In spring 2020, as a deadly new virus raged worldwide, upending lives in countless ways, some Vermonters turned to local historians for insights on how the state weathered its last major pandemic: the global influenza outbreak of 1918 that killed more than 50 million worldwide.
When Amanda Gustin, director of collections and access at the Vermont Historical Society, delved into the archives, she found some letters, diaries, newspaper articles and other ephemera but little else that captured the full scope and significance of that traumatic event. Within a year, more than 2,100 Vermonters died of the disease, more than three times the number of those killed in World War I. Yet much of that history, especially firsthand accounts from everyday Vermonters, was never documented. It was as if Vermonters experienced collective amnesia about the catastrophe and went on with their lives.
Realizing that we were living through another tumultuous time in Vermont’s history, Gustin told her staff that once life began returning to normal, they would start to gather the kind of stories that were lost or forgotten from 1918. Beginning in 2022 with a $137,000 federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, she launched a three-year oral history project to chronicle Vermonters’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, recorded in their own words.
“I kept thinking of the me from 50 or 75 years from now,” Gustin said. “Who do I wish they would have talked to? And what kind of experiences do I wish they would have documented?”
The result of that effort is the largest and most comprehensive oral history of COVID-19 compiled to date anywhere in the country. To mark this week’s fifth anniversary of the first lockdowns, the Vermont Historical Society is publishing Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont, edited by Garrett Graff. The book hits physical and digital bookshelves on March 25.
One of Vermont’s most prodigious and respected journalists and historians, 43-year-old Montpelier native and Pulitzer Prize finalist Graff was Gustin’s first choice for the job. The author of nine books, including two previous oral histories, on the D-Day invasion and the attacks of 9/11, he had the experience and skills to distill nearly 200 hours of recordings into a cohesive and readable narrative.
Life Became Very Blurry draws from interviews with more than 110 Vermonters, including state and municipal officials, health care workers, journalists, store clerks, artists, students, nursing home residents, teachers, and clergy. The book is but one component of the larger history project, which will also include a podcast and a searchable online database of the complete audio archive.
The project began with the hiring of four field interviewers, all of whom were trained by Vermont Folklife and traveled the state from 2022 to 2024 recording people’s stories and recollections. While certain individuals were chosen for their central roles in shaping the state’s official pandemic response — among them Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine, Department of Financial Regulation commissioner Mike Pieciak and Department of Health Laboratory acting director Helen Reid — others were selected because of where they lived, the nature of their jobs or some other unique life circumstance.
The interviewees ranged in age from students who were in middle school at the start of the lockdowns to nursing home residents in their eighties. Interviews typically lasted from 30 to 90 minutes. One question was asked of everyone: “What has the experience of COVID-19 been like for you?” Otherwise, the subjects steered the interviews almost entirely themselves. As Gustin put it, “Stories belong to the people who tell them.”
Because of the prolonged and all-encompassing nature of the pandemic, the interviewers often heard stories that were completely unexpected. Field interviewer Mark Johnson, a Vermont journalist since 1982 who is best known for his 25-year stint as radio host of “The Mark Johnson Show,” interviewed almost two dozen people. Among them was Ashley Van Zandt, director of development and communications at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury.
Johnson arrived at the interview expecting Van Zandt to talk mostly about the challenges of working for a live events venue at a time when large indoor gatherings were prohibited. Instead, she spoke at length about her experience with long COVID and the loss of her sense of taste and smell.
“She couldn’t eat anything but pasta. Everything else tasted like the bottom of a compost bucket,” he said.
Johnson also interviewed Tom Kelly, then a deputy state’s attorney in Lamoille County who was fired for refusing to get vaccinated or wear a mask. Johnson said he had to check his journalistic instincts to challenge some of Kelly’s statements and instead just “hear his story and his truth.”
Gustin, who also conducted some of the interviews, was struck by how emotional many of the subjects became, not just the ones who lost family or friends to COVID-19 but also those who missed important milestones such as graduations, weddings and births.
“In fully half of the interviews, I was holding back tears while I was doing them,” she said. “A hundred years from now, people are going to be listening to many of these interviews and at some point become emotional.”
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Some participants talked about the experience of forming pandemic-safe social circles, or “pods,” and the joy of spending extended time with family and friends preparing meals, playing board games, making music or walking in the woods. Some expressed a sense of gratitude tinged with guilt for the positive changes the pandemic had wrought. A few called it “a gift.”
In all, the interviews took about two years to compile, at which point Graff received the entire written transcript, which totaled nearly 3,000 pages.
As he explained in an interview, synthesizing Vermonters’ experiences with COVID-19 posed a fundamentally different challenge than his previous books When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day and The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11. Unlike those historical events, in which people remembered vividly where they were when they first heard the news, the pandemic was more amorphous and offered few common or unifying experiences.
“There were so many factors that went into how each of us experienced the pandemic,” Graff said, noting the role played by one’s occupation, health, family circumstances, geography, socioeconomic status and political viewpoint. “Even when you get down to the same street in the same town in Vermont, you have people who had wildly different experiences.”
Graff organized the book both chronologically and thematically, grouping interviews based on the subject matter: the state’s response, the care of hospital patients and nursing home residents, and the actions taken by schools, towns, essential workers and faith leaders.
“‘Flatten the curve!’ That was the most important thing in our entire lives for three weeks in March 2020.” Garrett Graff
While reading the transcripts, Graff said, he was surprised by how the different phases of the pandemic and their terminology had already been condensed and simplified in his mind — or forgotten altogether. He was reminded of the state travel maps that would indicate which counties were safe to visit and the buzzwords that briefly took on outsize importance: “stop the spread,” “open by Easter” and “turn of the spigot.”
“‘Flatten the curve!’ That was the most important thing in our entire lives for three weeks in March 2020,” he said. “And then we moved on to something else.”
Graff recounted one story that he said will stick with him for the rest of his life. Eric Rossier was a truck driver who delivered grain and hay from Canada to Vermont farms. In his interview, Rossier talked about how the pandemic was the first and only time in his career when people expressed genuine appreciation rather than annoyance for the work he was doing. (See sidebar on page 35.)
“I was tearing up the first time I read that,” Graff said. “I never could have told you that that was the story I wanted to read. To me, this is the most powerful story in the book.”
One takeaway for Graff, who spent most of the pandemic at his Burlington home, was how much better Vermont fared relative to other states. Vermont had among the highest rates of vaccination and lowest caseloads in the country. This was largely because citizens placed enormous trust in their state officials and the science they relied on to inform their decisions.
Indeed, while Vermont suffered the same economic and societal traumas as the rest of the country, it did not experience the same political divisiveness over mask mandates and school closures. As Graff pointed out, “There weren’t militias marching on the state capital to force Phil Scott to reopen the barbershops.
“The thing that comes through in interview after interview is how Vermont communities rallied together to take care of neighbors,” he added. “That, to me, is the overarching theme of the entire book.”
Life Became Very Blurry concludes with a chapter called “How We Changed.” In it, Vermonters reflect on the pandemic’s lasting impact. Graff makes it clear that, even as our lives have mostly returned to normal, we have yet to fully process the trauma and grief of COVID-19. The country’s trajectory was irrevocably altered by the pandemic, he said, and its enduring legacy will not be fully understood for years or decades to come.
“This is effectively a first draft. We’ve laid the groundwork and got a good start,” Gustin said. “But our grandkids are going to be interviewing us about what life was like during COVID-19.”
Excerpts From Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont
Gwen Louise Tuson, tax preparer, White River Junction, VT:
It felt like there was a hippopotamus sitting on top of my chest. I couldn’t move my chest cavity to breathe. It was horrible. It was still fairly early on with Covid, so at the ER, they put me in one of those hermetically sealed, zipped-up little boxes. The inside of the tent said it was designed for people with smallpox, measles, or West Nile virus. I don’t know how many of those they had at Dartmouth-Hitchcock [Medical Center], but they had me in one of those in the ER as they did tests. Eventually they sent me home because even though I was having trouble breathing, my oxygen levels were sufficient, so that I wasn’t actually having a breathing emergency. They said, “This is not life-threatening. We’re not admitting you.”
Eric Rossier, trailer-truck driver, Timberland Distribution:
It was beyond interesting to be on the road during the time that the border was closed. The product that I transported was hay and straw to dairy farms and to goat farms, beef operations throughout New York and New England. That caused me to cross the border three times a week.
…People that have animals at their homes don’t always have the carrying capacity on their land to feed those animals; you can imagine their uncertainty.
They knew all the hay we transported was coming from Canada. They wanted to know whether they were going to be able to feed their animals. When we would show up with a trailer-truck load of big square bales, they would just start crying. When we showed up, they knew that it was going to be okay—whatever we were facing, we were going to continue to show up at their house, at their farm, and they wouldn’t have to slaughter or ship their animals.
Jane Trevaskis, resident, Converse Home:
Nobody came to visit me. Nobody could come from outside and people from inside were encouraged not to, so I only saw people delivering trays. It was more loneliness—not having anybody to talk to. When the staff would come in in their yellow outfit, they’d be on purpose, on target, do their business and get out. Dear Lord, all those yellow plastic coat outfits—I see them in my sleep!
The original print version of this article was headlined “Viral Stories | The Vermont Historical Society unveils its COVID-19 oral history project with a new book edited by Garrett Graff”
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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