In a mall, signs tell the story. In a Walgreens in South Cape Village, a shopping center in the town of Mashpee, on Cape Cod, signs tell you which goods are in short supply: pain relievers, adult diapers, antacids, eggs, and Donettes. “Due to high demand / We have a limit of TWO per household,” the signs say. “If the shelf is empty, product is out of stock temporarily.” A sign gives “the facts about ibuprofen and COVID-19.” (Despite an early warning from the French health minister, there is no evidence that the pain reliever worsens symptoms of the coronavirus.) Signs all over the store, and a soothing voice on the speakers, remind customers that Walgreens is concerned about their safety and ask that they observe a distance of six feet as they follow the blue arrows taped to the floor, indicating the direction of traffic in the aisles. The cash registers have brand-new Plexiglas shields around them and Q-tips for use with the keypad. Everyone in the store is wearing a mask.
South Cape Village, which sits on a small highway, is built to imitate a quaint old town center. Streets have names such as Joy and Commercial. There is a cute, tiny bus shelter. Walking through the shopping center now, with its parking lots nearly empty, feels like walking through a deserted town, with giant barren squares and shuttered stores. Signs announce the status of every business. The pizza store is offering curbside delivery: “Park in marked spaces and we will see you on the camera. Please remain in your car.” The handwritten sign on the sporting-goods store reads “Temporarily closed.” Dunkin’ Donuts is open: “WE’RE HERE TO KEEP YOU RUNNIN’ EVEN IF IT’S FROM A DISTANCE.” Procuts promises, “WILL REOPEN ASAP!” Mattress Firm asks you to “kindly call our contactless store.” After Dunkin’ Donuts, you have to walk all the way to the other side of South Cape Village to find two more stores you can actually enter: a supermarket and a liquor store. Roche Bros., the supermarket, asks, in large letters, “In cooperation with the CDC recommendation and the Governor’s request, please wear a face mask before entering the store.” The liquor store has a laser-printed sign: “Here at South Cape Wine and Spirits we have been taking this situation very seriously. Our staff has been diligently taking the proper cleaning and disinfecting steps to make the store as clean as possible.”
Inside the store—which is indeed very clean—there are no further signs of a pandemic, save for one that informs customers of a change in store hours “due to this Unforeseen situation.” There are no taped arrows, no masks on anyone, no gloves or Plexiglas shields or Q-tips at the cash register. What there is at the register is a display of wine, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay from the Trump Winery, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The employee who sold me a bottle of the red (it was twenty-seven dollars and god-awful: like a mouthful of oak-bark shavings when opened, fading to vinegar and finishing dry and raspy) told me that the store wasn’t requiring masks because “some people don’t want to wear a mask.” He also told me that business was good, if a bit “unusual”—for example, he said, the store was selling more tequila than usual.
Two realities sit side by side in South Cape Village: one dominated by the pandemic and the other inconvenienced by it. In one, masks, gloves, shields, and Q-tips signal concern and responsibility, and, in the other, open smiles and bare hands signal a sort of defiant optimism. The liquor store embodies the particular spirit of anti-lockdown protests on Cape Cod: not so much the zombie invasion of the Ohio protests as the glib, relentless cheer of your Fox News-watching uncle who likes to tease you for your self-seriousness. Unlike protests in the Midwest and South, which are coördinated and funded by Republican mega-donors, the small insurrection on Cape Cod appears to be homegrown. “I think this will all go away a lot sooner” than experts predict, Toby Brown, the owner of a Nantucket sprinkler and property-management company, told me on the phone, although he admitted that he’d said the same thing in March, when he was still hoping to take an April cruise with his friends. “When President Trump said Easter was his goal—it’s good to have a goal, to be positive, even if it didn’t come true,” he added. Brown is not a coronavirus denialist—a friend of his, he said, has been sick—but he thinks the reports of the number of cases might be exaggerated, and he favors opening up the island, with some precautions, such as asking summer residents to self-quarantine for two weeks. (Brown even said that he has volunteered to get groceries for his customers who are coming to their second homes.)
Brown speaks admiringly of a group called United Cape Patriots, which has held two protests on two consecutive weekends. The first demanded that Cape Cod follow President Trump’s suggestion and allow businesses to reopen. The second, held this past Saturday, focussed more narrowly on gun shops, which under Governor Charlie Baker’s coronavirus orders are not allowed to sell firearms to the public. (Brown was disappointed that he couldn’t make the protests—the journey from Nantucket to the Cape is long, and ferry service is infrequent these days.) The founder of United Cape Patriots, a retired Boeing executive named Adam Lange, told me that he started the group three years ago as an alternative to the local Republican establishment, which he views as too timid. “They don’t like to do negative campaigning,” he said, something United Cape Patriots embraced in their protests against the sanctuary movement. Their protests on behalf of reopening Cape Cod are positive campaigning.
“Cape Cod has had a relatively mild infection rate, just twenty deaths,” Lange said, underestimating the number of deaths by nearly half: thirty-seven people had died by the time we spoke, and seven hundred and fifty-six had become ill. In most Cape Cod towns, though, the rate of infection is indeed much lower than the statewide average. “Boston is going to be shut down for a long time,” Lange said. More than three hundred people have died in Boston, with over nine thousand confirmed cases of COVID-19. “But we are a different story. Yes, as the country opens up, you have people travelling back and forth, and sometimes someone will catch the virus. But, as a community, we are destroying the economy over twenty deaths.”
The other big issue, in keeping with priorities tweeted by the President, is insuring that guns and bullets can be sold during the pandemic. Fifteen Massachusetts businesses and individuals have filed a lawsuit against Governor Baker, alleging that his coronavirus orders violate the Second Amendment. I talked to one of the plaintiffs, Toby Leary, the co-owner of Cape Gun Works and an activist of the anti-lockdown protests. He told me that his store is a “twenty-thousand-square-foot state-of-the-art facility,” with two indoor shooting ranges. Leary manufactures guns and sells to law enforcement—essential services under the Massachusetts coronavirus orders—so he is allowed to operate on a very limited basis. But he used to sell between ten and thirty guns a day, he told me, and now he sells only one every three or four days. Proceeds from record-breaking gun sales in March have allowed Leary to keep his staff of about twenty people employed since the governor’s order went into effect on April 1st, but he won’t be able to continue much longer if the order is not lifted.
Leary’s argument for the lawsuit is twofold. First, he sees the designations of essential businesses as arbitrary. “I don’t see how you can tell Best Buy that they can be open because they sell appliances and tell the mom-and-pop shop across the street that they can’t be. I don’t see how ice cream, liquor, tobacco, and electronics are more essential than guns.” The other argument rests on principle. “The Second Amendment is bestowed upon us,” Leary said. I pointed out that the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of assembly are also guaranteed by the Constitution but are clearly limited in the current emergency. Leary agreed, and argued that closure orders should be replaced with reasonable-precaution guidelines. Otherwise, he said, “it’s about control, not safety.”
By Massachusetts standards, Cape Cod leans conservative. Trump got more than forty per cent of the vote here in 2016, compared with just over fourteen per cent in Boston. Lange told me that he is afraid to go to Boston, not because of the risk of becoming infected but because carrying pro-Trump signs in the city would be dangerous. I asked if he was in touch with anti-lockdown protesters anywhere else in the country, and he said no. “The left is really good at that—they have Indivisible here, and Democratic Socialists of America,” he said wistfully. “Those are national organizations. Conservatives are too dumb for that. We are just grassroots.” Loneliness, at least for now, may be the fate of anti-lockdown protesters in a small liberal state whose Republican governor believes in science.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
