Postcard from Hardwick: The Old Pest House
Without thinking the other day, I asked the bank cashier how her day was going.
She looked at me over her mask and paused for the slightest moment. I quickly acknowledged what an unfair question that is — what with the pandemic and all.
Like everywhere on the globe, Hardwick has changed in past half year. The diner is take-out only. Co-op staff strung a cord across the door, and customers wait their turns. Clear plastic wrap drapes the post office counter. The library is open by appointment only. I stand outside, picking up my curbside books and calling hello through the screen door.
What’s also taped off is the suspension bridge over the Lamoille River, deemed unsafe in August until a cord is repaired. Put on your mask, folks, and walk around. In the scheme of things, what’s a little more inconvenience?
Last April, my high schooler studied the Fall of Rome on our couch. The Fall of Rome was a hard time, indeed, caused by numerous factors, including too much military spending, extreme government corruption, and plague. Six months into the pandemic, and I feel I’ve aged a decade. My own petty woes of parenting and work haven’t printed even a blip against the global suffering of illness and death and the hovering fears of economic collapse and civil chaos. And yet, my teenage daughter is edging day by day closer to adulthood, studying geometry and considering a career in law, walking past that taped-off bridge every day.
Further up the hill, we often walk on trails to Hardwick’s old pest house. In 1900, smallpox appeared in Hardwick. To combat this infectious disease, afflicted people were quarantined outside of town. The pest house was built along the reservoir, where the Black River joins the Lamoille. Four months and thirty-four cases later, the town closed the pest house. With no fatalities, the lingering effects were the psychological and financial havoc.
In my wanders along the Hardwick Trails, I often pause at the Pest House ruins, now nothing more than a cellar hole and a bench beneath a maple tree. Where the land joins the reservoir, I sometimes stand at the water’s edge. On a fortuitous April afternoon, two bald eagles swooped out of a pine tree, dove low over the water, and then disappeared.
Skipping rocks over this water, I wonder who stayed here, 120 years ago, suffering from smallpox, marooned from family and friends, staring at travelers on Route 14, across the water. As schools struggle to open (or not), as the world inevitably lurches forward, I keep returning to this serene, wooded place, reminding myself that this, too, will pass. Bridges will be mended. History, I know — in a way I’ve never known before — will unspool and continue. We’ll endure.
https://hardwicktrails.com/about/the-ruins-of-the-hardwick-pest-house/
