On March 6, 2020, I got on a plane in Bangkok for one of those long days that stretch across the dateline and the Pacific. We switched planes in Narita, and thought we had time to hit the lounge, but headed for the gate and that ate up the available time. We got asked twenty questions by a rather irritating official before we were allowed down the elevator to the gate. We had been traveling since the end of January through airports and border stations in Seoul, Bangkok, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia without hitting quite that level of questioning. They also only questioned me, and I’m not great at responding to COVID-19 questions. Let’s just say that Bangkok was a model of decorum compared to Japan. We thought we were fleeing from close to the epicenter of the pandemic — little did we know that we were flying into the heart of it instead.

The flight was nonstop from Tokyo to Minneapolis, but getting off the plane in Minneapolis was like time had warped somewhere over the Pacific. Signs warning about COVID-19 had vanished. Temperature checks had gone too. My traveling companion had to report for jury duty on the Monday after we arrived from S.E. Asia. After Someone picked us up at the airport, we wondered if we’d left the frying pan for the fire. It turns out, we had.