Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

1. Today
2. I cancelled
3. My trip to Hawaii. 
4. I was leaving next week. My wife, too.  
5. She was joining me the first week of a three-week research trip for my next book.
6. We never really had a honeymoon. Unless you count another book-trip stopping at a garment factory in Perry, New York, and then going to Niagara Falls, Canada, for a day. She doesn’t. 
7. I first visited Kauai nearly 20 years ago. Since I hiked her trails, paddled her waters, ate her wild fruit while swimming in waterfalls, and wondered at her lushly vegetated Emerald City of cliffs, I wanted nothing more than to experience it all with Annie, my patient highschool sweetheart, who didn’t wait for my wanderlust to pass but accepted it as part of me. 
8. Kauai was our dream. Unattainable because of two kids, a great recession, an inconsistent income that made unnecessary purchases seem irresponsible. We bought three knee surgeries for our dog and not a couch for our living room. There’s no room in such deliberations for Pacific islands. I’ve been everywhere. Not really. But close. I’ve stared at glaciers melting into the sea, mountains of coral teeming with rainbows of fish, Himalayan peaks, impossible clear lakes deeper than the sky, and always I’m visited by the same thought: I wish Annie were here. Places and experiences never quite felt full because she was missing, present to the day-to-day of our lives in Indiana, nurturing our most important stories. But then the stars aligned. I cashed in my miles for her.
9. I was pretty sure that from the cliff of our Airbnb overlooking an ocean reaching toward Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we could celebrate all those years when this was just a dream, while at the same time imagining the rest of our lives. Middle-aged in the Middle of the Pacific. Remembering and imagining. Sure, I had work to do, but Annie would have the beach, sun, books, and the quiet. We’ve been lucky that my life is my work and Annie my co-author. We live and I write about it. The questions I ask and the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been have changed us. And the living of this book to be published by Patagonia books in 2022, which is about our relationship with nature and the hope of regenerative agriculture was bringing us from the flatfields of unplanted corn in Indiana to Kauai . . . where there is also corn. The place occupying paradise in the ever-open Wikipedia of my mind has fields of corn sprayed with experimental chemicals to be sold and applied to lands in Indiana, polluting the soil and stream that run to the pond where Annie fishes with our daughter in our backyard. Protestors in Hawaii are fighting to keep their rivers, soil, ocean, and kids from exposure to poison. Whether they know it or not, their sacrifice and fight in the middle of the Pacific is a fight for us all. So Annie and I were going to Kauai to experience their paradise and learn how we might protect others.    
10. And now I have 512 words to tell you, despite how long we’ve wanted to go and how important we feel this trip is, why we’re not going. Each of the paragraphs I’ve written represents three days, and each word represents a person in the United States infected with COVID-19. Despite all the measures we’ve taken as a society so far, the number of people infected doubles every three days. If I continued to follow the formula of this piece: Paragraph 17 would be 65,536 words long–about the length of my first book; Paragraph 19 would be 262,144 words long–about the same amount of words in my three, 300-page books combined; and Paragraph 20 would represent two months and 524,288 people infected, 20% of whom would be hospitalized. As the best article I’ve seen about this states, “this is math, not prophecy.” And the only way to flatten the curve and stop the exponential spreading of COVID-19 is to self-isolate. Flying from Indianapolis to Chicago to San Francisco to Kauai and back exposes us to so many more people than living our lives in rural Indiana. I take risks all the time to do work I believe in. I’d be willing to put my individual health at risk to go to Kauai with Annie to realize our dream and to not delay the work of what feels like my most important book to date. We’re relatively young and healthy and the chances of COVID-19 killing us are low. But our choice to cancel the trip isn’t about us. It’s about the whole of society. It’s about my parents and in-laws who are much more at risk from COVID-19. If we contracted the virus we could pass it on to them or to someone you love or to someone someone else loves and depends on, someone who wants to recount the joys of their own lives and imagine and plan a future with someone they love. And they could pass it on to someone else in the United States or beyond. Kenya, where I have friends, just reported their 4th case of COVID-19 yesterday. The U.S. health system is expected to be overrun with patients. Now imagine what will happen in Kenya and in other developing countries around the world. If we went to Kauai we would not be honoring the sacrifices so many people are making by choice or circumstance: people are volunteering in a vaccination study in which they are infected on purpose, people are losing their jobs, people are losing their businesses, healthcare professionals are risking their lives, people are separating themselves from their loved ones, and people are dying. Even if the math and the scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to this are wrong, I don’t want to be sitting on a beach in paradise while others around the world are losing and sacrificing so much. Besides, it’s not everyday that we have such an opportunity to sacrifice something for the greater good of society. Today we do, and we are canceling our trip to Kauai.