the snow again. But here I was, having to do just that, and without the proper tools. As is said, Woman proposes but God disposes. Julio, a conference participant with whom I had talked quite a lot, was in even worse shape. His sedan had neither 4-wheel drive nor snow chains, a requirement for driving on mountainous roads once snow started. He borrowed a shovel from the conference center and disinterred his car, then gave me the shovel to use on my car. He started off, but was back quickly—his car couldn’t manage the slopes. Julio asked me to drive him down to the Safeway to buy chains, which I did after finishing digging my car out.

That short drive down to the Safeway gave me confidence that my rented, small SUV could handle the snow. Back at the Zephyr Point Conference Center, I loaded my still-heavy bags into the car and took off for Sacramento. I say “took off,” but I should say “crawled.” The first 12 miles were slow, but the traffic was moving. And then, for no discernable reason, the traffic came to a dead halt. I sat, and sat, and sat in my vehicle, turning the engine on and off to defrost the windshield and search for news. Cars in front and behind me also sat there waiting. Occasionally a vehicle would pull out of line and turn around, heading where? Eventually I got out of my SUV and talked to the couple in the car behind me, who had had an opportunity to talk with a passing policeman. The policeman said the wait might be as long as 10 hours or even longer.

My flight to Houston was on Monday afternoon, so I decided that waiting was just the best thing to do. In the end, a drive that had taken a little over two hours going up the mountain took more than 14 hours to get down. And the irony of course was that I had not departed on Friday evening in large part because I did not want to drive down a treacherous road at night, but in the end that is just what I had to do. Between the long, long wait while the road was closed, and the subsequent creeping down the mountain road at five or 10 mph, I didn’t check into my motel until 12:30 AM on Monday morning.

The Sacramento Airport on Monday was a changed place. While I had been isolated in the mountains for three days, attitudes had clearly changed. The airport was almost deserted. No one was in the security line. Hardly anyone was in the airport. It was so pleasurable to whiz my way through the checkpoints and onto the plane. “This,” I thought, “is what travel must have felt like in the past. Just a select few flying.”

I am now back at home, with an itch in my throat. Have I caught the coronavirus? Well, if I have, it wouldn’t be unexpected. Despite the warnings on the airwaves, I persisted in going to Mardi Gras, went to the AWP conference when the vast majority of registered participants cancelled, and continued on to the Gathering despite the increased shrillness of the warnings. I guess it’s just me. If I had allowed warnings to scare me, I wouldn’t have traveled all over Europe by myself as a young woman, wouldn’t have volunteered to serve in Guatemala during the Central American wars or in Colombia during the drug war, wouldn’t have stuck out Hurricane Harvey in Houston. I am hoping it is just a cold I have contracted, but if it is the coronavirus I guess that is my fate as a traveling woman.

I have now self-quarantined myself for the next two weeks, so the only traveling I will be doing will be the via the pages of books. At least I made it back home and can luxuriate by reading in bed and spending time with my cats.