They fled the coronavirus – now they’re in scenic limbo

The day before Megan LeCrone, a soloist dancer with the New York City Ballet, turned 36, she got an urgent call from her longtime friend and fellow soloist Harrison Ball. “If we don’t leave now, we’re not going to be able to get out,” he told her.

The date was March 20, when only 17,000 Americans had tested positive for Covid-19, schools around the country had just closed and nonessential workers were beginning to tire of the “are you wearing pants?” jokes on Zoom.

LeCrone and Ball sped through Kennedy International Airport, which was deserted, and, despite takeoffs being cancelled all around them, boarded the final flight to their destination. “It felt like we were crossing into West Berlin,” Ball said.

They were, in fact, flying to the Bahamas. And there they have remained.

While many who can afford it stayed proudly in their home cities, some decided to move, Green Acres-like, to less-infected pastures.

Not just the Matt Damons or Jerry Seinfelds of the world. (Damon is staying in the seaside resort town of Dalkey, Ireland after production for a forthcoming Ridley Scott film was shut down nearby; Seinfeld, who lives with his family in a terraced duplex in the Beresford on Central Park West, is sequestered in East Hampton.)

Matt Damon chose to escape to Dalkey in Dublin, Ireland. Picture: iStock

But there are also those who thought they could sneak in a quick getaway. They know that their privilege — financial, physical, professional, personal — allowed them to leave their homes, where infections were rapidly multiplying.

They know you will have about as much sympathy for them as you did for David Geffen on his $590 million superyacht in the Grenadines, or those newlyweds who kept an entire hotel staff at work in the Maldives.

They also know they cannot get home.

A Faux-Rosy Reality

After a spring break family ski trip to Lake Tahoe in California was cancelled, Morgan Bernstein, the director of strategic initiatives at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, thought of an empty house her mother keeps in Honolulu.

“We floated the idea of going to Hawaii by a couple of friends and they said, ‘It sounds amazing, but you know you might get stuck there’,” Bernstein said. “At the time it was, ‘Ha-ha, yeah, right’.”

Two months later, her husband is unemployed, the family car is in need of repairs after a Bay Area break-in and their kids are happily playing catch with floating coconuts.

Morgan Bernstein and her family.

“I really struggled at first feeling trapped between work and vacation, feeling displaced and isolated, even though it’s definitely not a ‘poor me’ situation,” Bernstein said.

“I would half-jokingly bring things up on Zoom happy hours with my friends about not having my pyjamas and face lotions and all the little things that make me feel like I’m at home. They were like, ‘Seriously, Morgan? You’re complaining about cleansers when you’re in Hawaii?’”

Bernstein also worries about the faux-rosy reality she has created for her 5- and 7-year-olds. “They get that there is a virus that is making people sick, but I’ve never seen them happier,” she said.

“They think they’re on an extended vacation. It makes me wonder if I’m robbing my kids of the experience of understanding what the world is going through. Are they not going to relate to their peers because they will have experienced this time in such a different way?”

Life will be a beach for the Bernsteins. For a while.

A few time zones over, Alice Boher and her husband, Sebastian Boher, artisanal marijuana pipemakers, boarded a flight at LAX in early March for a two-week trip to Nicaragua, thinking if they did get stranded, at least it would be within their budget.

They spent their first 12 days surfing on remote beaches with no internet access. The second Alice Boher walked into her hotel room in Granada, she turned on the air-conditioner and flipped on CNN.

Alice Boher and her husband.

“I’m still in the same mental reality as everyone else, regardless of where I physically am,” she said. “I look at the news and I’m devastated for hours. But I also have gratitude for real change. I’ve lived in cities my whole life and now I watch the first star come out every night.”

She has a friend in Los Angeles fulfilling pipe orders and no ticket home, since the airline she flew down doesn’t operate the route anymore. “We all have a story of this time,” Boher said. “And this is just my little story. This is my chain of weird events. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It just is.”

Alice Boher.

Muting the Ocean

After years working as an event planner in New York, Laura Ling had saved up enough money to travel for months and caught the last flight into Medellín, Colombia, before the borders closed.

“It was very weird to be two or three weeks ahead in terms of the virus. I knew their corona-future,” she said.

Laura Ling.

After hearing that immigration officers were picking up tourists on the streets and throwing them out of the country, she began self-quarantining, venturing out occasionally to her balcony or rooftop terrace.

“My industry is dead,” Ling said. “I talk to colleagues, and we know we won’t be making any money off events in 2020. I’ve just started to think about what other career options I have.”

Every night she watches President Iván Duque’s nightly address to the nation, where he talks about saving abuelos and abuelas. “I have no regrets about coming here and I don’t think about anything beyond the next three days,” she said. “At least I am still learning Spanish.”

Laura Ling’s view in Medellín.

Trading Places

Minus the exercise, I can relate from a few islands away. I, too, booked an impromptu trip, in my case to St John, a few days after a long-planned family vacation to Israel had to be shelved.

In retrospect, the plan — hatched on a crowded R train home from work — was far from responsible, though then schools were still in session and my office was open.

After our third attempt at a flight home got cancelled, my husband took his new mask of frolicking-turtle-print fabric, made by a local who calls himself Iron Man, and hopped a choppy 30-minute ferry to another island to procure a printer and cheap laptop so our daughters could attend online school.

I tried to persuade vacation property owners that they could indeed rent to us because we had arrived before the government-mandated tourist ban. (Luckily, I didn’t have to ask the woman with whom I chatted on a hike, who sprinted away when I told her where I’d arrived from five weeks earlier.)

A couple of days before I left New York, comedian Sarah Silverman flew in there and settled into a rented apartment that her friend Adam Schlesinger had found. They had plans to workshop The Bedwetter, the musical they’d co-written with Joshua Harmon, based on Silverman’s memoir.

Sarah Silverman. Picture: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images

The afternoon Broadway went dark, Silverman, Schlesinger and the show’s director, Anne Kauffman, sat around the rental eating pizza, drinking wine and getting updates on when Linda Lavin, a cast member, would land in the city.

“We figured, well, this is what it is, and eventually when it passes, we’ll all be together rehearsing,” Silverman later told me. “That was the last time I socialised in person. And it was the last time I will ever see Adam.”

Eighteen days later, Schlesinger, the frontman of Fountains of Wayne, died of Covid-19 at 52. Silverman is staying put until at least mid-June, her apartment eerily quiet (“I never realised how many New Yorkers seem to have a place ‘upstate’.”) but with a washer and dryer (which, to New Yorkers, may be a bigger brag than a Zoom ocean background).

Silverman also takes in the view every evening, from her vacation balcony, aka fire escape. “I live for 7pm to 7.03pm when the whole city seems to be howling and banging pots and pans in a collective primal scream.”

She is also not rushing to hop on a plane home. “Against all reason,” she said. “I feel safer here.”

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