My husband and I watched the final flight take off in March, standing on our porch, gazing across the turquoise harbour toward the Bermuda airport.
The sound of planes arriving and departing in the distance barely used to register. The jet streams crossing the sky often felt like nothing more than the hands of a clock: 8:40 a.m., American Airlines; 2:30 p.m., Air Canada; 6:15 p.m., British Airways. Like the chirps of the dime-sized whistling frogs that blend into our evening chorus, the ubiquity of the planes rendered them nearly invisible.
Yet the silence that followed the dull roar of the last plane soaring out of sight was deafening. “Well, that’s that. It’s just us now,” I declared, somewhat melodramatically. But it wasn’t really an overstatement: We live on a 55-square-kilometre island, a thousand kilometres from our nearest neighbour; planes are our connection to the rest of the world. Bermudians joke about being 60,000 alcoholics clinging to a rock, but as hell broke loose around the world and we segued into isolation, this was about to become at least partly true. Bermuda had closed her borders.
Read the rest at Toronto Star.
