Post #1: Coronavirus Blindside

When covid first began ramping up in the U.S., I didn’t know about it for the first week. While most people were going into panic mode—buying cartloads of toilet paper, moving home from college, and grumbling about having to isolate themselves for, “two whole weeks!”—I was emerged in an off-the-grid wilderness first aid training in the Cascade Mountains of Washington.

In the blissful days before I knew what was coming, I’d stood at the apex of a snow-covered peak with the twenty or so other college-aged students in the program, admiring the vastness of the wilds surrounding us. One night, a few of us hiked up the old ski trails to watch the faint glow of a train as it meandered along the rugged mountainside far in the distance. That train was the only other sign of human life we could see from our remote location; there’d been little chance we’d cross paths with anyone bearing news of the outside world. We never could’ve guessed that while we were enjoying the wintry wilderness, the rest of the country was shutting down and retreating into a husk of the society we’d grown up in.

The following dawn after completing our training, we packed up and boarded snowmobiles for the thirty-minute trip to the parking lot, where the bus was waiting to take us back to program headquarters in Seattle. Five minutes into the ride, we re-entered into cell range for the first time in a week. At once, the sleepy, early-morning aura was demolished as our cell phones exploded with notifications informing us of the new covid-era developments. The bus filled with a burst of conversation—everyone talking over each other as we learned that the rest of the college semester had been moved to online learning. Every single student would be sent home to quarantine with their families—leaving no time for us to properly move out of our dorms or say goodbye to friends. For the seniors on the trip, it was a devastating blow.

At that moment, the covid shutdown seemed surreal, but temporary—I had no idea that what seemed like a precaution would turn into a new style of life for the next few years to come.