We live on a little lake in Northern Michigan, about three hour’s drive from Detroit. I’d say probably 80% of the homes on this lake, maybe more, are seasonal cottages that are closed up each winter. That’s fairly typical of the many lakes around here. The lake is very dark and quiet on those cold February nights, just a handful of lights.
To slow the spread of the virus, Michigan’s governor issued a pretty aggressive set of guidelines, which included a ban on travel between primary and secondary residences within the state. This made sense for Michigan — Many people in southern Michigan, especially around the Detroit area, have summer cottages “Up North”. Such was the case with us. I’m not sure if it’s a uniquely Michigan thing, but it is a thing here. After retiring, we sold the house downstate and moved up here for good last spring.
Yesterday morning (Friday), that travel ban was lifted, with the provision that if you do go to your vacation home, you should stay there for an extended period of time, self-isolate, follow the guidelines, etc. Guess what happened?
Since Thursday night, the whole lake has been lit up like a damn Christmas tree, bonfires everywhere, music playing, people all over. Like it normally would be. The guy at the local beer store told me today that the main highway to this area was bumper-to-bumper on Friday night.
Here we’ve all been hunkered down, following the precautions, etc for two months. This is a sparsely populated area, but there are still a couple dozen known cases, and there have been four deaths. And the only hospital in the county is small. So now several thousand people, mostly from the Detroit area, which has been hit hard by the virus, all decide they’re bored from being stuck at home and come up and get their jet skis out of storage or whatever the f**k. Then they go home on Sunday. Repeat next weekend and the next and..
It is guaranteed that some of them are asymptomatic carriers, and it’s guaranteed that some of those carriers will infect people locally, and it’s guaranteed that some of those infected people will die, all because of their actions. The crisis in this area will worsen because of these people.
I am livid, pissed, cheesed off, boiling with anger, enraged, bent out of shape, and mad. I’m running out of synonyms but you get the idea.
So I took the Susan Collins route and wrote a sternly worded letter expressing my concerns to the editor of the local weekly paper, which comes out on Wednesdays. I sent this out the night before the travel restrictions were lifted.
Here’s the text, lightly edited. I hope it gets published and that it pisses off the right people:
We live on ******* Lake, we've been here since 1992 when we bought the place as a summer weekend getaway. We retired and made the permanent move here from downstate a year ago, and we love living here.
With this Coronavirus pandemic, the state has sensibly issued restrictions on travel between primary and second homes as part of the measures to help contain the spread of infection. I say sensibly because one can be infected and not have any symptoms for 5 days to 2 weeks. In the meantime, a non-symptomatic carrier can unknowingly infect anyone they come in contact with. This is a highly transmissible virus. I personally know of people who have contracted it and died, even though they were following all of the recommendations. This is scary stuff.
So, ours is a small lake, maybe 60 or so homes and cottages around it. I'm looking out my window tonight (A Thursday) and there are LOTS of lights. Way more than you would normally see at this time of year. Some of these are folks who winter down south and summer here, or came from downstate to ride it out. Great, welcome back! Just be careful, stay in for a couple weeks (You've just driven from Florida or wherever, pumped gas along the way, picked up take-out, slept at a hotel maybe. Plenty of opportunities to contract the virus on that trip, or downstate.)
But for the rest of you, who came up from downstate in spite of the guidelines just because you wanted to spend the weekend, I say, what the hell are you thinking? Multiply the people who came up to our little lake from downstate in defiance of the guidelines by the number of lakes around here and we could be talking about as many as a thousand people, maybe more, who will stay the weekend, go home, and maybe come back next weekend like these were normal times. These are not normal times.
In that population of weekenders, a percentage of them WILL bring the virus with them, either on this trip or one in the future. And they WILL infect others here. And people here WILL die because of it.
The people doing this are putting us all at more risk. This is a fact. They are being selfish, uncaring, and unthinking. Their actions will to make it worse than it had to be, which is already bad enough.
What the hell are you people thinking? Do you even care about anyone other than yourselves?
I’m done.