Fast Out of the COVID Gate at Churchill Downs

It was just a sidewalk. But after more than a year of cocooned isolation, it might as well have been the DMZ. Opening the car door, my foot came to rest on the curb. All I needed to do was cross over, back to my old life, before COVID-19 changed everything.

Our Uber driver had dutifully dropped us at Logan Airport’s Terminal B, under the colorful signage of Southwest Airlines. Pre-pandemic, this would have been a moment of joy and excitement. I love airports. I love scanning the monitors, searching for my flight. I love swimming upstream against the hordes of new arrivals headed to baggage claim. I love treating myself to a copy of the New York Times and a chocolate bar as I make my way to the gate. The airport is a liminal and magical space for me, where the whole world is just a boarding pass away.

When the pandemic began last year, I was about to start a new job. I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles the morning of March 10, 2020, but news of the virus made me uneasy and so I canceled my flight. The very next day the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

Fifteen months later, I still fret over air ventilation, the possibility of sitting beside a non-compliant passenger, and a new found hesitancy to use the plane’s restroom. But I was back — just a few feet away from the terminal doors.

My destination this time? The Kentucky Derby.

I had been hired to write an article about a horse named Hot Rod Charlie, this year’s Cinderella story, co-owned by five 2015 graduates of Brown University. I’m not a sports writer. I had never even been to a horse race before, much less covered one. But a friend, a former writer with USA Today, had turned me on to the story. He felt like it would make a good feature and urged me to sell the story to local media outlets. His confidence in me, combined with the chance to experience the hallowed oval of Churchill Downs, was just too seductive to resist. This chrysalis was about to take flight.

The day of the Derby I made my way from the hotel to a collection of yellow school buses hired to transport the masses to the antebellum fairgrounds of Churchill Downs. I skirted the growing crowd. My head spun round and round, as if on a swivel, looking for pockets of…