This is my last essay about life on the run in Covid. More will come, but about other topics.
In March 2020 the pandemic smashed into Manhattan like a world-killing meteor. Everything shut down. No gym. No bars and restaurants. No synagogue. Getting basics like groceries was scary. I had to stay inside but when I was inside, I was alone. Less than two days into the March lockdown I learned I wasn’t built for solitary confinement. My small, overpriced city apartment with no outdoor space felt like a cell — minus the yard and dining hall, but with the dread of getting shanked by an invisible menace.
Friends whose parents had summer homes fled to them. I joined the exodus because I could, thanks to my friend Andrew. I drove through the night from downtown Manhattan to his farm in Massachusetts. After a panicky stay at a highway hotel I moved to a nearby apartment filled with junkyard furniture, it was literally in a barn — a rough studio carved out of a former sheep house. No oven and lumpy bed, but it was warm in a wet and cold March. There was wifi and hot water, bed linens and a desk—all only a short walk to the greenhouses and fields.
The owner, barnlord?, and I agreed to an off books cash rental for two-weeks that progressed, in the slow-motion action sequence of the early pandemic, into three months. From the barn I ran what remained of my small digital agency, wrote ruminative essays, ambled the woods of Carlisle — a hamlet outside historic Concord, MA, of Thoreau and Walden Pond fame. When I wasn’t on my laptop or buying food, I volunteered at Clark Farm.
Fieldwork was the only way to interact with humans. I liked being outside and on task, even if I was barely competent. But hey, I never hurt anyone, or myself too badly, and I extracted lots and lots of weeds.
Andrew’s agricultural life has been my country escape for as long as he’s been farming and for as long as I’ve been in New York, which stretches back decades. I’ve always helped with farm chores. I knew seeding in the greenroom was easy work. Transplanting, where you sit in a little chair attached to the rear end of a moving tractor and thrust seedlings into the dabbled soil, takes dexterity and speed — both of which I lack. Weeding is a meditative repetition I learned to enjoyed during Covid because it’s a task I understand and can finish. Dredging unwanted plants also scratches the OCD tick you get when vacuuming — do I need to clean the space behind furniture no sees? How about the top of door frames? Rhetorical questions.
After making a bed of carrots as clean and uniform as possible, I feel a tired delight with the work. I’m no master grower who feeds hundreds of families nutrient-rich organic produce, but I assisted with the process as I, in turn, lived off the camaraderie and fresh food.
#farmlife lasted from a muddy March until the dry high summer bloom of July in New England. By then the local Airbnbs dried up (there were two in this relatively affluent area that frowns on short term rentals). When the barn had become unavailable in May I moved to a more suburban in-law apartment last decorated in the Reagan administration, but without Nancy’s imperial style and yes, there was a huge framed photo of a church, inexplicably in the bedroom. A warning? A promise of divine delights? Either way, by July 4th the place was no longer available.
I had to go, but where? It had to be drivable and low density; that meant upstate New York or New England, and definitely rural, which I craved not just because of Covid. Country life calls to me in clear terms. I was stuck.
Then another close childhood friend moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. He, his Brooklyn-born wife and their two little girls left a relatively small apartment in the middle of everything for a massive 18th century farmhouse on five acres of land, with barn buildings out back and incredible sunset views. They invited me to join them even though they had just moved in themselves and were drowning in boxes and new home logistics. “It’s a pandemic,” my friend explained one evening. “It’s hard to make plans. Stay as long as you like.”
Generosity distills into a potent form of gratitude when you’re vulnerable. I am more thankful to these two friends than I can express in an essay.
I drove the four hours northwest and settled that night into a small apartment attached to the main farmhouse, it was an extension built in the 1960s. Private but close. There was a college-style futon on the floor, an old sofa in the living room and then a desk I provisioned from an outbuilding. I scrubbed the bathroom to a high gloss and vacuumed everything, even the ceilings where spiders had abandoned their traps like wispy ruins.
Living in northern, rural Vermont, among my friend’s family and relatives, we ate group meals every day, listened to the breathless and occasionally plotted stories from their four-year-old. I introduced their six-year-old to soft-serve maple ice cream, “creemee” per the locals, and taught her how to identify a crew cab pickup truck. The girls, like their parents, are funny and smart and easy to laugh.
I was comforted but I didn’t have much work to keep me busy and at the end of the day, I was a houseguest. I was grateful, I was safe, but I was also alone.
By mid August a frisson came with the night air. It was no longer light by dinner time. Maple leaves on the tallest boughs bleached blonde. This only means one thing to a sentimental Jew like myself: the autumn High Holidays were coming — the month-long cycle of holidays for celebration and introspection and self-awareness and sobriety that make up the Jewish New Year.
Jewish observance pulled at me with a child’s lose grip that suddenly grows tight. But I was up in Vermont. I needed… something. Some change.
After six months on the road with no glances in the rearview, I needed to know: Where next?
All throughout this journey I had scouted places for the long term. I stayed in an Airbnb in Easthampton, Massachusetts, a town in the Pioneer Valley near colleges like Mt. Holyoke and UMASS. I slept in a backyard cabin of the leader of a Jewish co-housing project in central Vermont. I stayed in a series of always expensive, always shitty Airbnbs, because Airbnb is terrible, in Hudson, Beacon and Tarrytown along the Hudson River. None of the towns made sense in Covid because in all of them I’d be alone.
In the early days of September, as the summer slipped out like the tide, I packed my car, hugged my friends and drove to Brooklyn. I said I’d back in a few weeks.
It’s now been ten months.
My final move from Boerum Hill to… keep reading! All I own fits in a sedan.
This kicked off my next and last phase of Covid-life: living in two furnished apartments while hunting for a long term situation. First, I slept in an apartment for 10 days left empty by friends who had decamped to Asheville, North Carolina. Then I spent 2 months, which turned into another 2 months, which eventually totaled 6 months, living in a furnished parlor floor of a brownstone in Boerum Hill — a gem-like 19th century neighborhood near amenities and infrastructure, but also, in a neighborhood that is ruthlessly segregated. Affluent white people live in multi-million dollar private houses; disenfranchised Black people live in enormous housing projects. Each racial group shops and dines in separate spaces. It felt like being in the Jim Crow South, but not really southern, because this is America, everywhere.
(Last week I voted early for Maya Wiley, the progressive Black woman candidate for New York City mayor. Obviously.)
Almost every day for six months, in a strange mirroring of my formally rural six months, I looked at places online or in-person. I toured over 50 apartments in Park Slope, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — neighborhoods I somewhat knew and were somewhat accessible to what I knew best, which is lower Manhattan. I browsed over 500 website listings. I created spreadsheets and lists and maps. I biked and walked and subway’ed.
Finally, through luck and ignorance and a frugal ten years of living, I located, financed and bought a cute 1920 house in an up-and-coming part of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is well integrated and, not coincidentally, affordable to middle class and working people. Feels right.
I write you this dispatch of the Thacher Report from southwestern Crown Heights, below Eastern Parkway. It’s on the opposite side of the more august northern neighborhood, but it’s what I can afford and it’s fine. London Plane trees with elephantine bark stretch over rooftops. A wide swath of sky unfolds above since there are few high rises blocking the view. Almost everyone says hello when you walk by. Going from west to east, Freddie, Velva, Donette and Migdalia & Hahannah are my neighbors. They are as friendly and welcoming as anyone could hope.
I bought the house from a developer before it hit the market. “It’s a great deal,” the seller’s broker hissed like an Edenic snake, “you’ll love it. It’s perfect.”
The day I moved in, I discovered that the developer hadn’t finished the house. Surprise!
Moving to a half finished house was like listening to the start of an amazing rock anthem that has you pumped and thrilled with its rolling drums and guitar riffs and then just as it’s about — it stops. Silence. Then the lights shut off. And it’s cold. And you’re hungry.
The developer left the closets empty, no hanging poles or shelves, so all of my things piled on the floor until I hired people to build out the closets. That took two months. The backyard could still be the setting for a zombie film with its weeds and construction refuse and hastily poured, splotchy concrete patio definitely made by demented children. The front door didn’t shut tight because there was no weather-stripping. Up until now I thought the only correlation between the words “weather” and “stripping” was for outdoor pole dancing.
But wait, there’s more! The basement floods when it rains because the developer left debris in the lone pipe that protects the entire house. Half the kitchen appliances — the microwave, fridge and dishwasher — didn’t work or needed immediate repairs. Those oblong, near-the-ceiling “split” HVAC units displayed codes instead of temperatures. Kitchen trim wasn’t finished. There was no hardware in any of the bathrooms, so towels and toilet paper felt as unrooted and unfolded and as I did.
The house was empty because I own nothing. No sofas or loveseats. No bookcases. No dining or side or end tables. No consoles. No rugs. None of the furnishings that comfort a house. All I had in storage from my small apartment was an old bed and a desk, pots and pans, books and a prized Barcelona chair and ottoman gifted to me by a line-drawing friend. It was enough to fill a studio, not a three bedroom house with a finished basement.
Woe is me, right?
I have a house. It’s palatial compared to my former apartment. As they say in business, there’s lots of upside with limited downside. I’ll abate the flooding with the help of my developer’s contractor — and with the help of me texting him each and every week that ticks by until it’s done. So far it’s only been 16 weeks, but seriously, just today a worker created a “sump wall” to theoretically contain backed up water by the basement door. I have a few more months to test it. After all, Jews don’t start praying for rain until late fall.
Between an interior designer, a carpenter and my wallet, I will furnish the house. My goal is to sit down and watch TV by August. We’ll see.
The House
Workers have now fixed or replaced most of the broken appliances. The HVAC works, although it makes strange metallic noises. The front door locks tight while the inner door mysteriously lacks hardware.
My neighbors, while universally welcoming, have only had to scold me once, gently, for not sweeping my patch of frontage. I didn’t know it’s the owner’s responsibility to keep the sidewalk clean. The next day, in a nod to the OCD thrills of vacuuming, I swept out the large taupe squares of concrete until they were naked and pristine. I even weeded the concrete cracks and tree grate, because thanks to Clark Farm, I weed with the best of them.
To save the best for last, in all of this housing tumult, I’ve been dating a woman, Emily, whom I met last Chanukah, which you can think of as the twinkling winter coda to the somber fall holidays. Sometimes she and I make sense to each other and it’s like a symphony. Other times we don’t and it’s a polytonal off-key cacophony. But we’re trying, and I’m learning there’s something magnificent in trying together that makes a music of its own.
Emily demoing life on President Street.
Since rushing to my car the late afternoon of March 17th with bags of clothing humped on my back and tears welling my eyes, after living in over 10 temporary apartments across three states for 13 months, I have now found a place to rest. It’s my day seven.
I moved from the furnished rental in Boerum Hill to the unfinished Crown Heights house in April. Once the closets were done, I unpacked in June. Hopefully by these coming chagim, I will be able to host guests. I’ll need sofas and dining chairs and a few rugs, it’ll happen.
If it’s the trying that makes more music than the having, then today, in the cusp of July, I can sing a single lyric in my typically off key voice: Home.
— Zachary Thacher
medium.com/thacher-report