AmeriCorps 2020: The return of the COVID

This post continues the series about my AmeriCorps term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here.

In case anyone’s forgotten, we had a bit of a pandemic in 2020. As I’ve said before, though, my fellow AmeriCorps members and I were strangely isolated from the COVID chaos: we were living in a hilltop house outside of Boulder, Colorado, and spending our days working in picturesque landscapes.

However, there were a few days when we felt the effects of the pandemic more strongly, and August 12, 2020 was one of them.

Our day on August 12 started the same as any other. I got up before everyone else, made breakfast, and drank my coffee while watching the sun rise from our stone patio.

My fellow service members and I arrived at work after a standard commute through Boulder, and then hiked to the beginning of the Fern-Mesa reroute project. Once there, Kait – our main contact with the City of Boulder – moved us down the budding trail to a section that we hadn’t worked on before.

This section of trail had been “rough cut” by volunteers. Our job, then, was to finish what they’d started.

Some spots along this new segment of trail required more work than others. Kait and Jo stuck me on one of the worst spots, apparently thinking that I would complete it within a reasonable time. How wrong they were.

Unfortunately for Jo and Kait, my experience in archaeology had trained me to never dig too aggressively, because all holes must be dug uniformly and in increments of a few centimeters at a time. This made me great at the finer aspects of trail work, but less so at moving large amounts of dirt quickly. As such, it took me a long time to fix the spot that Jo and Kait had assigned to me, and by the end of the workday I still wasn’t done.

Once the end of the day had arrived, my crew members and I gathered our tools and began the hike back to our van.

We ran into Hillary on our hike to the van, and Hillary was our real boss, even above the mighty Jo. She told us that COVID cases were rising again, and that the City of Boulder was talking about going back into lockdown.

Those words cast doubt on the future of our project, and of our time in Boulder. We operated continuously with the threat of COVID suddenly shutting everything down, and our encounter with Hillary brought that threat into focus.

On the next day, August 13, we’d be confronted with a threat that would come much closer to ending our project than even COVID.