Reporter's notebook: A pandemic road trip through the United States

• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Author: SETH J. FRANTZMAN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

It's all about the timing. Several months before a flight you have to actually book the flight. But you don't know what will happen during those months. Maybe there will be a new pandemic we didn't know about, part of the already existing pandemic we have to live in.

The media sources fill our head with stories of dread – what new evils may come from this existing plague, underscored by headlines about various new bureaucratic hurdles for the most basic things.

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Air travel wasn't particularly pleasant before this whole experience. The ever-decreasing sizes of seats and legroom made travel feel more like navigating in human sardine cans than the luxurious air travel we are told once existed in the 1960s. As if to remind us, the airlines still tell us not to smoke. When was the last time people smoked on an airline? Not in most people's living memory. When was the last time there was a pandemic? Also not in living memory.

It was into that maelstrom I went, once again like in Henry V "once more into the breach," with the COVID test a few days before flying, hoping to be negative, and then wondering about the aisle seat I'd chosen on my United Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner, which ferries people from Tel Aviv to Newark every day. It's a good flight in general because it leaves late at night and gets you in at 4 a.m. local time. Not much is open at that hour, but you can find a Dunkin' Donuts at the airport, which is a good way to begin the "return" to America that one experiences when arriving.

I was going to the United States for only the second time since the pandemic. I had decided to make this a trip to see family, rather than my usual routine before the plague which would have involved business and scheduled talks and meetings. No family could come with me because one of the added evils of the pandemic is that children would face quarantine upon return. Adults returning to Israel with their two vaccinations and booster shot from Pfizer don't face the quarantine. So the adult is privileged. The children less so.

Media reports about the US these days are often filled with hysteria – from stories of Haitian migrants arriving en masse to the border, to lurid tales of the "unvaccinated" and the "pandemic of the unvaccinated." What this means is that living outside the US for many years, as I have done, gives one a warped sense of...