Stuck

March-April 2020

I stare out the window of my parents’ townhouse at the fluffy white snowflakes blanketing downtown Denver. I usually love a thick snow, but this one is heavy and wet like misery. Growing up, I had always thought that the inside of a snow globe would be a magical place. My mom would put out several of them with the rest of the Christmas decorations, and I’d turn them over one by one, imagining myself inside these little worlds where snow fell like glitter.

But it turns out that being well and truly stuck inside while the outside world is turned upside down is actually shit, despite the pretty flakes.

As the view outside gets whiter and whiter, all I think about is how I should be looking out the window of our ship cabin at the White Continent instead. The day is March 20, 2020, and our scheduled expedition cruise would have arrived in Antarctica by now after the two-day Drake Passage crossing. So it’s easy to hate the universe just a little bit for ensuring that I get some sort of wintery weather consolation prize here in Colorado.

I’ll have many of these moments over the next several weeks. I’ve become an expert at feeling sorry for myself, comparing the dates where I should have been on the W Trek in Patagonia, on a flight to Easter Island, bumping over the salt flats of Bolivia, with my actual Groundhog Day reality.

Over a month passes like this, the days so long and repetitive that they feel like a bad dream to me now. There were occasional bright spots like the then-novel Zoom happy hours and an abundance of quality time with my parents. But still, I spend the night leading into my 29th birthday quietly sobbing into my pillow, convinced we’ve made the biggest mistake of our lives by quitting our jobs to travel right before the world shut down and tanked the economy. Now I’ll be wasting the last year of my twenties living with my parents, unemployed, and stuck inside, I think. The what-ifs in my head become as repetitive as the days.

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During one of the many unhealthy hours I spend scrolling on social media during this time, I stumble across a post by one of the safari lodges we visited on our honeymoon in South Africa in 2017. The post advertises a YouTube livestream of safari drives—because South Africa is also on lockdown and the lodges aren’t allowed to have guests, the lodge has teamed up with a company called Wild Earth to stream the morning and afternoon game drives for the world to watch from home.

I click to watch, because there’s nothing else to do and because I do really love learning about African wildlife. It turns into three hours of total escape. There’s a guide who drives along the preserve’s dirt roads all while speaking directly to the camera, which is operated by a camera person in the back of the matte green Landcruiser. When there’s nothing interesting going on with the wildlife, the guide answers questions from the live chat which usually go something like: Hugh, 7, from Pretoria wants to know if lions are mean? Well, Hugh, that’s a great question. Lions are not mean, no, they are actually amazing animals but they’re a top predator here which means they do hunt other animals because they need to fill their bellies . . ., and the streaming connection occasionally cuts out because, well, it’s in the middle-of-nowhere Africa, but I’m completely entranced regardless.

And so I become obsessed with my twice-daily YouTube safari. With the time difference, the morning safari coincides with late evening my time, and then I’m able to catch the afternoon safari when I wake up the next morning. I spend countless hours watching, getting to know the guides and picking favorites, falling for the cute hyena cubs as they explore a little further outside of their den each day, waiting for the thrill of an African wild dog chase.

The routine gives me somewhat of a schedule for my otherwise monotonous days, though it is admittedly one of the least productive routines imaginable. Watching YouTube for six hours a day was not something that was on my 2020 to-do list, but here we are.

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It’s a typical spring in Colorado, at least when it comes to the weather, with snowy and sunny days alternating throughout the whole of April—the universe playing at being a kid who unpredictably flips snow globes upside-down among the other holiday decorations.

The tableau inside of the snow globe has changed over the course of the month. The girl (okay, fair, the woman) who used to stare out of her parents’ window has changed her focus. She’s grown adept at ignoring the reality outside of the globe—an endless cycle of snow blanketing and then melting in the credit union parking lot outside of the townhome, set to an endless soundtrack of news anchors discussing closed borders, increased restrictions, rising Covid cases and deaths—and instead, she stares, transfixed, at a screen that transports her halfway across the world to another reality. One where she’s on a safari in Africa, and the biggest concerns of the day don’t belong to her but rather to the leopard who is hunting for her next meal and to the impala who is trying desperately to avoid such a fate.

The woman is quite good at this sort of escapism; after all, she’s had a lot of practice. She spent years behind a desk at a law firm dreaming of the next trip that could take her away from it all. But that was a different tableau, in a different snow globe. She’s found herself stuck in a new one now; though with the common theme, it fits nicely into the collection.