A Post-Apocalyptic American Road Trip
My family’s drive home to Maine before the Covid-19 lockdown led me back to the wisdom of Atwood, Thoreau, and Frost.
Eileen Hunt Botting
10 Aug 2020
N
ine days after the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, my family started packing. Our son’s primary school had been one of the first educational institutions in the state of Indiana to close, even earlier than the Catholic university where I teach. As my close-knit residential campus slouched toward its rebirth as an online learning community, the only normal thing was the endless string of administrative emails. Though issued with life-or-death authority, the new social distancing policies were changing overnight. When faculty received an electronic memo to cease in-person meetings with graduate students—even at six feet’s distance—I knew I had entered the twilight zone of the modern research university.
I yelled downstairs to my husband, an ex-military guy turned carpenter and stay-at-home dad, that it was time to drive home. Smiling, he appeared in the entryway to my home office. The waterproof toolbox on his pickup truck was already packed, he said. He drew out the ah in pahked with his Maine accent.
The goal was to get to the log cabin that he had built for us, over a decade ago, on his mother’s family farm in the northernmost county in Maine. Aroostook is a bleak frontier of forests and fields on the Canadian border. Across its sparsely populated landscape, there was not a single known case of Covid-19. But the undetected virus was not the reason why we wanted to go home. The tentacles of this global plague would eventually reach everywhere that people lived on the planet, even remote outposts like ours.
The real reason why we would drive 1200 miles with our only child past the hot-spots of the pandemic was, at once, existential and political. We knew, on some reflexive level, that the rural culture of Aroostook was our best resource for coping with the rising national and international crisis. We had grown up in a community that embodied, in the practices of everyday life, the survivalist values of the Great Depression.
“Summer in Maine,” my grandmother would say, “ends on the Fourth of July.” That’s when folks in “The County” began putting away firewood and canned goods for the long cold winter that stretched from October to May. The people of Aroostook were always prepped for the worst. They kept their pantries stocked and their generators running. They rarely shook hands and kept to themselves. Isolation was normal in the North Woods.
As the United States entered its second great recession of the twenty-first-century, it felt imperative to return to a way of life that enabled our ancestors to survive and sometimes thrive in conditions of even greater peril and scarcity. We knew how to best protect our five-year-old son. But in order to properly shelter at home, we needed to get home first.
Fifteen hours before Indiana’s stay-at-home order went into effect, we crossed into Ohio in our trusty 2009 Chevy Silverado. The aging pickup sagged and rattled. We had filled the truck bed to the brim with the essentials of life under quarantine: hand soap, bottled liquids, prepared food, prescription medicine, cleaning products, and books.
While packing books for my family’s drive through the northeastern eye of the viral storm, I felt an unfamiliar form of urgency. When would libraries or schoolrooms be open again? No one on Earth could be sure. It was like I was living out the dystopian plot of one of the Margaret Atwood novels that I teach. Or used to teach, I thought, in the time before.
Cover of the first edition from 1985 (Abe Books)
The anxiety of the political moment reminded me of Gilead, the dystopian version of the United States that Atwood imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale. I had vivid memories of reading the novel soon after it was published in 1985. I was a freshman at Southern Aroostook, a public K-12 community school that serves the children of six towns near the eastern border with New Brunswick. Since there was no possibility of Amazon home delivery, I must have bought a copy of the novel on a rare visit to the nearest “Mr. Paperback” bookstore in Bangor, ninety miles south over a desolate stretch of Interstate 95.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood conjured a return to the severity of the Puritanical culture of colonial New England. Women were stripped of their rights by a new theocratic government based in Boston. Forced to serve as a surrogate, or handmaid, for an infertile military commander and his wife, the unnamed female narrator keeps a journal of the injustices done to her and other women under the authoritarian regime. Armed men eventually remove her from the family, but it is unclear whether she is rescued or imprisoned.
The ambiguous ending hit home. The last trace of the handmaid is found, years later, in Bangor. Hidden in a box is her journal. I felt like her now, struggling to write a fragmented record of a quest to cross state lines in search of uncertain refuge in the North.
It was hyperreal to interact with almost no one during our post-apocalyptic road trip through the unpeopled northeast. If toll booths were occupied, the workers would nervously wave us through, pointing at the credit card slot for payment. Avoiding truck stops, we took quick breaks at rural rest areas with no one in sight. As if we were camping, we carried our own soap and water, and left no trace. We ate, while driving, only the food we had packed in the truck.
Stops at gas stations were as tense as a military operation. My husband would put on his old farmer’s gloves—the rough leather ones like our grandfathers used to pick potatoes. Then I would ration him a single Clorox wipe. He would clean the credit card after he swiped it to pay for enough gas to get through another few hours of driving. After he closed the door, he wiped down his gloves and put them away. I would pass him the hand sanitizer. Then we would silently clean the locks, handles, and steering wheel with a fresh Clorox wipe, in a new religious ritual of purification.
Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)
As the Great Lakes passed in a blur, I found myself thinking about Atwood again. She often spoke of her love of bird watching while at her summer home on Pelee Island in the middle of Lake Erie. She had done most of her writing at that isolated retreat. Looking out the window across the water, I hoped she was out there, weathering the man-made disaster of Covid-19.
When we crossed into Maine, it was not yet under lockdown. Most of the coronavirus cases were in the southern tip of the state, and still are. Late into the evening of our second day of driving, we finally reached our home at the end of a long dirt road at the top of a hill. Our nearest neighbors are our relatives, with farm houses set about a quarter mile apart.
Standing on the porch in the evening, we can catch a glimpse of the peak of Mount Katahdin against an orange-pink sunset. Its summit is the northern terminus of the Appalachian trail. In his three trips to this region from 1846 to 1857, Henry David Thoreau hiked, canoeed and climbed through the wilderness surrounding “The Mountain,” as the locals still called it.
Thoreau went into the Maine woods looking for the last of the white pines before the logging industry took them down. He emerged from these woods with something unexpected: an enduring appreciation for the survival skills of the local people, especially the Penobscot tribe of his guide, Joe Polis. Thoreau’s spiritual kinship with Joe and the Maine woods persisted to his deathbed, when his last words were “Indians” and “moose.”
During his 1845 retreat at Walden Pond, Thoreau discovered that a single layer of solitude wouldn’t do. He dug deeper into self-quarantine in the wilds of Maine. Here he found a place where he could freely breathe.
In Aroostook County, the spring air is cold and clear. When the sun rises early on the horizon of the Maritimes, I am reminded that my son’s ancestors migrated from Nova Scotia to clear this land of rocks and trees. A chain of stone walls, now overgrown with bushes, surrounds the 700-acre farm. These short and uneven walls do not force anyone to keep out. They rather stand as symbols of the old ways of life—the quiet stoic manners and small social gestures—that helped generations of people endure the long cold winters of the past.
It must have been one of these rock walls that Robert Frost had mended on his farm in New Hampshire, on the eve of World War I. While living there, the poet lost a four-year-old son to influenza. During my long winter's quarantine, I kept circling back to the final cascade of lines in Frost’s 1914 poem, “Mending Wall.” He repeated twice the local saying, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
If Frost was right to lay stress upon this rural wisdom, then perhaps I should repeat it too. Good fences make good neighbors. In the absence of a vaccine, our best fences against the novel coronavirus may be those ways of life that drive us to stay at a safe distance from one another.
In the pandemic year of two thousand and twenty, the novels of Atwood appear as prophetic as the poetry of Frost and the diaristic writing of Thoreau. In my forthcoming book, Artificial Life After Frankenstein, I situate Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) within the intellectual history of modern political science fiction born of Mary Shelley’s famous first novel Frankenstein (1818) and her less celebrated, but nearly as influential, post-apocalyptic pandemic novel The Last Man (1826). What links Atwood and Shelley together as political thinkers is their joint concern with tracing human responsibility for shaping and exacerbating political disasters such as war, environmental change, and pandemics. What draws me to these women writers is their innovative treatment of the literary form of the memoir, journal, or personal history as an electric medium for conducting existential and political philosophy.
Eileen Hunt Botting (@EileenHBotting) is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest books are Artificial Life After Frankenstein, forthcoming from Penn Press in December 2020, and the two-volume set Portraits of Wollstonecraft, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Philosophy in 2021.
