Hi, I'm John Noelle. I'm a writer at large for the New York Times magazine and I live

on Bainbridge Island outside Seattle. I'm going to read an essay I wrote for the magazine's

recent voyages issue about a trip I took late the summer. By the time I pulled into Spokane,

I was furious of myself for coming to Spokane. I'd had a bad pandemic, though not nearly

bad enough that I feel entitled to complain about it and definitely not to complain about

it publicly. In the most important ways, my family was fine, healthy, housed, employed,

and buffered from the crisis by circumstance, privilege, and luck. Relatively speaking,

we worked squizzedly comfortable and safe, literally on an island, the semi-rural suburb

of Seattle where we live. We had space, we had trees, until recently the case counts were

low. Even so, at the onset of the pandemic, my wife and I were both working and our daughters

were 11 and 6. While there were many moments of laughter and togetherness, life in our

household also felt precarious and strained. Beneath the warm, opioid glow of family

moving night, there seemed to be the potential for some darker disorderliness and pain.

And so, I gradually put my career into an induced coma to prioritize our kids. It was a luxury

that felt like a necessity, but it carried its own complications too. As our family's

collective hard time eased, I began having my own personal hard time. The details aren't

important. Let's just say, I felt as if I were moldering in place. Time passed, summer

came. I was slow to experience any of the combustive euphoria of the reopening while it lasted.

I didn't fly anywhere, didn't eat inside a restaurant, didn't see a movie, scarcely

set foot in a city, seldom managed to leave my small town. Then Delta swept in, and

gazing out, I felt like people were being reckless, and I was primed to take their

recklessness very personally, on the half of my one still unvaccinated child. But I couldn't

...