JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 19

We here in Connecticut are learning to live with Covid19. While the virus is not our friend, we seem to have reached some sort of rapprochement with it. Most the state’s citizens wear masks in public places and observe social distancing mandates, without feeling...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #16

I recently received an email from someone who had read “The Longest Road”, the book I published several years ago describing an overland voyage Leslie and I made from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The purpose of that...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #15

The family vacation and the road trip — two American institutions — are attended by a certain tension during this year of pandemic. Will the people at the next gas station or convenience store, in the next town or state, be wearing masks and practicing...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #14

A post office delivery driver rang the doorbell at a little past nine this morning. In her hands was a cardboard box with the return address for the Edwin Bennett Funeral Home in Scarsdale, N.Y. and a sticker that read, in small type, United States Postal Service, and...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #10

We arrived in Connecticut yesterday evening at six, after driving 10 hours a day for four days. We covered 2,459 miles through 12 states and over nine major rivers: the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Cimarron, Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. I...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #7

You can feel removed from the tumult convulsing the country in this small Arizona town, nestled in a valley between the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains, about 60 miles southeast of Tucson and 18 miles north of the Mexican border. No hordes of protestors surging...