Day 5 – 5/13 – Glouster to Logan – 24 miles

Jason runs a small business in Logan, Ohio, a small town best known as the stepping-off point for visits to Hocking Hills State Park and its famous Old Man’s Cave. He anticipated that 2020 would be his best year ever; instead, he’s been sitting around idle for much of the time. Since he doesn’t have any employees, he says he has little recourse for aid, so he’s absorbing the financial hit directly.

When I ask about the coronavirus, he immediately offers that he’s only worn a mask once, but generally won’t do it. I offer that I’ve decided to wear a face covering in public not out of self-protection, but rather because the experts say it protects others, and I feel like it’s important to do my part. Jason grunts in response to that and then asserts that he’s pretty sure he already had it anyway, back in late-March, when the state first shut everything down. He had a fever for three days, so severe he was wiping sweat off his body with a towel, lost his sense of smell and taste, and then was “coughing up gray stuff” in the days afterward. Besides, he says, “we’re hard-headed people and we don’t like being told what to do. This is Appalachia. The census is going on right now. There are 48 counties in Ohio and we rank 44th in completion.”

Jason notes that he could file for unemployment, but all of that makes him uncomfortable. Tons of local people are receiving unemployment, including an extra $600 weekly under the CARES Act. He laughs and says most people in the area don’t make $600 a week to begin with. “Why would anyone go back to work?”

While the current conditions are challenging, Jason is particularly nervous about what might come in the fall–not just the much-speculated “second wave,” but the potential for it to bring about a surge of civil unrest. “I don’t know if you experienced this out where you are, but there was a run on guns sales out here.” If you can even find ammunition now, Jason says, the prices have shot through the roof. People are angry and they are well armed.

And, in the meantime, the food supply chain is already being disrupted. Beef is harder to come by than in anybody’s living memory. Wendy’s restaurants in the area don’t have burgers available; a Mexican restaurant is shutting down for the same reason. Slaughterhouses have been shut down because of illness; even when forced to re-open by the federal government, they nonetheless have their productivity greatly undercut. People raising cattle, hogs, and chickens are being pushed to euthanizing large numbers of stock, because they have no other outlet. The NY Times recently offered an alarming overview of these challenges. 

Jason is anticipating the worst–the supply chain breaking down and interrupting the delivery of new food, combined with the grid going down and wiping out refrigerated and frozen goods. He’s stocking up on canned food to be prepared. If people are hungry, he says, anything could happen.

While Jason is gravely concerned, he adds that he’s convinced that the federal government is exaggerating the death count. To offer one example, he asserts that if an airplane engine dropped out of the sky right now and killed us both, but the autopsy revealed that I had covid, then the government would count it as a covid death. Ultimately, he thinks, the government is using this as a chance to see how far it can push us, to find out just how many rules we’re willing to comply with. It’s capitalizing on our fear.

But wait, I reply–you think that the Trump administration is trying to maximize the severity of the crisis? It seems to me like the president, at least, has consistently downplayed the risk. He pauses, looks away, and then says, “I’ve always thought of the real government as taking place in dark rooms, men with cigars.” He doesn’t use the “deep state” term, but it’s clear that he’s not viewing Trump as the locus of power within the state.

“I don’t really have a party that represents me,” Jason concludes. For one example, he says, “it makes me physically ill to see two men kissing. But I can’t explain what exactly it is that makes me love my wife and I can’t claim that it doesn’t also exist for them.” He rejects the Republican opposition to gay marriage. However, “the Democrats just want to control everything.” As a consequence, “if I had to make a decision now, I would vote for President Trump.”