COVID PT 1

It’s the spring of 2020, the year the pandemic changed everything. It’s early March, and I am senior in high school. I’ve just returned from a two-week ski trip to Colorado-our winter break. Massachusetts schools don’t get out until late June, so we have both a winter and a spring break. Our official break was always just one week, but for as long as I can remember, during winter break, my family always took the following week off as well. This year was no different: two weeks in the mountains, and while in Colorado, I got a surprise visit from one of my brothers, who took a long weekend before his college spring break.

Once back, it was business as usual: catching up on work and gearing up for baseball season, which was set to start the following week. That meant indoor preseason practices on most nights.

At our school, we had at least one half-day Wednesday each month for teacher and faculty development. With no baseball yet and not much else to do, my buddy and I did the only thing we could - especially when the surf report was looking good. We checked the waves, and to our surprise, they were perfect. We were out there in no time.

The day didn’t disappoint. The older local surfers paddled out, all of us surfed until the tide shifted and the waves faded. It was a memorable day, something we as surfers always hoped for, yet a day of condition that would foreshadow the spring ahead.

March 11, 2020

The next day started out normal: classes lunch, more classes and finishing with homeroom, as we did every Thursday. By the end of the day, we learned that the baseball season would be suspended for a few weeks.

By Friday, things were starting to get a little weird. People were hesitant about high fives, and “COVID elbows” became a joke. After school, there was a science fair for the high school and middle school. They sped things up so everyone could get home quickly-things were definitely getting strange, but who cared?

At the end of the day Saturday, a couple of my other friends were back from their spring break. The waves looked fun, so we were out there again, surfing until sunset. Nantucket, being a tourist town, felt a little odd with people we usually only saw in the summer, but these were abnormal times. Still, who cared? The waves were good, and tomorrow promised even better.