Rain and Change

I started chronicling the surreal transition from being on the road to being in lockdown indefinitely a while back. I wasn’t sure if I would ever post it. I mostly did it for myself, and there’s more to it that I may post later, but today felt like the time to put this part out into the world.

A cloudy Mojave Desert around 6am

 It seemed like the spitting rain had followed us from the edge of the Mojave, all the way back to the Ozarks, and with the clouds came a growing sense of unrest. I don’t remember exactly when I started singing the chorus of “My Shot” from Hamilton every time I washed my hands, but by the time we got to Arkansas I wasn’t the only one spending extra time at the sink in the public restroom.

Public restrooms. That’s basically all I’d used for the last two weeks. As I sat at the small, round table in the café window and watched the ice-cold drizzle soak into the sidewalk, I casually wondered if I’d come into contact with the virus. Women a few tables over chattered about toilet paper and hand sanitizer, DIY recipes to make disinfectant if they ran out of Lysol. I scrolled through Instagram on my phone and saw the first post about someone cancelling an event. I showed Zack, and I wondered if and when it would happen to us. When would this dream life we’d been living be paused – or worse, ended?

It wasn’t long before I got my answer. A text lit up my phone as I typed up a booking inquiry on my laptop. A talent buyer in Virginia asked to cancel a weekend stint she and I had spent months planning. I tried to look on the bright side, telling Zack that at least we didn’t have to hire my sister to watch our dogs for another weekend. She’d spent the last two weeks with them while we were on tour, and I was pretty sure she’d gotten her fill.

We weren’t set to play until 7, so we sat and worked and read, and watched as the virus’ ever-present partner began to do its work. Fear moves quickly, altering our behavior with minimal effort, and sometimes altering history with the same efficiency. When I ordered my sandwich at the counter, the barista hadn’t been wearing gloves. By the time we started setting up our equipment, all employees were wearing gloves, and a new plan for sanitizing surfaces had been set in place.

“Once an hour, every hour,” I heard the barista chipperly tell a customer. He was smiling, but I wondered if he was feeling as nervous as the toilet-paper hoarders a few tables over.

We played our gig, and people listened. People drank. People ate, people laughed, people talked, shook hands, hugged, danced. Families ate ice cream together while we played CCR. A mom and daughter shared a cocktail in celebration of something, anything, and sang along to “Jolene.” These used to be common sights for me on gig days. I had no idea I was about to lose them.

We left the café and made our way back east. A 15-hour, all-night drive awaited us, so I shotgunned the coffee the barista made for me (a large triple-shot latte) and wound down the spaghetti-noodle streets of Eureka Springs.

The rain pittered on.