3/26/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
Part 1: Shelter in Place
Yesterday. Day eight since fleeing New York to Carlisle, Massachusetts, a speck of a town north of Concord. British colonialists settled here in 1651, Americans declared it theirs in 1780, it’s sheltered your faithful author since March 17th 2020. Fewer than five thousand people live here, which is roughly my block in the West Village. There is one store, what New Yorkers would call a bodega with unwoke Boar’s Head deli options, processed junk food, beer and wine. The library and town hall bear signs saying they’re closed until March 30th or April 7th. Even in a town of 4,800, with a handful of leaders, there are disagreeing promulgations.
A few days from now, a town clerk will drive over to these signs in her Prius or Subaru because those are the only options here. She will substitute the month with the letters M-A-Y. Then she’ll stop and think, and peel off the letters.
Closed is the obvious statement. Closed is all anything should and shall ever be. It is what you and I are as you read this.
To get you caught up: I left Manhattan last Tuesday in a mix of panic, peer pressure and cold, calculated risk. People a few buildings away from me tested positive with the coronavirus. Friends had packed and left. Others remained, all single, saying the news was overly dire. That weekend I had reckoned that if the schools closed, the city would be in turmoil. Despite the disagreeing promulgations between the Centrist Democratic governor and the Progressive Democratic mayor which spread panic-inducing confusion, the schools definitively closed Monday.
On Tuesday March 17th the gyms closed. No bars or restaurants would reopen that afternoon. A woman I had recently met hit the corona pause button. I couldn’t visit my brother’s family and four delicious kids a twenty minute drive north to Riverdale. Levana. Ziv. Aura. Meir. (Hugs!) They had been suffering through the original Westchester epicenter for two weeks already and still not out of quarantine.
How about everyone calls it Florentine? And since Jews are different, we’ll say Levantine.
“Hi! Want to come over for a delicious dinner party with lots of wine and people?”
“I’d love to but I’m Levantine. FaceTime L’chaims instead?”
In one day my Manhattan life shifted from manageable to not. Keep in mind we had all been increasing our distance since March 1st, with lazily-adhered to elbow bumps and canceled Purim parties.
But now, this.
The new world order felt real, at least for educated liberals in New York City. (Redundant 2x?) It also felt permanent.
You will live in a small apartment the size of your mother’s kitchen. You will not have a balcony or terrace. You will go outside to enjoy the few slivers of open space in Manhattan which you will share in close proximity with hundreds of thousands of others doing the exact same thing. Twice a day. You will calculate your diminishing odds of eventually becoming infected — at the grocery store, from your mail, by a door knob. You will fall ill with flu-like symptoms as the hospitals break and your general practitioner’s voicemail makes you to hold for hours, then tells you nothing.
There will be no accessible, easy-to-access fast-acting testing since you are in the second Republican administration that lost the popular vote and has disbanded key federal offices in favor of sinecures and sycophants. As your chills and aches intensify, you will tough it out at home with no access to fresh food or medicine. You will venture to an urgent care clinic which will make you positive if you’re not already. There will be a ribbon cutting for the new Javits Palliative Care Center two miles north. You will make it there, humming the final chorus of Hotel California, “check out any time you like, but you can never leave…”
I didn’t want to die staring at industrial ceiling tile while a stranger in a mask gets distracted and looks away. The Brueghelian calculations resolved into a solution as tidy and concise and free of meaning as a bullet from a gun. Go.
After a night in a Best Western on Route 2 outside Concord, 200 miles northeast of New York, Farmer Andrew worked his connections to secure a studio apartment for me in downtown, one-shop Carlisle. The home is carved from of an 1879 barn. No real kitchen, no yard, and $1,200 a month in addition to my neoliberal “free market” Manhattan rent. And also, no other options.
Deal!
I’m now living in a corner of a rambling domestic structure you see in the countryside. What was once a tidy farmer’s house up front, with a separate barn way off to the side, with sheep most likely and hay storage for New England winters, has merged over a century to form a compound. Imagine a long “L” on its side, off a country road. You see the house upfront, a similarly wood-faced addition from, say, the 1920s stretches down a slight hill until it connects to a barn at the small end of the recumbent “L.” That’s where you’ll find me. Door’s open. Or not. We can FaceTime Levantine.
After a few days of farm chores at Clark Farm I developed a dry cough. Each time I’d hack in earshot, Farmer Andrew would announce, “Dry cough!” He has the mordant sense of humor of Old Englanders stretching back to 1651, who inherited it from the Algonquians who must have developed it after a millenium of winters.
After a day of this I retired from the farm to my cozy den to repair and to work and to worry and to exist — aren’t we all existing now? Like, EXISTING. It’s what we’ve always done but are now so scrupulously aware of — sorry, can’t end a sentence in a preposition because English. You get it. Alive. Now.
A day later the White House, in the confused jumble of obsequious Trump cronies, the media manipulator himself, and previously appointed healthcare authorities from Constitutional administrations, announced that anyone coming from New York (since when? who practiced social distancing for how long?) should Florentine themselves for 14-days.
Cough. Sounds about right.
What had been this:

And this:
Is now this:
And this:
Just following orders.
Update: My cough resolved and no farmers fell ill, but I’ve felt a little scratch in my throat. I finally thought to check pollen.com. The tree pollen count is through the roof in Concord.
Please stay tuned to Part II: The damned and the dark.