Stay at Home

Governor Cooper's Stay at Home order takes effect today at 5:00 p.m., and local law enforcement is already gearing up.  There was another roadblock on the Walhalla Road this morning when I drove to Highlands.  I rolled down my window, and a young female police officer asked me, "What brings you to Highlands?"  I replied that I was going to the Post Office, and then for a run, and then returning to my home in Clear Creek.  "Where are you running?" she asked, which surprised me.  I hadn't really decided yet:  Big Bearpen?  Lower Lake Road?  The "Usual Three?"  I think I said something vague like, "You know, just around Town."  She told me that was still allowed, but to be sure to practice social distancing by staying six feet away from anyone.

"Still" allowed?  That had me a little worried.  I had read the Stay at Home Order, and it clearly says, "except to visit essential businesses, to exercise outdoors, or to help a family member."  I guess I am helping a family member, too, come to think of it.  I would be difficult to live with if I couldn't go running.

They are definitely getting out the word to Stay at Home, and I applaud our small Town with its limited manpower for getting out the word so well.  The roadblock was gone when I returned an hour later, moved to another highway, probably.  During the few minutes I have been sitting at my computer writing this blog post, I received a text message, all in caps as usual, from Macon County.  NC IS UNDER A STAY AT HOME ORDER TODAY AT 5PM PEOPLE SHOULD STAY AT HOME AND LIMIT INTERACTIONS AND TRAVEL.  And then we heard a message on our land-line's answering machine saying the same thing:  "This is a Code Red Message from Macon County 911, etc."  This would be a difficult time to be in local government; I feel for them, and I support them wholeheartedly.  The worse emergencies I had to face when I was Town Administrator were hurricanes, Town-wide power outages, and blizzards, but nothing like this.

When I arrived at the Post Office with some packages to mail, I found that they had hung long strips of clear plastic from the ceiling, in front of the counter.  The lobby smelled strongly of Lysol.  Postal Clerk Tabitha was as friendly as usual, but she was wearing latex gloves again, and this time she slipped on a surgical mask.  "Stay safe!" I said as I left, and she said the same.  How quickly we are adjusting to the New Normal.  We no longer blink an eye at a surgical mask.

Yesterday, I had come to Highlands for a Sunday morning visit to Bryson's Grocery Store, and I found it almost empty at 11:00 a.m.  Fred had told me Saturday that the Methodist Church's virtual worship service on Facebook had 1000 viewers last week (and they only have 500 members) so perhaps that is where most of them were.  The bread aisle had been cleaned out again, and toilet paper was down to a few rolls, of course; but what an earth would anybody want with shelled edamame beans?  The bread was no problem, really; I returned home and baked an artisan loaf that afternoon.

But tortillas!  Who cleaned out all of the flour tortillas on the lower shelf in the Mexican Food aisle?  I managed to find one overlooked box of an Old El Paso Soft Taco Dinner set, which contained six tacos and two foil bags of enchilada sauce.  Martha told me she had a good tortilla recipe, so I guess that is what we will try making next.

The Town was deserted for a Sunday morning.  I circled through the Shell Station, donned latex gloves, and topped up the gas tank.  There was not a single car there.  I circled around and drove back down Main Street from the east end, where all of the parking spaces would normally have been filled by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and visitors to Wolfgang's and Highlands Inn and Old Edwards Inn.

These are terrible times, and after a weekend without cable news, I turned on my computer this morning to horrific visions of body bags, makeshift morgues, and emergency hospital tents being set up in Central Park.  I am so thankful that my problems are so very few.  And that I know how to bake bread and make tortillas.  And that I can still run on these deserted streets.

Nothing Happening in Highlands

We look forward to our Saturday morning group runs every week; it's generally a long run, but more importantly it is a social run, when we catch up with the lives of our running friends, share stories, and talk about anything and everything.  I had posted a notice that our group runs had been cancelled, and I deliberately showed up at the Park a half-hour late.  Fred was parking his little red MG just as I was arriving, and he hesitated as he walked toward me.  "Is this a group?"  I laughed and assured him two runners would be just fine.  A half-mile down the road, we met Karen, and stopped to chat with her, and then we passed Art and Vicki; Martha started after I did.  So there would have been a group of six of us had we all started at the same time.

Governor Cooper's statewide Stay at Home order thankfully permits outdoor exercise, but we did not see very many people out at all on this second unusually warm and sunny day in a row at the end of March, just a couple of dog walkers.  There was no traffic to speak of, and only two or three cars on Main Street; gone were the throngs of visitors who would normally be here on a morning like this, walking down the sidewalks past open shop doors, and the auto enthusiasts gathered at the Loafer's Bench.  It looked like this photo that Martha had found posted on the "Highlands Happening" Facebook page:

The pollen is still in the "red zone," so we both ran fewer miles than we had planned.  Temperatures climbed into the 80s again in the afternoon and the prudent thing to do would have been to stay indoors or sit in the shade with a book, but I felt restless, and ended up working in the yard after lunch, turning the raised garden beds on which I had spread compost last week with a spade.

Martha felt restless, too.  "What would we normally be doing on a Saturday?" she asked me this afternoon.  I suppose we might have driven up to Town, top down on the Mini, perhaps ordered some take-out from the Asia House, watching people walk by on the street. Or gone out of Town to shop for groceries and eaten lunch at an open restaurant.  Imagine that!

Our old life.

Roadblocks

What Martha had heard yesterday on Facebook is indeed true.  When I drove up the Walhalla Road this morning to go to the Post Office, there was no sign of any roadblock, but on the way home the Town Police had set one up.  The young officer waved me through (since I was leaving Town), but I recognized him and I rolled down my window to thank him for doing a good job.

The road to Town had been eerily devoid of traffic except for two or three trucks heading south, bound for the County landfill on Rich Gap Road.  Main Street, too, was almost empty except for some vehicles parked in front of Reeves Hardware again.  The construction businesses is just about the last remaining commercial operation in Highlands, so it makes sense to allow workers to buy building materials.  In the same way, Tate Landscaping was busy all over Town, mostly placing pine straw around trees and shrubs.

The pollen level today is back up in the high range for this entire area, and I could feel it in my lungs when I was working outside yesterday.

But I thought it might not be as heavy in Town as it is in Clear Creek since the oak trees are not yet showing signs of greening up.  That seemed to be the case as I parked across from the Nature Center and began walking up the road to Sunset Rocks.  There were no other cars in the parking lot.

The Town made a good decision a year or two ago when it decided to stop maintaining this road, a roadblock of another kind.  It has deteriorated even more since my last hike up here; an adventurous 4 X 4 could make it, but gone are the days when SUVs from Atlanta could drive up here.  Nothing was more annoying than being forced to step off the road during a pleasant Sunday afternoon hike to allow a big Suburban containing healthy young people to bounce past in a little cloud of dust.  We all have our pet peeves.

But I was not feeling peevish today; I had the road entirely to myself, passing not a single person all the way up to the summit and all the way back down on this unusually warm day.

It was so warm, in fact, that I realized I was a little overdressed.  The Asheville forecast this morning had predicted that this would be a record-setting day, hotter than the previous hottest day on record in 1907.

Just as I was leaving the parking lot, an SUV pulled in beside me containing four young people.  The driver rolled down her window, and I said, "There is absolutely nobody up there!  Enjoy your social isolation!"  They laughed and climbed out, wearing hiking boots.  I would like to think that they had planned to hike even if the road had been in better shape.  I would also like to think that they were not from New York or New Orleans, the latest epicenters in the pandemic.

Coronavirus in Highlands

The Town of Highlands is doing a good job at addressing the coronavirus pandemic in this small, but very cosmopolitan, part of the world, where visitors come from all across the country during the summer.  The Town Board declared its own State of Emergency last week, following the State and Federal declarations, and has now passed some additional measures.  In additional to the Town Hall and Rec Park being closed, all restaurants, hotels, and shops are closed.  Curbside take-out is allowed by restaurants, and many are doing that.  Now, in addition to hotels, all short-term rentals have been closed down.  Residents who own homes here and arrive from out-of-state are asked to self-quarantine for 14 days.  The Mayor has put out the word that Highlands is not the place to hide out from the coronavirus! 

Gatherings of more than ten people are also prohibited, and the Police Department is empowered to issue misdemeanor citations.  I realized this morning that the Highlands Roadrunners Club website needed to be updated, so I posted a notice that all group runs have been cancelled, as well as the handful of small area races I had put on the calendar, some of which we had looked forward to running.  I also sent out an e-mail to that effect to all of our local runners.  We will plan to run in groups of one or two with our friends, as we did yesterday, for the immediate future.

Grocery stores, convenience store/gas stations, and hardware stores are exempt from the closings.  This morning when I went to Town on "essential" errands to the Post Office and to buy gasoline for my chainsaw (with latex gloves on my hands), Main Street was nearly empty except for Reeves Hardware.  And I was greeted by this at the Post Office - caution strips applied to the floor indicating six feet of separation between those waiting in line.

"Go ahead," a woman browsing through the greeting card display at the end of the counter told me, and I tiptoed nimbly around her.

All of this will be a tremendous loss to local businesses.  I have often heard that many retail businesses turn a profit based on only three holiday weekends:  Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day.  The first two of these holidays will almost certainly be cancelled, and we aren't even sure about Labor Day, six months from now.  We received the CLE (Center for Life Enrichment) catalog this week, and it looks like most of those classes, lectures, tours, and other events will be cancelled.  We will have to enrich ourselves this summer in other ways.

P. S.  Martha just learned from Facebook that the Town Police have roadblocks set up on all roads to Town!  That is just amazing.  And frightening.

The New Normal (Continued)

Day by day, our "normal" world continues to reveal stranger and stranger realities.  This morning, I had to stop in Bryson's, our local grocery store, for some essentials (and yes, they had packages of toilet paper!) and a woman in the next checkout aisle was wearing a mask.  Was she protecting herself from the possibility of coronovirus particles in the air?  Or was she protecting the rest of us from her because she was already sick?  In Dusty's, the little grocery store on the Dillard Road, I was greeted by Lou gesturing to two boxes of latex gloves on the counter, which all customers are asked to don upon entering - black (large) for men, white for women.  It felt strange to latex-fumble in my wallet for some cash.  "Are you still taking cash?" I asked, and he said they were so far.

And what is even more amazing is how quickly all of this has happened.  Two weeks ago today, we had just arrived back in Highlands the previous day and we drove to Clayton for lunch at Rumor Hazit restaurant and grocery shopping at Ingles, where we stocked up as we normally would after having returned from two months out of Town.  There had been plenty of toilet paper on the shelves.  Had I only known how quickly those shelves would become empty, in only a day or two, I suppose I, too, might have stocked up a little more.  But when does that cross the line to "hoarding?"  At Bryson's, there was a sign on the toilet paper shelf limiting single rolls to eight per customer; I carried four rolls to the checkout.  "You can have eight," the checkout girl said.  "That's OK.  Somebody else might need some."  That made me feel a little saintly, and I only hope others will do the same as those supplies which disappeared so suddenly gradually begin to re-appear.

Our mail was forwarded to Atlantic Beach while we were gone, and there has been quite a delay in receiving the last few straggling pieces of mail which were sent there and now are being returned to Highlands.  We received a local newspaper this week from nearly a month ago, filled with stories of school sports and activities all over Town, everybody so blissfully unaware of what was to come.  In the same way, issues of the New Yorker have been drifting in from what, if I were a science fiction writer, I might call something like "The Before Time."  The first few pages were filled, as they always are, with all of the concerts, plays, movies, art exhibitions, and other cultural activities that people in a big city so freely and widely enjoy.  This week's issue had no such items listed - who knows when we might be able to enjoy a symphony orchestra perform again?  The latest cover art, simply titled "Grand Central Terminal," said it all.

The pollen count is very high, too, higher than usual, and I have been suffering with a tight chest and stuffed sinuses, to the extent that I Googled several articles, such as Allergies Vs. Coronavirus:  Here's How to Tell the Difference.  I compared symptoms with Lee Zoellner at Highlands Outdoor Tool this morning when I picked up the chainsaw I had left for sharpening.  "They've been awful!" he said.  "And Laura, too!  It made me wonder if I was getting this thing."  His wife Laura works at our local nursing facility, the Eckerd Living Center, which is under lock-down; Laura has to have her temperature taken before entering.  "Me, too," I said.  "Except that I don't have a fever, and I always get allergies this time of year."  Besides, I thought, I ran six miles Saturday (probably not the wisest thing to do in medium-high pollen conditions) and I continue to work out here at home.

I told Lee that I was afraid I might sneeze or cough in a grocery store, causing a panic, perhaps even a stampede of frightened people, clamping handkerchiefs over their faces, knocking over displays and shoving shopping carts aside, all trying to escape that elderly man over in the canned vegetable aisle, spreading infection wildly through the air. 

The New Normal

The terrible news continues to pour in every day, making my own recent posts, "Tales of the Coronavirus," seem like minor inconveniences.  How quickly we have all come to adapt to the "new normal!"  Latex gloves worn by grocery store and post office workers, closed restaurants and hotels, shuttered movie theater, and empty shops all over Highlands.  The new normal:  when I return from the post office with magazines and mail, I give everything a once-over with a Clorox wipe, trusting that thoroughly sanitizing everything, together with "social distancing," will keep us protected. 

I am glad that we do not live in a large city, where we might have to depend upon things like public transportation and elevators in office buildings.  We can walk down Main Street, careful to maintain a safe distance from other pedestrians, and not feel in any danger.  We drove up to Highlands yesterday and ran with some of our friends, avoiding handshakes and hugs.  "I saw you running an hour late last Saturday," I scolded Vicki.  "So you either forgot to turn your clock ahead or you were practicing extreme social distancing."  But what a ghost town Highlands was, on a Saturday morning three weeks before Easter, when there would normally be plenty of traffic and the parking places would be rapidly filling up.  The new normal.

Martha and I both completed six miles, and I ended up running/walking most of my miles with Fred and Karen; we took a lot of walking breaks.  Fred does not normally take walking breaks, but I think he just wanted to talk.  The Methodist Church is a big part of his life and it has been closed down for a week, with virtual services taking place on-line.  When we finished running, some of us just stood around and visited just a little longer, satisfying that need for human contact.  Perhaps that will be the most difficult safety measure for some people:  to stay home, to avoid social contact, that powerful glue that binds us all together.

The pollen count was in the medium-high range yesterday, and we could both feel it in our lungs, especially after an afternoon spent working out in the yard in warm sunshine.  The yellow, sticky stuff is coming down hard, visibly coating the glass top of the outdoor table on our deck from one day to the next.  But it felt good to be outdoors, spreading pine straw and hauling compost from the compost bins to the garden with the wheelbarrow.  Our neighbor Daniel was out working, too, just a couple of hundred yards from my compost bins.  And later in the day he posted this picture on Facebook of a copperhead he killed with a shovel, lurking under an old tire.  It's that time of year when one has to be wary when working outdoors, socially distancing one's self from venomous snakes.

So as the new normal continues, we are doing the best we can against the perils all around us, armed with hand-sanitizer in one hand and shovel in the other.

Tales of the Coronavirus (Continued)

It was another surreal day in this new era of Coronavirus.  We have learned that the Boston Marathon scheduled for April 20 - Patriots Day in Boston - has been postponed until September 14 for the first time in its 124-year history.  I was texting one of my running friends in Montgomery, Alabama, about the virus.  "What's the situation up there?" he asked, and I told him what was happening.  "At least we can go running, right?" I told him.  "Not in Italy," he said, and a little research confirmed that was the case; those found guilty of being outside face a three-month prison sentence or a fine of 206 euros ($230).  I told him that our friend Anthony would be very disappointed about Boston being postponed; he had trained perfectly for the race, something that only marathon runners can truly appreciate.  But, of course, it would be madness to invited 50,000 runners from around the world, cram them into buses to Hopkinton, and allow them to run all the way to Copley Square high-fiving thousands of cheering spectators along the way.

We are not in danger of prison or fines in Highlands for being outside yet, and in fact we understand that outdoor exercise is being encouraged provided it is not done in groups.  So Martha and I drove to Highlands and went running this morning, separately, and compared notes later.  "It was so strange!" Martha said.  "There were only two cars in front of Mountain Fresh at lunch time.  And the whole street down by the Presbyterian Church was empty."  I had noticed it, too.  There were a few individual walkers out on the streets, but not many, and virtually no traffic.  And Highlands School, which we both ran by, had only a few teacher's cars parked out front and dark classrooms.

These strange days remind me of being in a blizzard - like the Blizzard of '93 that struck Highlands on March 13, 1993 - except there is no snow and our power is on.  I used to have a T-shirt that commemorated that storm, in fact.

There is the same sense these days that we are in the midst of a terrible storm, trying to hang on desperately to something solid.  And, as they did 27 years ago, all over Town people are asking one another, "Are you doing okay?  Stay safe!"  Life is on hold, as we hunker down and wait for this blizzard to pass and the long recovery to begin.