‘We can’t stop living’: Macon slips into uneasy quiet as coronavirus casts eerie shadow
Editor’s note: Telegraph reporter Joe Kovac practiced social distancing recommendations from the CDC when gathering material for this column.
It was 2 o’clock on a Monday afternoon and you could walk down the middle of Cherry Street.
Occasional cars came and went down in the heart of downtown Macon, where this main drag’s centerline is striped with a hot-pink homage to the annual (until now) Cherry Blossom Festival.
But life was on hold. Lives were on hold.
The new coronavirus that has ground commerce and day-to-day bustle to a halt has shrouded the city in uncertainty.
Despite the usual springtime pageantry — azaleas blossoming, lawns greening, pine pollen powdering all — a pall has been cast by an unseeable illness. Unseeable, that is, until it isn’t.
Unknowns hang like wisteria.
In fall of 1918, when Spanish Flu swept the nation, the Georgia State Fair was canceled. As a Macon Daily Telegraph dispatch at the time put it, “the lives of the people were in jeopardy.” Early on, headlines mocked the coming menace. Then people started dying. Locals donned homemade masks to fend it off.
Now in downtown, in what for past generations was the commercial mecca of Middle Georgia, the din of midday has been reduced to the silence of an endless Sunday morn. Or to a time even quieter, according to those most familiar with its rhythms.
“It seems like every day is a Sunday evening,” waitress Verrietta “Bunny” Deans said.
As she spoke to a reporter in front of a clothing shop named Fashion Avenue, a flustered mail carrier with an armful of packages marched past. The mail carrier had on a surgical mask and informed the reporter, “We can’t be recorded or asked questions.”
Deans, 53, who has spent parts of the past decade waiting tables at Market City Cafe and Parish on Cherry, said, “I can’t see how the country has come to this. ... It’s sad. ... I know what’s going on, but we can’t stop living.”
As our famed cherry trees bloomed, our everyday affairs have wilted. On Monday along Poplar and Mulberry streets, parking spaces were so plentiful that not paying the meters didn’t seem much of a gamble. Down at Terminal Station at the foot of Cherry, a Greyhound bus cruised in bound for Atlanta. The lone person aboard was its driver.
The emptiness was enveloping.
Along Fifth Street where city bus riders waited for a lift, they kept their distance, backs to a wall, cautious, as if on the lookout for more than a bus. A woman on a bench who said her name was Pam spoke through a surgical mask and said she was afraid to say much else.
Still, folks were friendly enough, there just weren’t many folks to see.
Down the way, a pair of joggers trotted south across Poplar. A woman with a Labrador retriever on a leash and two little girls in tow made her way through the Yoshinos in Third Street park. The quartet almost didn’t have to look as they ambled across traffic-less Cherry.
Meanwhile, three guys in chairs sat chatting beneath the awning at On Time Fashion, a men’s shop on Third. They looked relaxed enough, though one of the fellows was wearing rubber gloves.
A block north, the attendant in a glassed-in booth at a parking deck on Mulberry sat fiddling with her phone.
Outside the One Hour Valet cleaners on Walnut Street near the old Len Berg’s restaurant, a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy was picking up some clothes. Sheriff’s Maj. Eric Walker was a Macon police officer during the Flood of ‘94 and the Mother’s Day tornadoes in 2008. He said the virus’s grip is a disaster with a different strain of despair.
“In the past situations, they always told us to come together to help everybody,” Walker said. “With this, it’s just the opposite: stay away from each other to help each other.”
Walker, who oversees security at the county courthouse, said people who need to take care of business there are being turned away if they don’t have appointments. But he said custodians there are “still wiping down stuff three times a day.”
About two miles to the northwest, a woman sitting on a porch in Pleasant Hill didn’t give her name but said she had been living on the rise there at the intersection of Third Avenue for 81 years.
She declared the virus as something “in God’s hands.”
“It’ll eventually be over one day,” she said. “God got the last say-so over everything.”
South of her place Monday, Johnny Gilmore strode toward downtown on a Vineville Avenue sidewalk. He had on a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap. A baby-blue surgical masked covered half his face.
For protection, he said, from the virus.
“Ain’t no telling who got it,” he said.
Gilmore, who came to Macon from New York last fall, said, “Everybody needs to stay safe in their house until further notice.”
At lunchtime Monday, three tree surgeons sat with their backs to a wall outside Joe D’s, an Ingleside Avenue sandwich shop.
As they finished their meals — appropriately separated in this time of not getting too close — one of the tree-trimming trio mentioned how Macon was “starting to turn into a ghost town.”
“Some stuff,” said another, referring to shuttered stores and schools, “is a little unsettling.”
Across Ingleside, outside a gas mart at the corner of Rogers Avenue, handyman David McClendon sat resting his legs.
McClendon, 58, has done his best to stay home when he isn’t out rounding up yard work.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the coronavirus and COVID-19.
He said he was praying and drinking a lot of water.
Then he posed a question about the virus.
His question cut to the core of communal anxiety, edginess, restlessness and disquiet.
Sure, there are answers to his query, but the surest-fire answer of all — avoiding others — rings as hollow as sickness in springtime.
Yet it is a question that has all but silenced cities and states across the land.
One that likely will loom until it allows our collective slowdown to subside.
“How,” McClendon wondered, “do you stay safe from it?”
This story was originally published April 3, 2020 at 8:00 AM.