Altered States

As the coronavirus closes in on his home state of Texas, a photographer sets out on a challenging road trip across America to witness a changing nation firsthand

- Matthew Johnson

JUNE 13 We haven’t even passed the city limits of Austin, Texas, our home town, before our three-year-old daughter announces, “I’m done with this trip, I want out of the car!” Fifteen minutes down, 70 hours to go. This seems daunting.

It’s our first road trip with our two young children, and we’ve decided to go big, driving from Texas to Montana for two months in the middle of a global pandemic that has turned any type of travel into a risk. Our family and friends think it’s nutty. But since our kids were born, we’ve spent a chunk of each summer at a cabin in the mountains outside Missoula, Montana to escape city life and the oppressive Texas sun. Now it seems we are escaping the virus. And as a photographer, I’m ready to create a document of what is happening across America at this moment.

The first thing we see is that there are more RVs on the road than normal, but overall traffic is way down as we head across Texas. A rest stop outside Amarillo is eerily almost empty. We try to put some distance behind us, but even an 500-mile day doesn’t get us out of the state. We stop at Palo Duro Canyon State Park, a beautiful place that impresses as you suddenly find yourself standing along its rim after driving for hours across the flat plains. We’ve tried our hardest to plan out our nightly stops at someplace beautiful and interesting for the kids, who discover cacti and a snake that is a little too close for comfort.