That’s the best way I can describe the feeling inside Sam’s Club last week.
On the day I visited the store—Wednesday, March 25—Michigan had the fifth-most cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, of any state in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the sixth-highest number of deaths. The overwhelming majority of these deaths were in Wayne County, which is home to Detroit and its immediate urban surroundings. This makes sense: The state’s biggest population center is also its most densely occupied space. Where I was, in adjacent Washtenaw County, the virus hadn’t invaded in the same catastrophic numbers. But it was only a matter of time before it migrated from cities to suburbs, suburbs to exurbs, exurbs to rural areas.
On Carpenter Road, a humming artery that runs north and south on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, the Sam’s Club in Ypsilanti is usually a circus. Parking is impossible to find within a football field of the entrance; dozens of cars snake around the adjacent gas station, often waiting half an hour for a turn at the discounted pumps. Visiting any time after 2 o’clock is a recipe for long lines and short fuses.
How strange it felt, then, to pull into the parking lot in the late afternoon and see just 20 or 25 cars; to walk inside the doors, past the glove-clad greeter and sanitizing station, and find nobody at the checkout lanes; to stroll down the once-bustling aisles, their shelves now barren, and encounter more employees than customers.
With much of the country under government directive to stay home, grocery stores offer some remnant of civic life to a suddenly isolated people. Yet there is no joy apparent in these fleeting moments of fellowship. Perhaps that’s because the most banal of activities, shopping, now seems daring and even defiant. Whatever the case, if their escape from the doldrums of residential confinement offered any relief, it sure didn’t show. The megastore patrons I met were on the edge, physically and psychologically, knowing the monster could appear at any moment.
I spent nearly three hours inside the Sam’s Club. From a respectful distance, I spoke with customers young and old, black and white, wealthy and working class. We talked about the coronavirus. We talked about their families. We talked about their jobs and their finances and their 401(k)s. No matter whom I encountered, no matter their politics or worldviews, the conversations were animated by a common sentiment: fear.
This wasn’t the fear you read about in front-page headlines or hear about on the evening news. None of us was on death’s door. None of us was being admitted to an over-capacity hospital. None of us was retracing routes of infection through dozens of family members and friends. Our fear was one step removed. We were waiting. We were—like the vast majority of Americans—reading those headlines, watching those newscasts, wondering when it might be our turn.
“I check every box. I’m in all the high-risk categories,” PETER MOLLOY told me. “I’m over 60. I’ve had pneumonia twice and it killed my lung capacity; I need oxygen every night before bed. I’ve got ARDS [Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome], which is part of the progression of this coronavirus. And I shattered my spleen in a skiing accident. So, yeah, I’m a bit compromised.”
Standing in the pharmacy aisle, dressed in blue jeans and a green flannel shirt and with a yellow medical mask wrapped around his face, Molloy let out a heavy sigh. “If I get infected, I’m a goner.”
Molloy said he and his wife, also in her 60s with some history of health trouble, have been on self-imposed house arrest for nearly a month. They venture from home only when absolutely necessary. This was one of those times: Molloy had prescriptions ready for pickup, “and I figured I might as well stock up while I’m here,” he said, motioning to his shopping cart. (He grinned, acknowledging the mix of frozen foods and candy bars.)
There will be no return to normal for the Molloys—at least, not anytime soon. Covid-19 is far too menacing. Until a vaccine is available, they will remain in lockdown, praying to avoid exposure during their rare emergences. The hardest part, Peter Molloy said, is that their 24-year-old son lives in Georgia and cannot come visit. It would be far too risky. “We’re not going to see him for a while,” he said, emotion choking at his voice. “Maybe a long while.”
Molloy understands why, two weeks into a nationwide timeout, people want to get back to work, back to school, back to their lives. He also understands that, as a retiree with some savings stashed away, he can afford to wait out the pandemic in ways other people can’t. He just wishes the country had a little more patience, a little more perspective.
“I actually get it, this talk about the economic trade-off not being acceptable, because more people die of the flu every year, or from addiction, and we don’t slow down for them,” he said. “But this is different. Forget about the economy for a minute. I wouldn’t trade all the money in the world for my wife. Besides, we’re the most prosperous country in the history of the world. We will come back from this. The economy will come back from this. But let’s not kid ourselves. And the president, that’s what he’s treating us like: kids. Like we don’t know what’s going on. He needs to treat us like adults. We’re not going to flip a switch on Easter. Give me a break.”
Molloy was referring, of course, to President Donald Trump’s remark on the afternoon of March 24: “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” Incredibly, just 24 hours later, every single shopper I spoke with cited the president’s quote—completely unsolicited. It was a testament to the power of the bully pulpit. It also suggested that Americans were listening intently for some concrete marker, some hint of the endgame, some semblance of a date-certain to which they could look forward.
For Molloy, a Trump voter who had already begun to grow disillusioned with the president, it was an unforgivable blunder. “He’s constantly sending mixed messages, and that’s totally unacceptable,” Molloy said. “It’s been the story of his administration. His behavior, his tweets—he just does not act like a commander in chief. And it’s gotten even worse with this crisis.”
I asked if he could see himself voting for Trump again. “There is no way,” Molloy answered.
They were in less immediate danger than the Molloys: a bit younger, healthier, with more margin for error and fewer reasons for existential dread.
And yet nobody inside Sam’s Club communicated the panic—or moved with the purpose—of MARK and BETH CLANCY.
Their faces were smothered beneath medical masks. Their hands were wrapped with latex gloves. And their shopping cart was overflowing to the point that Beth began dropping items into a grocery bag she’d brought for backup. When I asked if we could talk, they looked at me like I was holding a loaded gun to my own head. That’s why you came to Sam’s Club? To talk?
“Two million deaths! Two. Million. Deaths. That’s where we’re headed,” Mark told me, his eyes bulging from behind his black-rimmed glasses. “America is going to get it worse than any of them—China, Italy, any of them. Two million deaths!”
Standing in the refrigeration aisle, plundered egg racks framing an ominous backdrop, the Clancys explained how their family had recently moved to DEFCON 1. Their son, living in Ferndale outside Detroit, went in bunker mode with his roommates. Their daughter, who lives in Manhattan, had fled to New Hampshire for purposes of solitary quarantine. This was the first time Mark and Beth had left home in two weeks—and it was only because of poor planning.
“Last time we came, we got two weeks’ worth of supplies,” Beth explained, shaking her head in disgust. “This time, we’re getting two months’ worth.”
Stacking a box of drumstick ice cream cones onto his trolley—which was already squealing beneath the weight of bottled water, frozen meats, and every other survivalist essential—Mark explained that he had nowhere to go. His employer, whom he asked me not to identify, has gifted most of its workers “an indefinite vacation.” He said money would get tight sooner or later, but for the time being, he was relieved.
Source: politico.com
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