Yesterday we were in the path of a tornado. It ended up missing our campground, but ended up tearing the roofs off a few buildings in town. It’s always a tough call, to know whether it’s safer to stay put inside our RV, or to go outside and stand inside a shower house. Tornadoes are, after all, unpredictable things. There’s always that chance it could touchdown on the shower house and obliterate it, and leave our RV unscathed. You never really know. As a parent, it’s a hard judgement call to make. But yesterday, when we looked at the radar, we came to the conclusion that the best choice was to head to the shower house.
There was already another couple there, when the five of us (me, my husband, and our three kids, ages 7 to 13) arrived. Soon another four or five people came. The majority looked to be over 60, and we were all in a space about 12 feet by 8 feet, though anyone could have elected to go inside the bathrooms so that they could have more space from each other. Everyone stayed in that small area and chatted.
I was talking with a gentleman that was also a full-time RVer. He and his wife had retired several years ago and hit the road, checking out America and all she has to offer. He told me about places they’d been and things they’d seen. We talked about homeschooling, and what type of work they’d done before they started RVing. From time to time, everyone’s cell phones would blare the emergency alert warning us of the imminent threat of the tornado.
As the wind kicked up and the sky grew darker, the guy started showing me pictures he had taken, some of a neat museum in Florida, others of an American Revolution reenactment, and others of Space Camp in Huntsville. We were standing side by side, passing his phone back and forth, and then it struck me: this was the first normal interaction I had had with a fellow non-family human being in quite some time.
No one in the shelter was wearing a mask. No one was using hand sanitizer. Everyone was bunched up together and making no effort to stay apart. I have often wondered, since this entire shutdown started, whether Americans would permanently become germaphobic and distant from each other. I think I found my answer yesterday.