Chicago Tribune
By Jennifer Day
Typically, Door County, Wisconsin, is home to just over 27,000 permanent residents in early spring, once you factor in the senior citizens who flee south to warmer climes.
Not this year.
The numbers have swelled as hundreds of out-of-towners poured into the area to wait out the coronavirus lockdown in their vacation homes — even after Door County officials issued an explicit health advisory for seasonal travelers to stay in their primary residences and state governors issued stay-at-home orders prohibiting nonessential travel.
That’s hundreds more people for them to worry about during a pandemic, those officials say.
While we have a great, first-class hospital and first-class medical personnel here, we are a small, rural community with a 25-bed hospital,” said David Lienau, chairman of the Door County Board of Supervisors. “We’re afraid our facilities could be easily overwhelmed.”
To prepare for COVID-19, he said, the hospital has tripled its intensive care unit capacity: from four beds to 12.
Tension rose last week as the local health department reported the first two COVID-19 cases in Door County; both patients are local residents who had traveled recently. At the same time, more out-of-state license plates have been spotted, Lienau said. And yes, many of those plates are from Illinois. The sheriff’s office has fielded calls from people who want the bridges raised (they won’t be). Notes have been left on cars, and out-of-towners have been confronted in grocery stores.
On the Door County Vacationers Facebook page, spats have broken out, where at least one local member joined the page purely to get a sense of how many out-of-towners were planning to come up.
“The only tourists who surprise me are the ones who don’t act like complete sociopaths when they come up here,” wrote Joshua Olson, a Sturgeon Bay nursing student. “Otherwise, their entitlement and disregard for others is the norm.”
This is a conversation playing out in resort destinations nationwide: in Cape Cod and the islands in Massachusetts; in the Catskills and the Hamptons in New York; in the Florida Keys, where state troopers have set up highway checkpoints to verify drivers’ residency. The Wall Street Journal has reported on the value of vacation homes in helping to isolate sick or potentially vulnerable family members.
Resort towns have responded by shutting down short-term rentals and reiterating nonessential travel bans. Coastal towns in Michigan likewise are urging would-be travelers to stay home.
If you own a second home in South Haven, we cannot prevent you from visiting — but we would call on common sense for everyone to shelter in place where they currently are,” said Brian Dissette, city manager of South Haven.
For a Pilsen couple, however, sheltering in place meant staying put in their Galien, Michigan, home. Mario Aranda and Paul Fagen left for the southwestern Michigan town on Friday, March 13; later that day, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered all public schools to close. The stay-at-home order followed a week later.
“It’s a place we come to every weekend when we’re able to,” said Aranda, who owns the architectural and interior design firm Cielo Vivo. “I remember looking at my laptop and thinking, maybe I should bring my laptop. Who knows?”
Aranda and Fagen considered going back to Chicago, but ultimately decided that it might be more socially responsible to isolate where they were, telecommuting via Zoom, to avoid having to go in and out of their Pilsen three-flat multiple times a day to walk their dog.
“Our decision to stay out here is not only for our health and well-being …. If we went back to our apartment, we’d be adding to the network of interactions in that direction, too,” said Fagen, an actor who also works for Communities in Schools. His latest play, “Verböten” at The House Theatre of Chicago, was shut down on March 8.
For Pete Toalson, the decision to stay in Logan Square rather than his farmhouse in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, was a business decision. He’s a principal for the project development studio Land and Sea Dept., which owns such restaurants as Longman & Eagle and Parson’s Chicken & Fish. His wife, Nicole Toalson, is founder and executive director of the Green Bean day school and nursery.
Although the Toalsons and their two children won’t be decamping to Elkhorn, Nicole Toalson will continue to make the hour-and-a-half drive once every week or so to feed the chickens and barn cats on the six-acre property.
Pritzker’s executive order permits “essential travel,” including “travel to return to a place of residence from outside the jurisdiction.”
The goal of such an order is to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus by limiting contact between individuals,, said Dr. Benjamin Singer, a pulmonologist and an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The confusion seems to be in defining the word “essential.”
“I think the way most people in public health are interpreting this means it’s something essential to your family and your family’s life and health, including pets and children,” he said. “Essential doesn’t mean things that you want to do. These are things that you need to do.”
Back in Door County — where in some northern areas as much as 60% of the property is owned by non-residents and more than 50% of the population is 65 or older — Lienau is fielding texts and phone calls. Some callers test the waters, asking if it’s OK to come; others argue that they pay taxes, so it’s their right to come.
“This is not about taxes or property rights. This is about social responsibility,” Lienau said. “There are always some people who believe it doesn’t pertain to them.”
(c)2020 the Chicago Tribune