Gulf States

Two weeks ago, we left Houston to drive towards normal. “Towards” is of course the operative word.

Towards Normalcy

We are empowered first by the Governor of Texas, in whom we have no trust, and the CDC, in which we have some, to make this a trip like any other. Although the governor of Texas does not make a distinction between recommended activities of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, the CDC does, although perhaps not as clearly as we would like. 

We are vaccinated, protected, enshrouded. We can eat at roadside restaurants without drive-in windows or even patios, search for the place with very best crawfish boil, or the one that serves crawfish boudin.  At night, when we are too tired to drive further, we can choose among motels, walk into the lobby without our own supply of the special aerosol Clorox spray we scored in an early-pandemic melee. We can sleep peacefully on hotel beds without wrapping ourselves in our own sheets. We can even enter, with (partial) impunity, bathrooms at gas stations and rest stops, registering and moving on from the merely disgusting as we did before toilets and doorknobs were fatal. Eating, sleeping, peeing, the road responds to our bodily needs and supports our bodily memories: this is how we used to do it, we think, as we close our eyes in those familiarly unfamiliar rooms along 1-10.

Of course, there are signs that not all is normal. Sometimes these are literal signs.  Hotel floors are still pockmarked marked with circles for measuring the ritual 6 feet of prescribed social distancing. Bulletin boards, pamphlets, marquees, “require,” “expect” or “encourage” mask wearing. Motel breakfasts—especially as we drive North-- appear in COVID-safe boxes: hard boiled eggs brined into a strange sliminess, sealed containers of very sweet yogurt. The bed scarf, once the sign that you were not in your own bedroom but in somewhere more institutional and upscale, has disappeared, along with the less glamorous but perhaps equally unsanitary coverlet. Elevator etiquette remains confusing.  In many but not all restaurants and convenience stores, staff are masked even as customers increasingly but not inevitably are maskless. 

Toward the North

Driving east and then north at over 70 miles an hour, “towards” cannot fail to have a spatial meaning. We are driving from a blue city in a red state through a series of red states, and then up into the blue part of the country. As we hurtle along the highway through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, we are both in and not in the states we pass. Our car is a bubble, our bodies full of antibodies are bubbles. We bring the blue bubble of our neighborhood and our city, the one that helps us to feel at home in Texas, with us through the gulf states. Small towns are, unless we get out in them for a brief exchange of services and money, merely exits, their attractions, unless we choose to visit them, merely squares on blue road signs. Unless we are desperate for gas or a bathroom, we get to choose the place and the length of our encounter. We shop the gulf, we shop the south. We set the limits.

In the car, I look out at the landscape less often than on past trips. This is partly because I have made the journey so often, both in “normal” times and earlier in the pandemic. It is also because, during the pandemic, I have become addicted to screens. I have two devices on my lap—an iPad and an iPhone. My laptop, should I need it, sits snugly at my feet. When I am a passenger, I run something like a communications control center, a space I have carved out from luggage and blankets and bags of popcorn. It is here that I receive and dispense information, passing what I think is relevant onto my husband who stares east through the windscreen.

My information spans a variety of genres. There are weather reports. An unprecedented tornado warning has been issued for metro Houston and a flood warning for where we are in eastern Louisiana. There are texts from home. My older son has prepared a safe place in the closet under the stairs for him and the dogs; my friend Susan reassures me that the tv news says the tornado is going north. There are news/no-news items. Susan Collins is dithering about the investigation of the Capitol riots. There is what passes for live baseball on my iPad. The Astros lead the Oakland A’s for 7 innings, only to lose in the ninth. And, of course, there are Facebook posts. I stare at a chart correlating state’s voting practices with vaccination rates.

Although all of these capture my imagination, produce new texts, phone calls, anxiety, and clicking, it is the last items that lingers. It is night, so even if I wanted to, I could not see the flooded bayous, the water lapping the road that I know is out there because devices tell me so. I focus my gaze instead on this chart which even enlarged on my iPad is difficult to see in a moving car. From what I can tell (I text my statistician son, the one taking care of the dogs, now out from the closet under the stairs and watching the Astros on “real” tv, to make sure I understand) there are no real surprises. The vertical axis represents percentages of vaccinated adults, the horizontal line the percentage of Trump voters in every state, from zero on the left (DC is closest) to 70% on the right (Wyoming). The way the chart is set up makes the blue, mostly northern, states cluster in the left top corner, and locates mostly southern states in the bottom righthand quadrant. The lowest vaccination rates include Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, with Idaho in the mix. Although the states we are driving through are out of order east to west, left to right, it is hard not to think of that corner of the chart as a map of where we are. We are driving along the bottom of the bottom quadrant of the chart, along something like a coast, the gulf coast. 

The chart, obviously set up by a blue-stater whose perhaps unconscious use of top and bottom makes this a story of fall and collapse, eschews reds and blues in favor of delicate pastels: periwinkle, hydrangea, a rosy pink I can’t quite name. The line of correlation belies the shading and its incrementalism: it cuts diagonally through the chart, defining a precipitous drop from New England to the gulf and dividing the country in half. Looking at the chart in Louisiana, and then again in Mississippi just before we turn irrevocably north, I feel anger travelling in opposite directions: the despairing rage, always far too near the surface when I ponder why so many people voted for Trump, and the sharper deeper and more intimate feeling in me that is called out by people from the “two” coasts dismissing Texas and the South. By the time I got back, the New York Times of all places had captured some of this feeling in an article asking its readers to consider the South not as a bastion of racism but as a group of states filled with progressive people battling right-wing and racist legislatures. A place where gerrymandering had drawn its own non-map maps, turning politics into geography. No such article came over my transom that night.

Towards Representation

What if that chart had added a third axis—the axis of race? What if it had taken into account, explored in words or numbers the problem of racialized vaccine access and racialized mistrust of medicine? What if the voting percentage had been broken down by race in another chart? Why only two axes, only two coasts? I do not live in Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee. When I drive through the states I begin by looking and thinking and end up wishing the miles away that stand between myself and a usually east coast destination. I do live in Texas, not far from the gulf as the crow (or heron) flies, and I know that, despite this last vicious rush of bills before the legislature grows quiescent for two (!) years that Texas is many things and many places: the legislature just passed the most restrictive abortion bill the country; Houston is the first big city to elect an out lesbian mayor; farmers on the border are deeply divided over the wall that divides us from Mexico; Tejanos in the Rio Grande Valley voted overwhelmingly for Trump; Austin is weird and wired.

And the states through which we are speeding, the states represented on my iPad as we speed, also have their contradictory stories to tell. It’s partly about technology. Certainly, my old and dogeared road Atlas which disappeared perhaps in Harvey or quietly self-destructed in this age of screens did a better job of rendering dots on the map as places. When I was a child, no air-conditioning, windows open to ocean breezes of another coast and another country, we stopped more often, if only to cool down. For this trip, perhaps more than any other, our car was our world—until it was crushed in an accident at the end of the first leg of our journey. But of course, cars, even when whole, are not the world, even and especially when they serve as hubs for information, receiving from an indifferent and homogeneous universe signals that turn us away from what is on the side of the road, beyond the exits.