How to see the world when you’re stuck at home

The other day, anxious in my desk chair, I became a virtual traveler, staring at photos of public spaces abandoned in the wake of the coronavirus global pandemic: a soccer game in Germany, played in front of thousands of empty seats; the Piazza San Marco in Venice, vacant save for a few confused pigeons; the huge empty courtyard at the Great Mosque of Mecca, usually filled to the brim with worshipers circumnavigating the Ka’bah.

These are places built for humans, but there were no humans. It was like peering into what a future might look like after we are gone, a disaster movie without the movie part.

Our country is slowly wrapping its head around this disaster in slow motion. It is clear that life cannot go on as normal, at least for the foreseeable future. We are entering a wartime of solitude. All must do their part. A friend canceled a lunch meeting with me a few days ago, writing, “I am practicing active social distancing at this time. No offense.”

None taken. We are all learning a new vocabulary of inoculation: self-quarantine, shedding period, flattening the curve, inflection point. We are learning the exact dimensions of close contact. We are shaking elbows; we are singing “Happy Birthday” twice while washing our hands (I can’t actually get through the first verse); we are working remotely; we are awkwardly conducting our classes online; we are (for reasons I still don’t quite understand) buying ridiculous amounts of toilet paper. By the time you read this, a whole new reality may have set in.

We are also canceling our travel plans, at rates not seen since 9/11. Hence the photos of empty places. Our family was supposed to travel to Charleston, South

Carolina, in mid-march for a short break, but we made the wise decision not to go. Like many U.S. families with young children, we are hunkering down in a voluntary quarantine cocoon, with a pantry full of beans, a shelf full of Roald Dahl, the Hungry Hungry Hippos board game and a whole bunch of uncertainty.

Over the past year, as the climate crisis has consumed my head and most of my writing projects, I’ve been traveling less and less to there. I’ve been forced to wrestle with the question of whether flying for pleasure can really be ethically justified anymore. As you can imagine, this is deep existential territory for a travel writer.

After much fretting, weighing the culpability of the fossil fuel industry versus that of the individual, I’ve ended up at a tenuous philosophical balance point where I will minimize my air travel, choosing my trips carefully, but I won’t categorically say no to all travel. I will try to plan more trips locally, and I will look for alternate ways to find the magic.

Such a mind-set, it turns out, is also useful in the time of pandemics and self-quarantines. Right after we canceled our trip to South Carolina, Max, my 3year-old, and I took a break from Hungry Hungry Hippos and attempted to re-create the trip virtually, using one of my favorite tools in the world: Google Street View.

On my computer screen, we pretended to land at the Charleston airport. I provided the narration. We rented our car, which smelled like Twizzlers and a damp pack of cigarettes. On our way out of the airport, Max spotted a TSA agent dangerously reading and walking by the side of the road.

We grabbed some fresh grouper at Crosby’s Fish & Shrimp Co., to be grilled later. Max threw stones into the water. After a bit of wandering, we stumbled across a crazy dance party on the beach. We gazed at Morris Island Lighthouse from the shores of Rat Island. Then we got sidetracked looking at people’s weirdly long walkways to their personal piers and wondered: How long was too long? Soon Max got bored and left the room.

In short, I was traveling, discovering. Maybe not in the flesh, but I was an explorer nonetheless. I’ve been fascinated with the beguiling world of Google Street View for a decade now. I often turn to it as a research tool when I’m writing a novel, but more often than not, I simply use it to practice being a curious human. What an unbelievable resource! An endless fountain for little details. You can traipse down almost any street in the world, unbothered by snow or rain or gloom of night, completely safe, eating your Cheetos, and if you grow weary of your traipsing you can teleport to a completely new place on a new continent.

Try it with your own block.

Street View has an uncanny way of making the familiar unfamiliar. How many times have I gone and viewed my childhood home from various angles? Or my old school? Or the site of my first kiss, now obliterated into a new shopping mall?

There is something tantalizing about being there but not being there, about being everywhere and nowhere at once. The geospatial distance leaves us wanting, hungry for more. I’m enamored of the glitchiness of these human landscapes, the way people’s legs are sometimes separated from their bodies, the way everyone’s faces are blurred out, as if they no longer exist (sometimes they no longer do). This is our world, but it is not our world.

In 2015, London-based publisher Visual Editions approached me to make a digital book for its series “Editions at Play.” The idea was to make a “book” that could be read only on a smartphone. With coding assistance from Google Creative Lab in Australia, I composed “Entrances and Exits,” a short story told through Google Street View, about a lovesick man who possesses a key that could open any door in the world. The story, like Street View itself, has no end.

But I will also be the first to tell you that Google Street View is no replacement for the real thing. Traveling in the real world is about contact: body contact, surface contact, contact with new foods, with new waters, new smells, new light, new languages. Strange that at this moment in time, surrounded by the invisible threat of infection, we are supposed to be denying all contact, to retreat, to barricade our bodies from the world.

So then what to do? When we cannot travel ourselves, when we cannot lay our hands upon the there, how can we virtually re-create that sense of wonder and discovery?