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.