Covid begins / Part 2, Vermont

This story continues from: Covid begins / Part 1 NYC

March 22, 2020. I make it out of New York a day before the near-total shutdown, feeling like I am abandoning an old friend after they stopped being fun and grew burdensome. On the other hand, I tell myself, Vermont is my actual home. But truth is, I have not felt well for days, and the prospect of ending up, one more anonymous senior in the Javitz Center stocked with rows of army-issued cots, tamps down my guilt.

The day before the lock down, NYC streets are eerily empty of people and traffic.

After an adventure finding a rental car, I leave via West St., which runs along the Hudson, River. Finding synced lights (who knew?) and sparse traffic, I glide all the way from the Village to the George Washington Bridge at 30+ mph, hitting nary a red light.

When I stop for gas in southern Vermont, I go inside to buy milk. As I’m approaching the cash register, a family is walking toward me, holding a tiny baby. I put up my hands. “Please,” I say, “don’t come closer. I’ve come from New York City and might be infectious.” It sounds like overwrought movie dialogue, but they thank me and move back. I hold the milk up so the cashier can scan without touching it.

Back in the parking lot, the man with the baby asks what it is like in the city. “Weird,” I say. “Here, too,” he replies. “I saw some guys get into a fist fight over toilet paper.”

Vermont seems a week or so behind New York in grasping the pandemic’s gravity and extent. But the hospitals are getting ready, constructing infection rooms and planning for an influx (a deluge?) of terribly ill patients.

Newly built Covid isolation room, Central Vermont Medical Center

The differences between rural and urban life are glaring in many, but not all, aspects. Here in Vermont, the battening down and social distancing are nerve wracking, but not like the sledgehammer to the head they are in New York, where people live on the streets and crowd into subways and restaurants. In Vermont, even for those out of jobs and still having to make rent and daily expenses, the scale of disaster, if not the individual impact, is less horrifying and certainly less obvious. The social safety net sports fewer holes and the sense of community is more ingrained. It’s where, years ago, a neighbor who had painted a sign on his garage reading “No Hippies,” (aimed, perhaps, at me) still cheerfully pulled me out with his truck after a snow storm skidded my car into a ditch.

Now that I am back in Vermont, isolating and not feeling well, neighbors and friends check in, offering to shop and help. People who are not working spend their days walking and walking because, really, that’s about all there is left to do outside the house. So I am holed up, looking out at cold mountains and still-bare forests, instead of at New York’s flowering trees and parks dotted with daffodils smiling in the face of plague.

Snow is beginning to fall so fast and thick that distance disappears and the hemlocks by my window grow white wintry blossoms. And while the city’s relative quiet had been unnerving, here the silence of the snow is whole and reassuring. Normal.

Lack of people and traffic on Lightening Ridge Road is normal.

Clearly I am privileged by money and luck to be able to escape to where population density is 68 people per square mile compared to Manhattan’s almost 1,000 times greater. Here, social distancing is easier and more familiar. But social isolation is not. No more friends gathered for dinners seasoned with litanies of ailments, home-cooked and -raised food, tasty gossip, breakfasts at the hardware store, music, and movies out. All our worlds are diminished, endangered, and will remain so for way too long.

If you missed Part 1, click here: Covid begins, NYC / Part 1, NYC

The usual short-format posts resume tomorrow.