Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXVII): New Yorkers who decamped to rural places (mostly) return to the city

The New York Times reports today on New York City residents who fled to the country during the pandemic and are now mostly returning to the city.  The headline for Julie Lasky's feature is "They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds."  Here's the humorous lead anecdote:  

For Andrew Joseph, the unexpected challenge of rural living was summed up in a single word: beavers. Mr. Joseph was enchanted by baby beavers swimming in the brook on his four-acre property in the town of Saugerties, N.Y., [population 19,482, in the Hudson Valley] where he and his partner, Paul Pearson, have been sheltering since March 2020.

“I quickly learned that they’re horrible, nasty creatures that wreak havoc and destruction,” said Mr. Joseph, the head of a Manhattan public relations firm who still maintains a home in Harlem. The beavers dammed the brook in three places, creating a swamp behind the house, and built a den that is “the size of a small van.”

Mr. Joseph, 51, applied for a permit to remove the animals and awaited a visit from a beaver trapper. After a preliminary visit, he never showed up again, though a bear did.

Then one night the couple heard gunshots from a neighbor’s property, and, lo, the beavers were gone.

Here's another excerpt, this one focusing on what the data tell us about population movement:

According to a report published in November by the New York State comptroller based on United States Postal Service change-of-address forms, a trend in migration from New York City following the March 2020 lockdown had reversed itself as of July 2021, motivated by the reopening of schools, offices and arts and entertainment offerings.

There are more humorous anecdotes, this one about Tara Silberberg, who moved with her family from Brooklyn to Gallatin, population 1,668, also in the Hudson Valley, early in the pandemic:

Having been raised in rural western Massachusetts, where her parents retreated [from Brooklyn] after a horrific 1973 acid attack left a Park Slope child blind, Ms. Silberberg said she speaks two languages: country and city. “I’m very direct and the people on my board appreciate that about me. In the country, there’s a lot of couching and people trying to say something and not wanting to be aggressive about it.”

She is also schooled in the sometimes-operatic inconveniences of rural life. In the first year of her family’s Massachusetts sojourn, the 1930s gravity-fed water system broke “and nobody knew how to fix it and we didn’t have water for a year,” she recalled. “I understood that the country doesn’t mean it’s always picking daisies.”

Some transplants came to realize that urban density, the close contact with fellow citizens that seemed so threatening in a time of pestilence, was the first thing they missed.

And here's yet another, focusing on the "harsh demands" made by "big rural parcels":  

“I hurt my back over two years ago when I did weed whacking, one of the perils of country life,” said Annette Schaich, 58.

Ms. Schaich, a New York-based marketing consultant in the design industry, has spent the pandemic in a southern New Hampshire farmhouse she shares with her husband, Tony Conway, 71, an artist who grew up and was educated in the state. The couple are stewards of 20 acres, which has claimed a bit of their health. “Tony fell from a ladder when he was renovating the barn and broke his knee,” Ms. Schaich said. She added that there is an excellent hospital in the area.

And the presence of that excellent hospital sets it apart from other rural locales, where the transplants to rural places found themselves missing all sorts of services.   

Read the whole story.  Among other things, you'll find a mention of New Yorker--or urbanite--as identity. 

Here's a related post--now more than a decade old--by a student, "The uninformative rural mystique."