Items

• 2020-05-06

  COVID on the Border: Part 1

  I won’t name the town I was in due to operational security concerns but I arrived on 9 March 2020 to a small rural community on the U.S. side of the U.S./Mexican border. I had arrived in support of one of those governmental three-letter agencies and would be spending the next few weeks in the town. For a small town it had all the services necessary to fulfill the needs of myself and my coworkers; restaurants, grocery stores, even a shopping mall. Surrounded by farms, the town was predominately blue-collar and relied heavily on cross-border migrants to assist in the fields. Spanish was the dominant language and a great opportunity for me to recall my ad hoc lessons from junior high classmates while growing up in Long Beach, California. The gig was temporary but would be a new experience in a new location. I was excited. The first night in town I enjoyed a meal at a nearby Famous Daves BBQ restaurant with my coworkers. As we ate our BBQ sandwiches finished off with draught beer we couldn’t help but notice the concerns of news anchors on a nearby television over COVID’s proliferation in the U.S. Each day from that point on the restrictions grew. First barber shops, nail salons, and other non-essential businesses. Then restaurants. A week later the Famous Daves was closed for dine-in. Our world was collapsing. In a matter of a week the town’s fragile economy had come to a screeching halt. Nearby was a large shopping mall that I visited during my first few days in town. I bought a replacement wedding ring from the mall’s JCPenny after losing mine prior to the trip. Now the giant behemoth, that monument to 1980s-90s materialism, was closed. Not a soul stirred. A recreational jog around it found a family riding bicycles in the parking lot. Aside from a few lawn care workers pruning shrubs and palms it was a ghost town. I thought of the courteous saleswoman who helped me pick out the replacement ring; how was she fairing, what was her income like, what was her struggle like now? As these thoughts permeated my mind I couldn’t help but be thankful that I was still in a job that paid. I said a quick prayer for her. Could I help? The mall was locked tight, no way to find out who she was. In just a few weeks of living in this small town during this time of COVID and observing human responses and governmental orders related to the pandemic I was shocked to learn how fragile an economy can be. What did this look like for the future of businesses? Could that large mall ever open again or was it relegated to history, to serve as a relic or memorial to past human behaviors. Amazon had become king. One’s only hope was to live near an Amazon packing plant or own a business that was sub-contracted by the online giant. The farms continued to produce, the trucks continued to drive, but there was a hole in this once tight-knit small town along the border.