Travels Outside Washington State
Should Shake Faith in Mandates
A crisis of faith. Anybody who has recently traveled outside Washington State has good reason to seriously doubt the necessity for the lockdowns and mandates decreed by Governor Inslee and our public health officer. Other states are much freer. Some never locked down. Others required only looser restrictions for a much shorter period of time than we have experienced. Yet those states are doing better. You can feel it and see it in the shops and restaurants, in the museums and churches, in performance halls and on the streets.
I have taken two long trips since our public health officer required vaccine passports to dine out and masks indoors for everyone. One excursion was a 4,600 mile road trip through seven other states. We reached Iowa on a route across Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska. After wandering back roads and visiting small towns and villages amid Iowa’s cornfields, we returned on a northerly route through South Dakota, Wyoming again, Montana, Idaho’s panhandle and Washington’s Palouse country.
After leaving Washington, we were required to wear a mask only once, in the Pendleton factory store in Pendleton, Oregon. But the restaurant where we ate in that town told us not to bother.
In Idaho we saw next to no one wearing masks.
In Salt Lake City, Utah, some of the waiters and store clerks wore masks, some did not. Customers dared show their faces. We caught Michael Bublé at the Vivant Arena. His performance had been rescheduled two times since the onset of the pandemic. Admission required proof of vaccination. (I had weighed much of the evidence and studies, including articles on this site, and decided my health needs were best served by getting the Moderna vaccine.) Inside, the sold-out crowd of nearly 20,000 was maskless, as was Bublé. I can’t imagine him delivering Louie Prima’s “Just a Gigolo” through a blue surgical face covering. Some members of his orchestra wore masks—like the piano player—but not, of course, the men blowing saxophones or trombones or his backup singers.
In Wyoming and Nebraska, some employees at truck stops wore masks, as did some travelers. If the station were part of a national chain, the staff usually wore masks, but not at independent businesses. Nobody wore masks in the huge Cabela’s flagship store in Sidney, Nebraska.
Monumental taxidermy exhibit, Cabela’s, Sidney, NE
Mask wearing was entirely voluntary throughout the trip. The vast majority of people we saw chose not to wear masks.
In Dodge City, Iowa, the woman in the featured photo at top haphazardly wore a mask, but only as part of her costume. She was dishing out free cups of mac n’ cheese and mashed potatoes at a gas station, “just to cheer folks up.” That’s Iowa friendly, for you. Iowa really is a cheerful and amiable place. People meet your eye and smile at you on the street, in the stores… everywhere.
It was great to see so many smiling faces again. It’s a shame we had to travel to the center of the country for that pleasure.
The iconic Taylor’s Maid-Rite, Marshalltown, Iowa
For over a week we had seen no signs requiring masks until we were inside the Badlands National Park. At the bottom of a hill in the middle of nowhere sat a diminutive National Park Service tourism center. It announced that federal law required masks. About half the people complied. At Mount Rushmore nobody paid attention to placards repeating President Biden’s mask decree, though some people in masks did pose for photos with the four presidents—maskless—towering behind them. Go figure.
Like its big sky and sprawling landscape, Montana was wide open. We got snowed in for two days in Livingston and holed up in a chain hotel. The staff wore masks, sort of. One of our fellow stranded travelers walked his dog after the blizzard lifted. He was out there alone making tracks in a patch of white and wearing a surgical mask. God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy, so the Billy Currington song goes. Rather than “crazy”, it might be more accurate to say this man was “irrationally terrified.” But that would never work in a country song.
When we reached our hotel in Spokane on the return leg I caught the evil eye from a masked hotel clerk as I passed through the lobby trundling luggage to our room. Right, I’m back in Jay Inslee’s domain. It took me a while to locate the mask I had stuffed somewhere in the van. At least we did not have to pull out our vax passports for the unexpected delight of a dinner of fiery Ethiopian food. Showing our papers in order to dine out would not happen again until we had returned to Jefferson County.
We saw no bodies in the streets along our route. No black crepe over doors. I know that’s overstating how we would measure the success of these states’ measures against COVID. But I paid attention to local news and read nothing about any medical crises.
Jay Inslee points to Idaho as a way of trying to convince people his dictatorial decrees and their costs and impositions are medically necessary to save lives. Yes, Idaho has gone through a challenging period of time as it struggled to maintain the delivery of medical services to everyone. But so did Washington. Starting in March 2020 for several months Governor Inslee flat out prohibited any medical procedures except treating COVID, addressing immediate threats to life (e.g., gun shot wounds) and surgical abortions. Hospitals were never close to overwhelmed. (See my article from last year, “You Can’t Believe Jay Inslee: His Big COVID Hospital Crisis Lie.”)
Please recall that Seattle received an emergency Army field hospital and sports arenas were turned into expansive hospital wards. Except for Inslee’s photo ops, these facilities were never used. Hospitals were actually quite empty and laying off nursing staff. Inslee ignored the pleas of the Washington hospital association and medical society to let doctors care for their patients. One can only wonder how many people Jay Inslee killed and caused to suffer grievously. One can only wonder how many cancer cases advanced to more serious stages because of Inslee’s orders that blocked preventive care and kept surgical theaters empty. I have a friend who was rushed not long ago into surgery to remove part of his cancerous colon. A fairly young man, his colonoscopy had been cancelled by Inslee’s 2020 order. The log jam caused by the disruption of delivery of medical services pushed his rescheduled appointment out almost a year. He was in the ER before that postponed appointment came around. He is now undergoing chemotherapy.
And, of course, there’s Florida, which I did not reach on my travels. That state has been mocked by our Governor and former public health officer for minimal restrictions that favored upholding the merits of personal and economic freedom. Yet Florida for some time has had the lowest per capita incidence of COVID infections in the country. Its economy is booming and it is not suffering infrastructure problems. Meanwhile, Inslee’s government has slashed ferry schedules and announced that mountain passes may not be regularly cleared of snow because the Washington Department of Transportation has lost so many key people to his vax mandate penalties.
I am writing now from Pennsylvania. In the past week I have worn a mask only in the senior facility where I’ve visited family members. The rule there is a bit nonsensical. The octogenarian walking to dinner must wear a mask, though they may be alone in the hallway. Inside the dining room, by way of contrast, I saw over a hundred senior citizens seated at tables talking and laughing without masks. Everyone has been vaccinated, and there have been no outbreaks of COVID since the start of the pandemic. The ladies playing cards in the Bistro and chatting in the lounges on the resident floors, I will add, regularly ignore the masking rules and management has let them be.
Life seems normal here. One can shop at the historic Allentown Fairgrounds Farmer’s Market. No need to cover your face to stock up on smoked pig’s ears or smoked beef trachea. And don’t pass up the fresh scrapple, a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy. Yum.
I am heading back to SeaTac in a short while. Except when I am eating and drinking, I will have to wear a mask from the time I return my rental at the Philly airport until I reach my own car at SeaTac. Allowing people to remove their masks at any time during their flight seems to undermine the rationale for mandating masks at any other time. All those passengers crammed in a metal tube without masks eating and drinking (and stretching out their meals to extend their taste of liberty) would seem to risk spreading COVID—if there were a real risk. Alaska Airlines assures us that the air filtration systems in their planes are amazingly effective, rendering cabin air perfectly safe to breathe. I believe them.
I scored a first-class seat on the return trip. Conceivably, I could eat and drink for the six-plus hours it will take to cross the continent. “Another coffee, please.” “Do you have more nuts?” I could then nibble my cashews and almonds one at a time and order a drink to sip afterwards and then request a bag of popcorn and stretch that out. And then, of course, I would again need to wet my whistle, very, very slowly.
Rick Steves says travel “acts as our greatest teacher.” So what are the lessons of traveling beyond our fear-riddled, mandate-hobbled community? The answer is obvious: It doesn’t have to be this way.
