![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
littlebitofearthDid any of us make it out of 2020 unscathed? I think everyone got hit with something that year. Physically, emotionally, financially. Maybe you lost your trust in the institutions you've been raised to rely on, maybe you'll never look at the toilet paper aisle again without a hint of anxiety or chagrin. If you walked away from the early days of the Pandemic without a scratch, outside or inside, I am so glad for you, but that wasn't me.
In early January I started following the virus news pretty closely, I am nothing if not a dedicated doom-scroller. I watched as the numbers rose overseas and spread across the world on planes, on a cruise ship as though that app Plague Inc. had come to life. Ever a zombie fan, I'd played it with my teens and now I was on the internet pointing at maps like "See, just like in the game, this city, Wuhan, was the vector. And now you can watch as sick people are traveling around and spreading it everywhere!" The difference was, when we played on my phone the goal was to see how fast you could infect the entire world and that's how you won. Now we were trying to contain it with little to no effect.
In late February I had a Friday off. I went to Walmart and filled two grocery carts with supplies. Flats of canned beans, canned meat. Dried milk and eggs, pasta, vitamins, cough medicine. People looked at me like I was nuts because here in Georgia, no one really believed in the "China Virus" yet. It was political, it was made up...Some people STILL don't believe it was ever real.
I didn't know what was coming but I could see it wasn't good. Are we surprised that one of my mottos in life is "It's better to be prepared than unaware?" My daughter's 16th birthday was in a few weeks and I didn't know what that day would look like for her, for any of us, so I went ahead and picked up cake mix that afternoon, frosting and candles because I had a feeling there wasn't going to be any slumber party with friends or dinner at Cheesecake Factory that year.
Government signs with weird propaganda-esque graphic design started sprouting up around the library where I work reminding you to keep your distance and wash your hands for at least 20 seconds. I side-eyed every person that walked in with a cough and they raised their eyebrows at me if I sniffled a little.
In early March I visited the Capitol in Atlanta for Library Day, when librarians from around the state come and meet their representatives, and serve them lunch to say thank you for supporting us - and PLEASE keep supporting us in the future. Five days later the Georgia General Assembly was suspended and all lawmakers sent home because of a Covid outbreak at the Capitol! My coworkers and I had just been there, in close quarters, innocently serving those viral douchebags hotdogs and onion rings! We all were sent home for a week to wait and see if we were ill.
First school was cancelled for my kids, although they promised it was just for three weeks, due to "An abundance of caution." Does that phrase make you feel mildly nauseated now too? Then the library closed to the public although were were still in the building together and providing curbside service to patrons. And then we were sent home too. My boss said "Your job is to get a storytime online before the week is out and figure out how to take children's services digital now." I learned how to record and edit and upload so people who couldn't leave their homes still had a connection to books in that scary time.
One of my favorite pandemic dystopia memories was visiting the Ingles grocery store near my house, the third place I had gone looking for chicken that day, and walking through a store eerily devoid of humans, with shelves pillaged and empty while Cindi Lauper cheerily sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" through the store sound system. Girls just wanna have fun, indeed.
My daughter turned 16 and to celebrate, we brought brownies to her friends at their homes, positing that if her arm was three feet long and their arm was three feet long we could bring treats to them in their yard and pass them at arms length and snap a picture from a distance and not get sick. I have to hand it to her, she only cried a little that day. The husband of one of my best friends went to the hospital and we sat in her driveway a solid 10 feet apart and I comforted from as close as we dared get.
And then my mother in law was hospitalized too. She had been dealing with balance issues for months and suffered severe brain bleed from a series of falls. Our local hospital looked like something out of a pandemic movie. A large military tent had been set up for triage outside the emergency room and no one was allowed to just walk in or out. Because of Covid protocols, a week passed before were allowed to visit her. We all came, to tell her we were there and we loved her even if we couldn't be at the hospital, but she was comatose, nonverbal and the next day she slipped into a coma she never woke from. She died alone, hemorrhaging as the hospital filled with Covid patients, people wracked with coughs and burning with fever. We couldn't even have a funeral for her for five months because no more than 10 people were allowed to gather for memorial services until the fall.
Should I go on? I won't, because I know my story isn't unique and it isn't special and we're all still dealing with the scars. The fear, sadness, frustration, loneliness, anger...For a control freak, there has never been a time I felt more out of control.
But this is not a story about The Pandemic, for all I may have led you to believe. This is a story about September 2020, and a scavenger hunt, and a golden ticket and candy factory being offered as a prize by a man who called himself The Candyman.
Here in Georgia my kids were back in high school, albeit a month late and the library was open, as long as we all wore masks, but the world still felt shaky. No one could see my smile behind my mask and I was met with a lot of hard eyes as I sat at the children's desk. Into this strangest of times I saw a post on Facebook that said the founder of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans was about to offer a nationwide scavenger hunt to bring some light to these dark times and the grand prize was...a candy factory!
Was it a scam? The guy, David Klein, claimed to be the founder of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans (actually he only created the name and briefly manufactured the beans at his place in Florida. He has been embroiled in lawsuits with the REAL Jelly Belly company for years.) Pictures of him online didn't inspire much confidence. He looked like the rummy uncle that you try to avoid at family reunions. His website claimed he was going to be hiding one "golden ticket" - Willy Wonka, anyone? - in every state in the U.S.
For just $49.98, 1,000 lucky participants could receive a clue, written as a riddle, for a particular state, and let the hunt begin! Find the golden ticket for your state and you'd receive $5,000 and a chance at a final hunt. Find that final golden ticket and you win...a candy factory! Photos of the purported candy factory on Google Earth were also a little sketchy. Was he just trying to pawn off this dump of a building to a contest participant? Was it all a huge hoax? Folks, 2020 was a crazy enough year that I thought "Why the hell not? We love puzzles and Willy Wonka and candy! Let's add a nationwide scavenger hunt with a deranged jellybean purveyor to the bingo card!
I paid for the Georgia clue - one of the first to be released in the country - and waited for the date when it would arrive. It simultaneously popped up in my email and the email boxes of 999 other participants at 11:00 a.m. on September 30.
I can find this middle first in a place
I can not sell it with an arms race
I do not want to fight as I am a happy space.
Ridiculous! What could it mean? I sent the riddle to my husband and kids and we spent the morning tossing out locations, sending Google Map links back and forth - middle like Middle Georgia? Arms Race? A weapon or a basketball game? It was a joy, theorizing, laughing, connecting over this completely manic riddle in a time riddled with fear and uncertainty. We settled on The Coliseum in Macon, a happy place in central Georgia where people raced with their arms. Now to go find the golden ticket! My husband's job was taking him near Macon the next day and we held our breaths hoping no one would get there first.
When he arrived, he started sending pictures. The place looked abandoned, it had been so long since people could gather together somewhere like a stadium. Leaves littered the parking lot and metal police barriers blocked the doors. Where should he even start looking? After a fruitless hunt, he gave up. Maybe this was not the perfect answer we thought it was. He drove home in defeat although we kept guessing all the way. The next day the riddle still hadn't been solved so they sent out a hint.
How do you do,
How are you,
Hello.
In just hours after the new clue the golden ticket was located at a welcome center on the middle of the Florida/Georgia state line. It was hidden beneath an historic cannon on a playground and the next day photos of a family from South Georgia triumphantly holding their treasure showed up online! Would they actually get paid? Yes! They received their $5,000 check and we realized this golden ticket thing was legit! I wanted to try again.
The next few states weren't within driving distance but then they announced Tennessee, just a few hours from home, would go live October 8. I ante'ed up and the clue arrived bright and early on a Thursday morning.
(Ok, I am sorry to tell y'all I cannot find the exact words to the Tennessee riddle. I have hunted and it's just gone. They've disappeared into the amorphous File 13 that is the digital world. Forgive me!)
We played the what if game throughout the day. Could it be here...no there? Based on the clues, we narrowed it down to locations on hills with really big crosses. Have you been to Tennessee? There are multiple locations with these massive, I am talking like six stories high massive crosses - it's quite a testament to redneck Jesus - and I dropped a pin on three of these sites on Google Maps. I came home from work, my kids came home from school and night fell as we formed a plan.
Are we sure?
Definitely sure.
I have to go to work tomorrow!
I don't want someone to get there before us!
We already lost hours today.
Is this crazy?
This is definitely crazy.
I'm in!
Let's go!
We packed snacks and drinks and took some selfies in the garage. I posted this message with all of us in sunglasses as an ode to the Blues Brothers: "There are 106 miles to Tennessee, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses." We didn't actually have the cigarettes. We headed out into the night, driving into the mountains, into another state in the autumnal chill.
We hit Tennessee around 11:00 and came to the first location, the Sewanee Memorial Cross, a 60 foot behemoth on the edge of a cliff on the Cumberland Plateau. Lit from below, we spent 45 minutes with our flashlights poking around bushes, looking over under and around trying to find our clue, and disturbed a bevy of spiders but no golden ticket.
We drove another hour east to Chattanooga to explore the three colossal steel crosses beside I-75 on the campus of The Crossing Church. Here the tallest was 125 feet tall with the other two no slouches at 100 feet. We poked around the grounds - these crosses had a whole cross complex, apparently open 24 hours for needy souls or those on scavenger hunts. Now at 1:00 a.m., we even had the opportunity to enter their life-sized replica of the Garden Tomb where Jesus was buried. But no golden ticket.
We had one more location up our sleeve, a massive 65 foot cross in La Folette, Tennessee. We drove the final two hours, now so deep into the night it wasbe early morning, and risked our ankles in a muddy field covered with ant hills to explore this final cross. This was our most remote cross yet and although there was a whole lot of nuthin' out here in East Egypt, Tennessee it did share the lonely exit off I-75 with just a porn shop and liquor store. Whatever floats your boat but...No golden ticket.
Defeated but not depressed, slap happy, running on nothing but caffeine and Pringles, we knew it was time to call it a night. I had to go to work and now, at four in the morning, we were four hours from home! Off the freeway, we got stuck on a two lane road behind a miserable Vote Donald Trump bus that slowed our progress but led to us creating a brilliant rendition of "Fuck the vote BUS!" sung to the tune of "Turn Down for WHAT" and, as we swirled our way through the mountains came up over a hill just in time to see dawn break across the Appalachians in a glorious wash of golden light. It was exquisite. I got home and fell into bed for 45 minutes before rushing to work, giddy with exhaustion and manic energy. What a night!
In the midst of a desperate time, it was cleansing to do something ridiculous with my children, my husband. For one night to not fear the upcoming election or the virus or the sweeping uncertainty of our whole damn existence. We talked for hours on the road, listened to music, sang together, exclaimed over things we discovered in the dark. At one point, around 7:00 am, we were all SO tired, and we were laughing SO hard I nearly had to pull the car over for fear of crashing into a ditch. Priceless.
We didn't find the Tennessee golden ticket. Someone the next afternoon discovered it in a place that had exactly NOTHING to to with crosses. We laughed our asses off at our misguided confidence. We didn't win a candy factory - although some guy in Indiana actually DID after all the clues came out in early 2021. It wasn't a scam, and I don't care what David Klein did to piss off Jelly Belly, to us he really was the Candyman and what he did for my family was well worth the cost of admission.
In early January I started following the virus news pretty closely, I am nothing if not a dedicated doom-scroller. I watched as the numbers rose overseas and spread across the world on planes, on a cruise ship as though that app Plague Inc. had come to life. Ever a zombie fan, I'd played it with my teens and now I was on the internet pointing at maps like "See, just like in the game, this city, Wuhan, was the vector. And now you can watch as sick people are traveling around and spreading it everywhere!" The difference was, when we played on my phone the goal was to see how fast you could infect the entire world and that's how you won. Now we were trying to contain it with little to no effect.
In late February I had a Friday off. I went to Walmart and filled two grocery carts with supplies. Flats of canned beans, canned meat. Dried milk and eggs, pasta, vitamins, cough medicine. People looked at me like I was nuts because here in Georgia, no one really believed in the "China Virus" yet. It was political, it was made up...Some people STILL don't believe it was ever real.
I didn't know what was coming but I could see it wasn't good. Are we surprised that one of my mottos in life is "It's better to be prepared than unaware?" My daughter's 16th birthday was in a few weeks and I didn't know what that day would look like for her, for any of us, so I went ahead and picked up cake mix that afternoon, frosting and candles because I had a feeling there wasn't going to be any slumber party with friends or dinner at Cheesecake Factory that year.
Government signs with weird propaganda-esque graphic design started sprouting up around the library where I work reminding you to keep your distance and wash your hands for at least 20 seconds. I side-eyed every person that walked in with a cough and they raised their eyebrows at me if I sniffled a little.
In early March I visited the Capitol in Atlanta for Library Day, when librarians from around the state come and meet their representatives, and serve them lunch to say thank you for supporting us - and PLEASE keep supporting us in the future. Five days later the Georgia General Assembly was suspended and all lawmakers sent home because of a Covid outbreak at the Capitol! My coworkers and I had just been there, in close quarters, innocently serving those viral douchebags hotdogs and onion rings! We all were sent home for a week to wait and see if we were ill.
First school was cancelled for my kids, although they promised it was just for three weeks, due to "An abundance of caution." Does that phrase make you feel mildly nauseated now too? Then the library closed to the public although were were still in the building together and providing curbside service to patrons. And then we were sent home too. My boss said "Your job is to get a storytime online before the week is out and figure out how to take children's services digital now." I learned how to record and edit and upload so people who couldn't leave their homes still had a connection to books in that scary time.
One of my favorite pandemic dystopia memories was visiting the Ingles grocery store near my house, the third place I had gone looking for chicken that day, and walking through a store eerily devoid of humans, with shelves pillaged and empty while Cindi Lauper cheerily sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" through the store sound system. Girls just wanna have fun, indeed.
My daughter turned 16 and to celebrate, we brought brownies to her friends at their homes, positing that if her arm was three feet long and their arm was three feet long we could bring treats to them in their yard and pass them at arms length and snap a picture from a distance and not get sick. I have to hand it to her, she only cried a little that day. The husband of one of my best friends went to the hospital and we sat in her driveway a solid 10 feet apart and I comforted from as close as we dared get.
And then my mother in law was hospitalized too. She had been dealing with balance issues for months and suffered severe brain bleed from a series of falls. Our local hospital looked like something out of a pandemic movie. A large military tent had been set up for triage outside the emergency room and no one was allowed to just walk in or out. Because of Covid protocols, a week passed before were allowed to visit her. We all came, to tell her we were there and we loved her even if we couldn't be at the hospital, but she was comatose, nonverbal and the next day she slipped into a coma she never woke from. She died alone, hemorrhaging as the hospital filled with Covid patients, people wracked with coughs and burning with fever. We couldn't even have a funeral for her for five months because no more than 10 people were allowed to gather for memorial services until the fall.
Should I go on? I won't, because I know my story isn't unique and it isn't special and we're all still dealing with the scars. The fear, sadness, frustration, loneliness, anger...For a control freak, there has never been a time I felt more out of control.
But this is not a story about The Pandemic, for all I may have led you to believe. This is a story about September 2020, and a scavenger hunt, and a golden ticket and candy factory being offered as a prize by a man who called himself The Candyman.
Here in Georgia my kids were back in high school, albeit a month late and the library was open, as long as we all wore masks, but the world still felt shaky. No one could see my smile behind my mask and I was met with a lot of hard eyes as I sat at the children's desk. Into this strangest of times I saw a post on Facebook that said the founder of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans was about to offer a nationwide scavenger hunt to bring some light to these dark times and the grand prize was...a candy factory!
Was it a scam? The guy, David Klein, claimed to be the founder of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans (actually he only created the name and briefly manufactured the beans at his place in Florida. He has been embroiled in lawsuits with the REAL Jelly Belly company for years.) Pictures of him online didn't inspire much confidence. He looked like the rummy uncle that you try to avoid at family reunions. His website claimed he was going to be hiding one "golden ticket" - Willy Wonka, anyone? - in every state in the U.S.
For just $49.98, 1,000 lucky participants could receive a clue, written as a riddle, for a particular state, and let the hunt begin! Find the golden ticket for your state and you'd receive $5,000 and a chance at a final hunt. Find that final golden ticket and you win...a candy factory! Photos of the purported candy factory on Google Earth were also a little sketchy. Was he just trying to pawn off this dump of a building to a contest participant? Was it all a huge hoax? Folks, 2020 was a crazy enough year that I thought "Why the hell not? We love puzzles and Willy Wonka and candy! Let's add a nationwide scavenger hunt with a deranged jellybean purveyor to the bingo card!
I paid for the Georgia clue - one of the first to be released in the country - and waited for the date when it would arrive. It simultaneously popped up in my email and the email boxes of 999 other participants at 11:00 a.m. on September 30.
I can find this middle first in a place
I can not sell it with an arms race
I do not want to fight as I am a happy space.
Ridiculous! What could it mean? I sent the riddle to my husband and kids and we spent the morning tossing out locations, sending Google Map links back and forth - middle like Middle Georgia? Arms Race? A weapon or a basketball game? It was a joy, theorizing, laughing, connecting over this completely manic riddle in a time riddled with fear and uncertainty. We settled on The Coliseum in Macon, a happy place in central Georgia where people raced with their arms. Now to go find the golden ticket! My husband's job was taking him near Macon the next day and we held our breaths hoping no one would get there first.
When he arrived, he started sending pictures. The place looked abandoned, it had been so long since people could gather together somewhere like a stadium. Leaves littered the parking lot and metal police barriers blocked the doors. Where should he even start looking? After a fruitless hunt, he gave up. Maybe this was not the perfect answer we thought it was. He drove home in defeat although we kept guessing all the way. The next day the riddle still hadn't been solved so they sent out a hint.
How do you do,
How are you,
Hello.
In just hours after the new clue the golden ticket was located at a welcome center on the middle of the Florida/Georgia state line. It was hidden beneath an historic cannon on a playground and the next day photos of a family from South Georgia triumphantly holding their treasure showed up online! Would they actually get paid? Yes! They received their $5,000 check and we realized this golden ticket thing was legit! I wanted to try again.
The next few states weren't within driving distance but then they announced Tennessee, just a few hours from home, would go live October 8. I ante'ed up and the clue arrived bright and early on a Thursday morning.
(Ok, I am sorry to tell y'all I cannot find the exact words to the Tennessee riddle. I have hunted and it's just gone. They've disappeared into the amorphous File 13 that is the digital world. Forgive me!)
We played the what if game throughout the day. Could it be here...no there? Based on the clues, we narrowed it down to locations on hills with really big crosses. Have you been to Tennessee? There are multiple locations with these massive, I am talking like six stories high massive crosses - it's quite a testament to redneck Jesus - and I dropped a pin on three of these sites on Google Maps. I came home from work, my kids came home from school and night fell as we formed a plan.
Are we sure?
Definitely sure.
I have to go to work tomorrow!
I don't want someone to get there before us!
We already lost hours today.
Is this crazy?
This is definitely crazy.
I'm in!
Let's go!
We packed snacks and drinks and took some selfies in the garage. I posted this message with all of us in sunglasses as an ode to the Blues Brothers: "There are 106 miles to Tennessee, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses." We didn't actually have the cigarettes. We headed out into the night, driving into the mountains, into another state in the autumnal chill.
We hit Tennessee around 11:00 and came to the first location, the Sewanee Memorial Cross, a 60 foot behemoth on the edge of a cliff on the Cumberland Plateau. Lit from below, we spent 45 minutes with our flashlights poking around bushes, looking over under and around trying to find our clue, and disturbed a bevy of spiders but no golden ticket.
We drove another hour east to Chattanooga to explore the three colossal steel crosses beside I-75 on the campus of The Crossing Church. Here the tallest was 125 feet tall with the other two no slouches at 100 feet. We poked around the grounds - these crosses had a whole cross complex, apparently open 24 hours for needy souls or those on scavenger hunts. Now at 1:00 a.m., we even had the opportunity to enter their life-sized replica of the Garden Tomb where Jesus was buried. But no golden ticket.
We had one more location up our sleeve, a massive 65 foot cross in La Folette, Tennessee. We drove the final two hours, now so deep into the night it wasbe early morning, and risked our ankles in a muddy field covered with ant hills to explore this final cross. This was our most remote cross yet and although there was a whole lot of nuthin' out here in East Egypt, Tennessee it did share the lonely exit off I-75 with just a porn shop and liquor store. Whatever floats your boat but...No golden ticket.
Defeated but not depressed, slap happy, running on nothing but caffeine and Pringles, we knew it was time to call it a night. I had to go to work and now, at four in the morning, we were four hours from home! Off the freeway, we got stuck on a two lane road behind a miserable Vote Donald Trump bus that slowed our progress but led to us creating a brilliant rendition of "Fuck the vote BUS!" sung to the tune of "Turn Down for WHAT" and, as we swirled our way through the mountains came up over a hill just in time to see dawn break across the Appalachians in a glorious wash of golden light. It was exquisite. I got home and fell into bed for 45 minutes before rushing to work, giddy with exhaustion and manic energy. What a night!
In the midst of a desperate time, it was cleansing to do something ridiculous with my children, my husband. For one night to not fear the upcoming election or the virus or the sweeping uncertainty of our whole damn existence. We talked for hours on the road, listened to music, sang together, exclaimed over things we discovered in the dark. At one point, around 7:00 am, we were all SO tired, and we were laughing SO hard I nearly had to pull the car over for fear of crashing into a ditch. Priceless.
We didn't find the Tennessee golden ticket. Someone the next afternoon discovered it in a place that had exactly NOTHING to to with crosses. We laughed our asses off at our misguided confidence. We didn't win a candy factory - although some guy in Indiana actually DID after all the clues came out in early 2021. It wasn't a scam, and I don't care what David Klein did to piss off Jelly Belly, to us he really was the Candyman and what he did for my family was well worth the cost of admission.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 03:40 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-03 08:08 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 09:17 pm (UTC)