My dad who lives in Atlanta called and said he was going to watch App State football. “They’re playing with no one in the stands,” he said. My mom said she was going to spend that Saturday cleaning out her closet.
“It’s the strangest thing,” my dad said. “No one there in the stands.”
One of my friends decided to drive to Marshall, West Virginia anyway. Another friend, who announces the App State games, said the sound system had recently stopped working. Another friend set up a tailgate party in his house with his kids.
I had to laugh. At all that. Not because it’s funny but because it all feels like I’m living in an Arcade Fire song, in a city with no children in it, or at least in a small town with no loud sound of football fans cheering. A senior with no senior year excitement. It feels like a year with no seasons. Even here in Boone, where the seasons are so harshly and beautifully felt, and where college football is so intensely personal, we’re all in a bit of a COVID fog.
The local fast food drive-thrus are the biggest attraction? The car lines wrap around the restaurant two–sometimes three–times–even at Taco Bell. They often extend out onto Blowing Rock Road.
They say the kids will go back to school two days a week in October. But I wonder. And I sort of dread that. I mean if you think the kids were vaping in the Watauga High School bathroom before? Imagine what it’ll be like returning after months away from what probably drove them into the arms of nicotine to begin with.
Anyway. That’s October. And in COVID time that’s years away. We’re barely through the September of these “unprecedented times,” the September of Our Discontent.The last September before the rest of our lives here in The High Country where spring still brings the flame azalea to full fiery bloom. Where fall still brings an early chill. The seasons are indeed still changing, and normal will again arrive in The High Country.
I just hope we’ll be able to recognize it behind that mask.
LM
For several weeks we got to experience a vista that we’d only seen in quick flashes while rounding the curves of the Linville Cove Viaduct, an engineering delight that marks entrance into The High Country along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Parkway was closed to traffic for several weeks in the spring of 2020 as COVID fears began to grow. But it provided a rare opportunity to walk or bike the viaduct freely.