I relocated from central California to a tiny coastal town in Maine. Right now, the extra space and joys of rural living are outweighing the drawbacks.
- A month and a half ago, Mary Kearl, her husband, and their toddler packed their bags and moved from California to a small coastal town in Maine: population 39,772.
- When the pandemic threw a wrench into their original plans to purchase a new home in Southern California, Kearl decided — like many urban dwellers — to move in with her parents.
- Kearl and her family have since adjusted to the pace of rural life, easily keeping a safe distance from neighbors and reconnecting with nature.
Before the start of the pandemic, I was planning to move with my husband and our two-year-old to San Diego county, the second most populous county in the country's most populous state — with an estimated population of 3.3 million.
That's nearly three times the size of the overall population of the state I ended up moving to, Maine, with its estimated 1.3 million residents. And it's nearly 8,300% bigger than the population size of the county I have since become an official resident of, Knox County, population 39,772.
While our own reasons for moving were unique, my family's experience is part of a larger trend some have referred to as "urban flight" and others have declared "the end" of big cities. About 40% of urban dwellers have considered relocating since the start of the pandemic "out of populated areas and toward rural areas," according to a Harris Poll of 2,500 US adults conducted between April 25 and 27, 2020.
And, according to more recent numbers that Pew Research Center reported in July 2020, about one in five US adults knows someone that has moved due to COVID-19. As is the case for my family, about 61% of adults who moved reported that they relocated to live with family and 41% specifically moved in with their parents or in-laws, like my husband and I did.
It's been nearly five months since the start of the pandemic. And the shutdowns that followed that affected our freelance incomes, causing some of our main projects to be canceled, and left my dad, who was going to help us qualify for a loan by cosigning for our mortgage, without a job, becoming one of the millions of unemployed workers in the US.
That's when we put our plans of buying a house in Southern California on hold. As freelancers, we now have to wait at least until January 2021 — when we'll meet the requirement of having two years of self-employed income — to try and qualify for bank financing on our own.
Once home-buying was no longer an option, we weighed our options. We could rent, but would we want to commit to leasing for a year if we could potentially buy somewhere as early as January or sooner if one of us got a full-time job? Would we want to commit to a year with our own incomes still a question? And potentially go a year without seeing our family across the country, as they're no longer an easy plane ride away — especially since we don't feel comfortable flying with a toddler amidst the coronavirus outbreak?
It's now been a month and a half since we packed up our car and moved our family of three across the country in the middle of the pandemic, driving about 50 hours and 3,190 miles from California to Maine. It wasn't a decision we made lightly, but with all the unknowns we were facing, it felt like the best option — to have a place to call home, to be together with my parents, to pool our resources to share our living expenses and childcare, and to have a safe place to keep physical distance from others throughout the potential duration of the pandemic.
We've successfully relocated while taking every precaution we could not to come into close contact with anyone along our journey. We passed through the two-week quarantine period while self isolating in Maine and keeping a physical distance from my family and our new neighbors, and now and have largely been able to self-isolate in a state that's one of the few that's seeing cases drop and in a county that's had only two new cases over the last seven days and 27 cases total — while the state we left has since become a coronavirus hotspot.
Here's what it's been like since I relocated from California to a tiny coastal town in Maine.
We can go what feels like days without seeing anyone — but if we do run into people, it's easy to keep a distance.
We walk the loop at least once or twice a day, and we can go days without running into any of our neighbors. Though, when we do, it's easy to keep a distance of more than six feet.
We also live in front of a tidal river that connects to the ocean and we're often more likely to see people out on the water — where it's easy to have a conversation from a distance.
People are largely compliant with wearing masks and, so far, there's no shortage of supplies like hand sanitizer, gloves, disinfecting wipes, toilet paper, and paper towels.
Compared to experiences we've heard about from friends and family living in New York, San Francisco, and other cities with high population densities, I appreciate how easy these experiences have been.
Hannaford, the local grocery store chain, has a table set up at the front where two staff members keep track of everyone coming in to make sure all patrons are wearing a mask.
Here, everyone we've seen wears their masks.
At Walmart, there was an employee who checked for mask compliance, and handed out disposable masks for people to wear inside the store.
We rarely go out in public, but we do have to go to the post office and drop off our trash and recycling.
Phone and Internet service are hit or miss.
It's different from city living, but for those looking for space to keep a safe distance, there's plenty of it — and for the foreseeable future, that may be the only thing that matters.
We've had home-cooked food for nearly every meal since arriving.
For us, we're lucky that moving to Maine has met all of these requirements and we've traded uncertain circumstances stretched time zones and thousands of miles apart from our family, for the chance to ride out these uncertain times together, sharing the cost of living and taking care of our toddler with my parents.
And, in addition to the space we have to enjoy the nature and community around us at a safe distance, for which we are so grateful, there are other small joys to appreciate each day.
The library that, in lieu of regular programming while closed to the public, scattered poster-size pages of a picture book across its gardens for readers to safely enjoy outside.
The parade we organized for a neighbor’s 90th birthday.
The physically distanced garden tour the public library recently hosted.
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