The 25 musicians of the White River Valley School Concert Band walked over to the South Royalton green from the school on Thursday, carrying their instruments and music stands.
Yes, it was the day after Veterans Day, but the band wanted to mark the occasion in public. The warm weather of the start of the week had gone, and November had reasserted itself: cold, with gray skies and a damp breeze. True to teenage form, some of the band members were in shorts, and only Joshua Pauly, the conductor, wore a parka.
The brass and woodwind players worked through an E-flat scale while the percussionists lugged their drums and cymbals onto the green from an SUV. Arranged in a semicircle, standing 6 feet apart and wearing special masks, into which they could insert their mouthpieces, the musicians prepared for a performance that exemplified the times.
“When asking our seniors how we should navigate our annual Veterans Day ceremony during the pandemic,” Pauly posted on the band’s Facebook page Thursday evening, “trumpet player Carder Stratton expressed a sentiment that the band quickly embraced. ‘I think we would rather perform without an audience than do nothing at all.’ ”
During the first days of the lockdown, South Royalton residents were waiting and watching, wondering how their lives would be reordered by the novel coronavirus pandemic. Now, eight months later, with case counts climbing more sharply than they did last spring, the new normal of wearing masks and staying close to home but a measured distance from friends and family feels familiar, a way of life that has thus far kept the pandemic at bay here. For some, these days feel just as fragile as mid-March.
Since then, there has not been a substantial outbreak of COVID-19 reported in South Royalton, and the village and surrounding area have been vigilant, for the most part, even as parts of daily life have opened back up.
South Royalton Market, a small co-op grocery store, went to curbside pickup from March 24 until late May before reopening with limits on the number of people in the store. Restaurants reopened, first for takeout only, then with a limited number of seats. Upper Pass Beer held weekly taco and beer nights on the green over the summer, and its sister business, First Branch Coffee, has been allowing four people at a time in the shop. With a statewide mask mandate in place, nearly everyone has been wearing a face covering.
School resumed in the fall, with most students in person at least two days a week at the outset, and now four days a week.
Life has gone on. But it hasn’t been easy.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we get shut down,” Kristen Strong, owner of 108 Chelsea Station, the town’s lone diner. She has owned and run the place since 1991, and the past year has been the hardest, starting with a divorce (her husband had done the cooking) and then the pandemic.
With the diner closed, she said, she had time for projects, but no earnings to fund them. She decided to clean it and repaint it, and she did some repainting at her home in Bethel.
Then she started serving takeout meals, working by herself. Even before the pandemic, she’d been working 16- to 20-hour days. Now she’s just carrying on until normal life can resume and the little diner can be crammed full at breakfast and lunch.
“I’ve kind of been holding on to that,” she said. “I love this place. It’s frustrating and it’s hard. … I don’t know if I’ll make it through.”
She had to ask a longtime patron who refused to wear a mask to leave, and he’s vowed not to come back. Foliage traffic made her “very uncomfortable.” Tourists would walk in without masks.
“Or they’d say, ‘We’re not going to quarantine,’ ” said India Hook, who waits tables at 108. They’d whisper, “ ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ ” she added.
Two women had come in without masks and when asked said, “ ‘Where we’re from, they don’t make a big deal about that,’ ” Strong said. She explained that there are regulations she has to follow or her place gets shut down.
“We are parents through this whole thing,” Strong said.
A couple of doors down, Five Olde Tavern and Grille owner David “Spike” McDerment has experienced some of the same hassles.
“Sometimes, customers are taken aback” when mask rules are enforced, he said. “No matter what side of the mask thing you’re on, there are regulations and we have to abide by them.”
Business is about 25% of what it used to be and about 75% of the business they are doing is takeout for customers who stop in pretty much every week. He’s keeping six or seven people employed at least part-time, he said.
He said he wouldn’t be surprised if the state closed down restaurants again, but the new restrictions the state released on Friday say only that restaurants must close for in-person dining at 10 p.m., and that only a single household may be seated together. All other previous physical distancing and masking guidelines remain in place.
“I haven’t heard of an overabundance of people getting sick at restaurants,” said McDerment, who opened the South Royalton restaurant and bar in 2004 and for the first three years ran it along with the original Five Olde, in Hanover, before selling the Hanover location. “The leaf peepers probably didn’t do us any favors, and now it’s the hunters.”
From the Sunshine Thrift Store, in the back of 108 Chelsea Station, Raelene Lemery keeps tabs on people in town who are struggling, either financially or with the isolation of the state of emergency.
The social restrictions have hit older residents particularly hard, Lemery said. She went to a local bank and secured a loan to help an older couple who were about to lose their home. Some residents are so deep in a financial hole that it’s hard to see how they’ll get out of it.
“How are these people who are four months behind in their rent, how are they going to get caught up?” she said.
Lemery turned 80 a couple of months ago and was interviewed for WCAX’s “Super Seniors” series. She wasn’t happy about that at first, but then four cousins she didn’t know she had came and visited her at the thrift store. It was a surprising bright spot of her pandemic year.
After Tropical Storm Irene devastated the White River Valley in 2011, the community pulled together, Lemery said. “I know this is different, but we as a community should be looking out for our neighbors.”
The fear of COVID-19 is a barrier to overcome.
Frank Lamson, who was a longtime nurse practitioner at the South Royalton Health Center, the pediatric clinic in town, was walking home from the market with a small cloth bag of groceries. Now retired, he said the pandemic’s main effect on him has been to limit how much he sees his grandchildren, two of whom live in Bennington, Vt., and two in Massachusetts, “in a city that’s been redlined as far as Vermont is concerned,” he said.
The other main effect “has been a reminder of what this community means to me.” He sees people helping their neighbors and looking out for each other.
“I have been somewhat worried about the law school’s future,” he said. “I just cannot imagine this community without the law school. It would be so profoundly different.”
Vermont Law School is teaching remotely, but some students are still living in town.
At First Branch Coffee, Megan Fuerst was holding down the fort on Thursday afternoon. She came to South Royalton from her native Cleveland four years ago to get a master’s degree at the law school and stayed on.
“When I talk to my mom and my sister, I feel so much safer here,” she said. Vermont has fewer cases, but also, “there’s so much community support.”
Upper Pass Beer, which shares space with the coffee shop, threw a big fifth anniversary party for itself at the end of September. “People were really respectful,” said Star Yesman, who handles sales and events for the beer company. Upper Pass also took contact info for everyone who attended, to aid in contact tracing in the event of an outbreak.
The events have stopped now that it’s cold.
“It seems like a small thing, but people really like it,” said Yesman, who grew up in Norwich. “To turn it on its head a little bit, it’s something to look forward to.”
Stopping by on Friday night for a beer, a simple pleasure.
“That’s what’s keeping everybody going,” he said.
As the lockdown first descended, the days were getting longer and warmer, and South Royalton residents got out for walks, because they knew they could see friends and relatives outdoors, at a distance.
The surge in cases is happening as the days are nearing their shortest and darkest, and soon, coldest, and the two biggest family holidays approach.
But everyone seems to know what to do.
The school band played the national anthem and Pauly, the director, reminded them of why they were there.
“We chatted last week about people we know who are veterans,” he said.
“My grandfather’s right over there in that blue car,” Julia Morse, a percussionist, shouted out.
They played These Green Mountains, the state song, then a medley of military songs. Anyone who was in band would know the words. “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli”; “and those caissons go rolling along”; “off we go, into the wild blue yonder”; “Anchors aweigh, my boys.”
The battle now is here at home, and the band’s members know how to fight it.
“Seeing as how we’re a small town, it makes it easier for things not to explode,” said Hayden Howe, while he and fellow percussionists Morse and Ryan Smith loaded their drums and stands into a waiting vehicle. “Everyone’s just kind of accepted that it’s part of our lives now.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
