MANTON, Texas – Zoom in on the glowing red map of the ever-growing coronavirus cases in continental United States and you’ll find a county that has been defended. Only one, along the coast.
Like a lonely house standing after a tornado, in the oil-rich West Texas’ Shadless Dune Plains, Loving County has leveled the city, but it still hasn’t reported a single case of coronavirus.
It’s something the people of the county are proud of. They talk about it. They live by it.
“You can pick it up!” Chuck Flush told a visitor in a face mask on the window of his food truck as a pair of backfashed oil field workers chuckled. “We don’t have the virus here.”
If that were true.
However, despite never being included in the county’s official reports, at least one positive test for coronavirus was recorded at a local health clinic in Menton, the only city in the county, during the summer, according to a clinic worker.
The man called everyone in this part of Texas a “man camp” – temporary shelter for oil and gas workers – near the city center when he was ill. But, he was not a permanent resident, and quickly closed home, so Loving County never registered a case. His record remained intact.
Ten months after the first infection was reported in the United States, the coronavirus has entered every corner of the country. More than 11 million people have tested positive for the virus, which causes Covid-19, with more than 164,000 new cases coming out on Monday alone.
Now even the rural areas, which survived the outbreak of the epidemic as early as possible, have become a serious center of new infections. In recent months, the number of small, remote counties, including Living County, has been declining, with no positive cases remaining the only places on the continent in the United States.
One by one, the infections began to record. In addition to the officially falling Loving County, the last in Nevada was Esmeralda County, which filed its first case last week. (Calavo County in Hawaii has fewer people than Loving County, but no known cases have been reported.)
Those who live full-time in Loving County – the smallest population on the U.S. mainland, no more than 169 people stretched to 669 square miles of sand, mesquite and greasewood – attribute their relative antiviral success to the landscape and peculiarities of the population. They joke that they were socially far away before the cold came.
“It is a desert city. That’s it, “said County Attorney Steve Simmons.” We’re not talking about how many cows per acre to run, how many cows per department. One division is 640 acres. “
But despite the vast open space, the county is busy. The census counts 10 times the number of workers in the county. Trucks for loading large boxes of oil, farms and sand. Bits of plastic trash and flying truck tires on the side of the road.
When one passes through the county at night, the lights from the operation of the oil and gas shine around the landscape and create a mirage of a distant city that can never be reached. “You make it to the top of the hill and it looks like you’re driving in Dallas or Fort Worth,” Mr. Simmons said.
The men – and those mostly men who work in Loving County – travel miles outside the only store, a relatively new convenience store where the line for beer and single-serving meals can lengthen to the back refrigerators during a 5pm rush. . .
“Restrooms are coming soon,” boasts the -l-caps banner hanging outside. On a recent weekend evening, one of the shopkeepers wore a cowboy hat. Peacock had mesh trucker caps. Nothing was in the mask. Neither were the clerks. The county has been exempted from the statewide order.
But even if the virus is not on the mind in Loving County, it has changed lives here.
The slump was caused by an epidemic of falling oil prices, which reduced the number of workers in the town. The man’s camp was less crowded. Hotel rooms priced at Hotel 350 a month ago in the nearby big city, Pacos, were now priced at a third.
“With the epidemic, a lot of stuff was shut down,” said Ricardo Gallan, 38, adding that the number has dropped from 50 employees to 12.
Mr. Galane of Eagle Pass, near the border with Mexico, near the Texas border, said he usually worked about 12 days and then got four days off. He considered himself lucky to be away from his family for five hours. Some workers come much further, such as Utah or Louisiana.
While in Loving County, Mr. Galan lived in a man’s camp on his company property and shared a small space with another worker. He said the workers there practice social distance. “At our yard, no one got sick from covid,” he said.
But, he added, no one was examined unless there were symptoms. “They don’t test you just to give you your exam,” Mr. Galane said. For that, workers should go to big cities like dess desa or midland.
A private health clinic offers coronavirus tests and performs about 20 per week, according to paramedic 28, Anthony Luke. Mr. Luke, like most of the county’s workers, lives in the trailer – it’s attached to the clinic – and stays in the lubbock for two weeks between periods of rest at home.
During his time there, he said, the clinic has had two positive tests for coronavirus: a man camp in the middle of Menton in August, and another was taken at a job site outside of Loving County.
The August Gust case raised alarm in county court because clerks and other county workers often go to camp for a free lunch on a workday.
“We’re made very well known when something like this happens here,” said Angela Madeline, a 31-year-old deputy county clerk who moved to Menton with her husband and four children last year. “I know of at least one person who was sick, but they took him back to where he was,” he said, recalling the summer situation.
In town, residents draw a bright line between themselves and visitors. Those who live full-time in the county treat each other like members of an extended family bubble.
In the courthouse, a square brick building since 1935, the doors are now locked to outsiders and county employees do not wear masks. When it comes to a visitor, such as a landman looking at a new oil or gas lease, that person must be appointed and wear a mask.
The Halloween party for children in the city attracted about 60 people and included a temperature check at the door. People felt comfortable not wearing masks.
But there are few such gatherings in Menton, where the history of the county bo il booms and buses can be read in the hollow rusting storage tanks, empty corrugated houses and the cracked plaster of the only schoolhouse that has not been used for decades.
“When we got here, I said, ‘Punk, how long are we going to stay in this goddamn place?'” Mary Belle Jones, 89, who settled in Loving County in 1953 with her husband, Elgin Jones.
There were gusts in the yard of her first home, she remembered, and there was a toilet outside. They had five children, moved into a larger house, amassed acres upon acres of land and never left.
Mr. Jones, better known by his nickname as a child, left the oil field to become a sheriff for nearly three decades. “He was known as the only sheriff in Texas. You can call Punk and run away with him,” Mrs. Jones said.
Their children went to a local schoolhouse until the sixth grade. But it was driven by a lack of students, and then shut down. The kids now drive the bus to the next county east at 6 p.m.
Some members of the Jones family lived in Loving County. One son, Skeet Jones, is a top county executive. Her sister is a county clerk. Mr. Simmonson, the county attorney, married into the family.
“She spent more time here than at home so we decided to walk,” said Mr. Simmons, a lawyer living in Houston, about his wife. “I know there’s no lawyer here in town.”
For Maderlin, 33, moving to Loving County was a dream come true. Not for Angela, his wife, who was convinced.
“She was just throwing a fit at her idea,” he said, sitting in a wicker reckoner on his porch on the far side of town, wearing a cowboy hat on the table next to him.
Mr. Madeline, who was fired from his job as a San Antonio police detective, lied to justify the car business and later lost his job in the city as a deputy sheriff, works as a cowboy on the Jones family ranch.
“I like to go back in time. That’s why I’m out here, “he said.
Some residents said they know of cases of coronavirus in the county, but since they are limited to visiting workers, the county still considers itself virus-free – if on tech.
According to Mr. Luke, most of the tests conducted in the county at the local clinic involve oil and gas field workers. Lara Anten, a spokeswoman for the state government’s health department, said the employees’ residences would be registered, not in Living County.
Were any permanent residents infected? Officially, it’s still no.
But Loving County residents admitted their entire record may not be complete.
“We’re the only place in the United States that has never had a covid case, I don’t think that’s true,” Mr. Simmons said. “It’s a nice hype, but definitely it’s here.”
