Coronavirus refugees
Americans are fleeing big cities and seeking relative safety in second homes or new rentals in rural areas, said reporters Marc Fisher, Paul Schwartzman, and Ben Weissenbach in The Washington Post.
BACK HOME IN Oakland, Lisa Pezzino and Kit Center built a life that revolved around music and the people who make it—the musicians who recorded on Pezzino’s small label and performed in places where Center rigged the lights and sound equipment.
Where they are now, deep in the redwood forest near Big Sur, 140 miles south along the California coast, there is mostly the towering silence of isolation. A tiny cabin, an outdoor kitchen, just one neighbor. This is life in the flight from the virus.
They left town with four days of clothing and every intention of coming right home. And then the new rules kicked in, and state officials urged people to stay inside. There would be no concerts, no musicians wandering by to plan a recording session. Pezzino, a civil engineer who can work remotely, and Center, whose rigging work definitely cannot be done from home, decided to stay put in the woods, indefinitely. They joined the impromptu Great American Migration of 2020.
“The heartbeat of what we do is in gathering, the community of where we live,” Pezzino said. “That’s what keeps me in the Bay Area. It’s certainly not the rent, which is crazy. When everything we do was canceled, my response was, ‘Gosh, then, can we go to the country?’”
Even as most people stay close to home in this deeply disruptive time, millions have been on the move, a mass migration that looks urgent and temporary but might contain the seeds of a wholesale shift in where and how Americans live. College students and young adults are on the interstates, heading home to repopulate their parents’ empty nests. Middle-aged people have been heading to their parents’ retirement communities.
From beaches and resort towns to mountain cabins to rural family homesteads, places far from densely packed cities are drawing people eager to escape from infection hot spots.
But virus fugitives often are running into fierce opposition on their routes, including Florida’s effort to block New Yorkers from joining their relatives in the Sunshine State, a police checkpoint keeping outsiders from entering the Florida Keys, and several coastal islands closing bridges to try to keep the coronavirus at bay.
Already, the arrival of urban émigrés— whether temporary or long-term—has raised alarms in many vacation communities. In Bethany Beach, Del., police posted a plea on Facebook, begging people not to drive out to their summer homes and not to rent temporary housing: “Although this area is awesome, we have limited hospitalization facilities that cannot accommodate a rise in potential illnesses...#stayathome means just that! This isn’t the time to send your kids to ‘the beach.’... Now is not the time to start a project at your beach house.” “People are leaving populated areas and they’re coming to their second homes here,” said Paul Kuhns, the mayor of Rehoboth Beach, Del., a resort town with about 1,500 year-round residents, but where the summer weekend population can soar above 25,000. “It’s very difficult to tell people not to go to their second home—they have no problem reminding me that they pay taxes—but my big fear is we’re going to be overwhelmed because our medical facilities are very limited,” he said. At the Polo Club, a gated community in
Boca Raton, Fla., recent days have seen an influx of Northerners, especially from the hard-hit New York metro area— a reversal of the usual traffic this time of year, when snowbirds head back north, said Joel Rosenberg, a physician who heads the club’s emergency preparedness task force. “They’re bringing in extended family to get away from the virus, and we’re asking them to maintain a 14-day quarantine,” he said. “There’s no legal way we can force them, but we’re asking, really imploring.”
As the threat of the virus intensified last week, Danette Denlinger Brown, 54, hoped to relocate from Williamsburg, Va., to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where she and her husband own a second home. But as she prepared to leave, she learned that North Carolina police had blocked the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge connecting the mainland to the barrier island. Only year-round residents could cross, a restriction that county officials said was necessary to stop migrating families from overwhelming the area’s only hospital, a 20-bed facility.
Real estate agents “were actively soliciting people to come down,” said Bobby Outten, the county manager of Dare County, which contains part of the Outer Banks. “We can’t handle all that.”
Brown, who owns a concrete company with her husband and planned to work from their waterfront house, said she has a compromised immune system and would feel safer in the more remote location. The decision to bar second-home owners was “very underhanded,” she said. “Everyone worked hard for their second home and should not be punished for having one.” CONOMIC DOWNTURNS HAVE a way of altering people’s decisions about where and how to live. American history is a story of movement toward cities. But a shock to the system can reverse that trend: During the Great Depression of the 1930s, as factories shuttered, many people
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107 acres abutting a national forest. “We can hear the Methow River when the windows are open,” John said. “It’s remote, beautiful, and frankly where you want to be in a pandemic.”
The couple went there in early March to catch the end of cross-country ski season, with coronavirus in the back of their minds. In January, John, 65, suffered a ski injury in Telluride, Colo., and the local clinic had no ultrasound machine. He’d had to drive two hours to assess his injury. “It was a wake-up call that health care is really important, but it’s uneven across the U.S.,” he said. Still, the couple decided to accept the risks of going to Mazama, even though they’ll have to travel 90 minutes from their cabin to a small hospital if the virus hits them.
After Wesleyan University in Connecticut announced it would send students home for the semester, Martha Wedner, 19, checked into an emergency room, feeling short of breath. It turned out to be anxiety, said her mother, Anne Wedner, likely “driven by the departure from school, and from having to live with parents again.” Now Martha is home in Winnetka, Ill., and the migration is taking some getting used to. “We don’t really understand why when we say, ‘Let’s watch a movie together, or play cards, or backgammon,’ that she’s not like, ‘Great!’” her father, Marcus, said.
One recent night, after Anne cooked a vegan recipe that Martha had found on Instagram, the family watched
Little Women, and “we thought we had had a very nice night,” Anne said. But after her parents went to sleep, Martha texted them her new ground rules:
Not everything needs to be a family activity.
I do not want to be micromanaged. You guys can and should eat dinner without me, a.k.a. I will be wanting to eat dinner alone and I will not always want to tell you every single time what I am doing all the time. I am turning my location off from now on.
Martha was adamant on this: “My mom still sees my location! Which is literally a Black Mirror episode,” she said in an interview. The parents, at once amused and dejected, resolved to honor their new housemate’s wishes.
In Charlotte, N.C., it was the parents who posted the rules. When Rob and
Mary Tabor Engel’s daughter, Currie, a 23-year-old graduate student at Columbia University, arrived back home, she found a list of 13 “house reminders” taped to the kitchen wall. “If you yell ‘Mom’ or ‘Mary’ from more than one room away,” one said, “we will arrive with a diagnostic test kit as it will be deemed an emergency.” Another: “Our Wi-Fi works. God is in charge of the internet. If it’s not working, check the router (under mom’s desk), then troubleshoot yourself.”*
Mary is grateful to have her family back under the same roof: “I’m thinking of this as a curtain call, or a bonus track on a record.” She added: “Call in a month and see if I’m still saying the same thing.”