On the Fifth Anniversary of Vermont’s Covid Lockdown Eve

A Final Run Before the Pandemic Shut Vermont Down

🎵 Bridgers 🎵 Please join us in welcoming a guest writer Andrew Dix to our greater Singing Bridge community! Andrew brings a thoughtful voice and a deep appreciation for the connections that bind us across places and experiences. We are immensely grateful to Princeton, NJ for sharing yet another beautiful human with our rural Vermont hills, and we look forward to the insights and stories Andrew has to share.

Musical Pairing: Beautiful Things by the Lawrence Arms

Five years ago today, March 14, 2020, was lockdown eve in Vermont. For me, the beginning of Covid and the country-wide shutdown of schools and businesses is inextricably linked with skiing. My idle exchanges with strangers on the lifts went from curiosity about the new respiratory virus in Asia to wondering how long we had until it arrived in Vermont. At Sugarbush, where I skied during the 2019-2020 winter, many of the skiers are from out of state and work the kinds of jobs that involve travel, so Covid was a frequent topic of conversation. Most rides blur together into vague impressions, but I do clearly recall the teenager worried about her dad, who was in Singapore on business in December, and the lawyer from Boston on the Castlerock lift on the morning of March 7, who said it was his last trip to Vermont for the season. This would turn out to be prescient, as that night we would learn that the first Vermont case was diagnosed in Bennington, a person whose symptoms brought them to the emergency room two days prior.

Lydia was five in 2019, and it was her first season on skis. I am a terrible teacher, so I left her instruction to the professionals, but we spent plenty of time on the mountain together. We split our time between Sugarbush and the Middlebury Snowbowl, though most often when we skied together it was at the Snowbowl. I would ride the magic carpet with her, occasionally slipping backwards on sunny days on the old, too steep pitch, and watch her tentatively, then fearlessly make her way down the bunny hill, while I wondered if she would manage to stop before running into the equipment shed. She took to skiing immediately, and it wasn’t long until we she was off the bunny hill and onto the mountain proper.

Watching Lydia progress on skis was like watching her go from toddling to running. It went so fast you could only truly appreciate the rapid progress if you weren’t constantly present. Luckily I took many, many pictures and videos throughout that winter to record her adventures in the Green Mountains. I can only piece together the timeline of when we skied where and what trails we went down by going through these photos. Without them — and frequent reference to the contemporary news articles recording the Covid pandemic in Vermont — this essay would not be possible. Lydia’s first lesson was at Sugarbush on December 8, 2019. She was on the magic carpet until February 5, 2020, when she rode the Sheehan chair at the Snowbowl with her instructor. (She hated the group lessons at Sugarbush, and private sessions were affordable at the Snowbowl, so I relented and we spent a lot of time there.) After her first lift ride, she never looked back. Four days later we were on the Bailey Falls chair, skiing down the backside of the Snowbowl.

During February break, the seventeenth to the twenty-second, we took a break from skiing and went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter on Florida—Lydia and I were through the first three books and reading the fourth—with my parents. It seems insane that in the middle of February in 2020, with Covid coming closer and closer, we were in an amusement park with the epic winter crowds of northerners who flock to Florida during school breaks, but no one knew any better at the time—or at least the general public didn’t, including me. The trip is a whirlwind of delighted laughs and smiles from the enchanting atmosphere. And of course wizard robes, toys, and so much candy. I distinctly remember Lydia tricking my dad into trying an earthworm flavored Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Bean, and laughing uncontrollably with her as he grimaced, but sportingly swallowed the foul jellybean.

I can’t remember exactly when I started to get worried, but I do know that, as with most of us, it was awfully close to Covid’s arrival in Vermont. On March 1, Lydia and I skied at the Snowbowl together, and she had her last lesson for the season. On March 7, I went to Sugarbush on my own and rode every lift at Lincoln Peak and Mt. Ellen on a marathon ski day. That night I read about Vermont’s first confirmed case of Covid, in Bennington. Though two hours away in rural Addison County, where we live, it still didn’t seem real. On March 8, Lydia and I were at the Snowbowl again, and Meg came out to watch Lydia ski and do a few runs of her own. (Lydia was relentless with her guilt trips, and Meg was very sporting about coming along, despite ski boots that numbed her feet until she could barely walk.) On March 11, I helped chaperone Lydia’s kindergarten class to Rikert for a couple of hours of cross country skiing. We both hated it. (I have since embraced back country cross country skiing, but Lydia is adamant that she will never try it again.) I have an amazing picture of her looking at me, incredulous that anyone would find cross country skiing fun. The next day Vermont recorded its second case of Covid.

On Friday March 13, Vermont’s governor announced a state of emergency. Schools would remain open, but the declaration introduced limited visitation in facilities where the elderly resided, including skilled nursing facilities. At the time I worked in a skilled nursing facility, where we had been preparing for Covid’s arrival, so the governor’s order hit close to home. There was so much we did not know about the virus and its transmission, but we did know that our residents were most vulnerable to it. The same day the governor declared a state of emergency, Win Smith, who sold Sugarbush to Alterra on January 14, but was still President and COO, posted on Sugarbush’s blog that Sugarbush planned to remain open until its scheduled closing date of May 2. I read the post from my desk at work while wearing a mask. I did not share his optimism. Neither did Middlebury College, which announced later that day that the Snowbowl’s last day of operations for the season would be Sunday March 15.

No one really had any idea what was going to happen, or for how long it would last, so decisions were made, and changed, quickly, sometimes within a matter of hours. With the information we had about how to protect ourselves, I planned a last weekend of skiing with Lydia, with strict precautions for our health. We would not go in the lodge unmasked, and even then only to use the bathroom, or ride the lifts with anyone else. The itinerary was to ski at Sugarbush on Saturday and the Snow Bowl on Sunday, its final day for the season. On Sunday Night I would put our equipment away for the season.

On the morning of Saturday March 14, with the Covid case count still at two, we went to Sugarbush. Lydia took to skiing in 2019 as I had in 1987 at the same age: quickly and confidently. Because it was our last day at Sugarbush, and I knew she could handle it, I took her on the Heaven’s Gate lift to the Lincoln Peak summit for the first time. We slowly made our way down Jester to Lower Jester to Gondolier, two and a half miles. I remember Lydia throwing herself into the snowbanks on the sides of the trail every few minutes to rest her exhausted little legs. The entire run took 45 minutes or an hour to finish. It’s my only clear memory of the entire day, and one I cherish. I have no idea why I didn’t take a picture of the two of us at the summit, but I do have one of her at the beginning of the run. Every time I see it, it brings me right back to that moment. We had no idea the world was about to change, but on top of a mountain together the world always melted away for me. All that mattered in that moment was that we were together, sharing our love for the winter and snow.

While we skied, Colorado’s governor prepared an executive order that shut down all the state’s ski areas as of Sunday March 15. He announced it that night. Alterra and Vail Resorts, the latter of which owned several Colorado ski areas, closed all their mountains in North America. This news was accompanied by reports that Vermont’s number of confirmed Covid cases had doubled, to four, though there were still no confirmed cases in Addison Country. Despite the steady stream of bad news, we kept to our plan to ski at the Snowbowl on Sunday, with the same precautions we employed at Sugarbush on Saturday.

Meg decided to come to commemorate the end of the season with us, so the three of us loaded up the car and set out at about 8:00 for the 15 minute drive up route 125 towards Middlebury Gap. As we approached the Snowbowl’s parking lot, it was clear that we wouldn’t be skiing. The entrance was roped off, with an employee standing next to a traffic cone. He told us, following a script he must have repeated at least 100 times throughout the day, that the college decided to close the Snowbowl a day early. With the sudden closure of the other nearby ski areas, they anticipated crowds that could not be accommodated while maintaining six feet of space between skiers. The Snowbowl is, after all, a very small ski area, so it would not take much to overwhelm it.

The ski season was over. And Vermont’s case count doubled again, to eight. On Sunday afternoon Vermont’s governor declared that schools would close by Wednesday March 18, and that attendance on Monday and Tuesday was optional. I can’t remember if we sent Lydia to school on Monday—I don’t have a great memory for events or timelines at the best of times, and the rapid escalation of the situation renders much of 2020 a blur—but I do know that she was home for good by at least Monday afternoon, because that night our school district shut down a day earlier than the governor’s deadline. On Wednesday March 18 Addison County had its first confirmed Covid case, at Porter Hospital, directly across the street from Helen Porter, the skilled nursing facility where I worked. The next day we learned of the first two deaths from Covid in Vermont. Seven days later the governor acknowledged what was already obvious: schools would remain closed through the end of the school year. I drove to Mary Hogan Elementary School, where an assembly line of teachers and parents passed garbage bags filled with each child’s belongings and artwork through car windows. The woman who put Lydia’s things on my passenger seat saw my Porter Medical Center badge and thanked me. I was too stunned by the situation to let her know that I worked in an office and didn’t need to be thanked.

🎵 Bridgers 🎵 Please share your memories with us — if you, like us, feel remembering heals and helps us find our way forward; please share your stories with us.