One of the advantages of having family in rural North Carolina is that when the mayor of Washington, D.C., threatens fines and jail time for leaving one’s house on Capitol Hill, I have somewhere to escape.
Driving nearly 500 miles south to the mountain town of Asheville, where I grew up, I had hoped the coronavirus hysteria might be less acute there than in Washington. The all-encompassing nature of the global pandemic hit home when I attempted to hike my favorite peak.
Bearwallow Mountain is a natural bald, one of those open, grassy summits unique to the Appalachians that offer stunning views of the surrounding area. Bearwallow ascends more than 4,200 feet above Gerton, North Carolina, which is a census-designated place with a population of less than 300. Despite lying between the two tourist traps of Asheville and Lake Lure, Gerton has remained remote and undisturbed for generations.
Gerton’s most notable business is perhaps Sam’s Walking Sticks, which lies snug along U.S. Route 74A on the road to Bearwallow. A makeshift sign advertises the long-bearded, perennially shirtless Sam as “The Original Carolina Hillbilly,” whose sticks sell for $10 apiece. A self-righteous tourist once pulled over to object to Sam’s display of the Confederate flag outside his humble cabin; Sam defiantly replied, “If you don’t like it, don’t look at it.”
Upon reaching the small parking area at the top of a winding gravel road, I saw ribbons had been tied across Bearwallow’s trailhead. Plastered across the trail map was a notice: “Trail Temporarily Closed: Overcrowding on our trails poses an increased risk of COVID-19 transmission at a time when public health is our first priority.”
A disappointed older couple behind me read the signs and shuffled back to their car in deference to some distant, invisible authority. As a proud American in the tradition of Hillbilly Sam, I disregarded the warnings, lifted the ribbon, and hiked the mountain. I survived, though I was admittedly tossing a look over my shoulder the entire time.
I was by myself but apparently am far from alone. In Huntington Beach, California, “surfers walked right by law-enforcement officials telling them the beach was closed this weekend. Cyclists zipped across bike paths that were supposed to be off limits,” the Wall Street Journal reported May 3. Golf course owners in Massachusetts vowed to defy the lockdown and reopen. New Yorkers flocked to city parks, which remained open, but so did police officers bent on enforcing social distancing rules. With salons and barbershops still closed, hairdressers have been making unauthorized house calls. Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther chose jail rather than apologize to a judge for resuming her business.
As a market economy, suppressing such interactions can be, in many cases, plainly unsustainable for an extended lockdown. As such, the Washington Examiner reported May 4, “Black markets for food, drink, haircuts, and other goods are flourishing.” Part of it is that the government has provided them with no Plan B, no other option: “From being rejected by financial institutions for federal loans intended to help small businesses during the pandemic to not being eligible for unemployment because they may be considered sole proprietors, reopening their businesses against the state mandates became a last resort for many of them.”
None of this is evidence of crassness or ignorance of the virus. Who could fail to be moved by stories about those who did not take the coronavirus seriously, only to find themselves hooked up to a ventilator, fighting for their lives? Not only did I go home to evade the disease, I continue to avoid crowds and wash my hands every time I venture to the country grocery store as well. But, like many others, I am also concerned by the extent to which the state is intruding into even the smallest parts of my life. The pandemic poses unique political complexity for a nation that has mistrusted government from the beginning.
Fleeing from tyranny into the freedom of nature has long been an American pastime. When transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau found the trappings of 1840s New England society too onerous, he famously withdrew for two years to his small cabin on Walden Pond, in what was then the woodland outside Concord, Massachusetts. Ironically, the area is now a “state reservation” that has been “temporarily closed” to slow the spread of COVID-19.
In his 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government, which first popularized the term “civil disobedience,” Thoreau argued that the injustice of slavery and the Mexican-American War had given abolitionists reason to disobey their government. He would do jail time himself when he “did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.”
Thoreau’s questions about the limits of legitimate state authority are applicable in the age of the coronavirus. “Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient,” he wrote. The pandemic has offered government unprecedented opportunity to be inexpedient and has also given renewed relevance to the idea of civil disobedience.
Former federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy used the term recently during a discussion on Fox News about the overreach of states such as Michigan, where even professional lawn care and visiting family were forbidden in the name of social distancing. “Americans are sacrificial,” the former South Carolina congressman said. “But it’s not too much to ask, ‘Why are you making me do that, and is it rooted in some rationality that is connected with what we’re trying to prevent?’ And if it’s not, then we have this thing called ‘civil disobedience,’ and people can engage in it.”
Unlike Communist China or even many nations of Europe, U.S. government is predicated upon the idea that those in authority derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. For most of their history, Americans have been content to cede increasingly more rights to the state, as long as they are basically left alone in their daily lives. When authority attempts to involve itself in solitary hikes and other innocuous activities, the political theories that thinkers such as Thoreau wrestled with cease to be abstractions. When the state interferes with the ability of its citizens to gather for worship or make a living, those theories assume dire significance.
The tension between the individual and the state has always been an aspect of the American experiment. As protests proliferate amid a coronavirus clampdown that some speculate could extend for years, the near future may test the extent to which that centuries-old tension can go without snapping.
Jon Brown is the deputy breaking news editor for the Washington Examiner.
