This is Everlands

With my protective antibodies raging, I roamed the early landscape of the American pandemic, witnessing pure hearts, puzzling chaos, and profound appreciation of nature. Everlands tells the stories.

I began the drive in the Kansas Flint Hills, a place where I feel deeply connected to my ancestors — I’m a fifth generation Kansan, though I now live in New York. Looking at this photo from June, 2020, I feel light years away, though the pandemic began only four years ago. The road trip took away all my desires to be well groomed — though I retained my vanity. All photos and videos by Stephen P. Williams

It’s been exactly four years since the virus took over our minds and bodies, and my imagination has lately taken a sharp detour towards the stories I encountered during a long driving trip into the heart of the early pandemic. I befriended characters like the Native American man and the Japanese woman who lived on the side of a remote Arizona mountain, marking time by the height of the pile of wood-stove ashes they dumped in their yard. And I passed through wild landscapes such as the desolate high desert where I camped under vast star fields in a “zero light preserve,” and hobnobbed with extreme conspiracists.

While I covered some of this trip on Facebook years ago, stirring up a lot of commotion in the comments, Everlands itself is new, with photos, videos and words from a different angle. I have a fresh perspective on the pandemic, and what it has wrought. I appreciate beauty even more now, and isolation, and the sounds of people’s voices. I live for the joys of other people’s stories about themselves.

You can meet a lot of people just by offering a smile, even in a pandemic. Binyam Teklom and his wife, Aster Ruossom, who emigrated to Garden City, Kansas from Eritrea, were among the first people I met and interviewed. In coming days I’ll post a video of them, in Salam East Africa, the restaurant they founded in Garden City after Binyam left his job in a meatpacking plant that became a major covid vector.

I got the idea for the trip on March 12, 2020, when I became one of the first people in New York City to get the coronavirus. Without this illness, I would have been too scared of getting sick to make the trip.

It was very difficult to get any tests in New York in the spring of 2020. Then Mt. Sinai Hospital put out a call for blood plasma from infected people that they could use to treat covid, and they tested me to see if I could donate. I thought the results, above, would be a safe passport into any area with a covid outbreak. They’d show I was totally immune. “Yeah, probably,” the nurse said. “But not definitely.” I’m the type of person who is fine with “probably.” Off I went. I was surprised to find that showing my results to strangers I met just made them more nervous about catching the virus, when I had thought it would soothe their worries. After the first few days, I kept my antibody status private.

Feeling that my antibodies made me potentially invincible, I flew to Wichita and rented a Dodge Ram truck for the amazingly low pandemic panic price of $750 per month, unlimited mileage. On what became a 35,000 mile roadtrip, I interviewed over 150 people and took hundreds of hours of video and thousands of photographs.

I like interviewing strangers, probably in part because, while these interviews are incredibly intimate in the short term, they don’t pose all the long-term complications that normal relationships have. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to realize how distant I can be, and I’m happier in life accepting this about myself. Yet I do love people, and am not turned off by opinions and lifestyles I don’t agree with. In fact, those are the discussions I enjoy the most, and this trip was filled with them.

Here’s a montage reel I put together with a producer, Steve Wax, who made invaluable contributions to this project.

Scenes I shot while on a roadtrip into the pandemic. Reel produced by Steve Wax

I call my video, photo and word project Everlands, because that word evokes in me the unfolding, ever expanding nature of the places I visited. The trip, which I began not long after my 62nd birthday, was a turning point in my aging process. The creative aspects of this project fulfilled my deep need to live the rest of my life authentically as a writer and artist. In this important way, the pandemic was good to me.

The traveling itself filled me with joy (balanced by a moments of dread, like when I entered Arizona when it had the highest viral transmission in the world, and realized many Arizonan’s didn’t believe in the virus). My experiences with all the characters I met along the way gave me hope for the future of our country, but also fear. I feel both even today. I still spend a fair amount of time driving around America, and my stories will include some updates about how America continues to respond to echos of 2020.

So many things happening now mirror those days. The same two old guys are running for president (in the summer of 2020, I was detained by the police in Miami for getting too close to President Trump’s motorcade, and in the winter I wandered along the high fences and armed guards keeping the public away from President Biden’s inauguration — I wonder what the next five months will bring). There’s a huge sense of disbelief about almost every official matter now, just as there was then. It’s a good time to reflect.

I’ll be posting new Everlands stories at least once a week, right here. Subscribe for free to get them in your mailbox.

The Manhattan Bridge walkway, March, 2020