Nice day for a drive, we thought, nope. A wonderful day to visit a yarn store in Prescott, Arizona, nope. Great day to have confidence in my fellow American, nope.

Well, the drive was okay, but we were gone for six hours, and besides making headway into Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and having a nice lunch, we did not accomplish what we set out to do. Our intention was for Caroline to support the shop in Prescott, where she bought her loom, but their laissez-faire regard for having customers or their staff wear masks had us walk up to the door and turn around. With seven people in this small shop and six of them not wearing masks, we were not about to toss off five months of vigilance in order to spend money. So we left.

We took the scenic route this morning, heading west for a visit to this city north of us. Through Wickenburg, Congress, Yarnell, over to Kirkland, and past Skull Valley, we entered Prescott from the west side. First off, the traffic on this normally quiet road was heavy, not quite traffic jam heavy, but enough that impatience had a lot of drivers speeding over solid yellow lines in curves to race past the six cars in front of us. I guess this is what is being talked about when people are checking out the local area. Well, we did a lot of this in years past, so now, with this kind of traffic, the slow meander on the back roads loses much of its former appeal.

Prescott could be considered a small town in a nearly rural area, although, until 1899, it was the Arizona state capitol. That these out-of-the-way places have been missing out on the pandemic shows in the cavalier attitude of the people living there regarding the need to wear masks. As we stood outside the yarn shop, considering our options, I noticed what seemed to be more than half of the people heading into shops not wearing masks. Leaving the plaza with a serious amount of disappointment and anger at myself for not just “dealing” with it and going shopping after our two-hour drive, we went for lunch. We called our order in from the parking lot and waited 10 minutes for it to come up. Sitting there watching others, I was again wondering: where are the masks?

While here in Phoenix, I still see the reduced traffic, and the number of people at our local stores still seems light; up north of us, it looks like business as usual. A popular joint on the side of the highway in Black Canyon City was packed if the number of cars was a valid indicator, plague or not, people gonna have their pie. Once we were back in Phoenix, there was a pop-up “Trump 2020” tent hawking propaganda in the parking lot of a strip club, and while the two seem to go together, I can’t help but think that the association diminishes the reputation of such a place.