I had constant interior conversations about the ethics of my virus road trip -- in retrospect, my worries seem quaint

Story No. 15 from my journey in the early pandemic. 6 am, Gardner Hotel, El Paso, Texas, June 26, 2020. Cormac McCarthy lived at times in this old hotel. The interior was straight out of his books.

As I traveled through Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, the pandemic effects that I’d seen in New York earlier in the spring started to pop up out west. As I was getting ready to cross from El Paso into New Mexico, I faced an imminent travel ban for everyone who had been in high risk states — I’d been in a few. While I’d encountered a number of people who thought I was a potential typhoid Mary because I wasn’t confined to my home, this was the first state-sanctioned judgement I’d encountered. I believed — though the medical science wasn’t 100 percent proved — that I was immune. The nurse at Mt. Sinai, where I’d been tested and found to have high antibodies to coronavirus, told me I was immune, though she couldn’t say for how long. Typical of my personality, I chose to believe what I believed, and went ahead and crossed into Roswell, which was empty of pedestrians. The restaurants and stores were shuttered. I share this video because I think it highlights the quandaries we all faced regarding this virus. And it shows how much things have changed.