The Great American Migration of 2020: On the move to escape the coronavirus [View all]
Back home in Oakland, Calif., Lisa Pezzino and Kit Center built a life that revolved around music and the people who make it the musicians who recorded on Pezzinos small label and performed in places where Center rigged the lights and sound equipment.
Where they are now, deep in the redwood forest near Big Sur, 140 miles south along the California coast, there is mostly the towering silence of isolation. A tiny cabin, an outdoor kitchen, just one neighbor. This is life in the flight from the virus.
They left town with four days of clothing and every intention of coming right home. And then the new rules kicked in, and state officials urged people to stay inside. There would be no concerts, no musicians wandering by to plan a recording session. Pezzino, a civil engineer who can work remotely, and Center, whose rigging work definitely cannot be done from home, decided to stay put in the woods, indefinitely. They joined the impromptu Great American Migration of 2020.
The heartbeat of what we do is in gathering, the community of where we live, Pezzino said. Thats what keeps me in the Bay Area. Its certainly not the rent, which is crazy. When everything we do was canceled, my response was, Gosh, then, can we go to the country??
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coronavirus-great-american-migration/2020/03/28/b59d4d44-6f6f-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html