88 years in and we finally get around to planting an apple tree

As many of you know (and a surprising amount don’t) none of the apples sold or processed here, grew here. For generations we’ve relied on others to supply the apples.

At the start, that was the whole business model, you brought your apples here for us to press into cider that you then took with you. When people stopped having a few trees in their dooryard, but they still wanted cider, we bought apples from commercial growers around New York State. Some of whom we’ve had a continuous relationship with over multiple generations of both our families. We still enjoy and plan on utilizing those amazing growers for generations into the future, but as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

We don’t have enough land to ever produce enough apples to completely supply our demand. Given the price of subdivided housing lots and the price that large dairies will pay for ag land in Virgil, we won’t be able to get enough land to grow enough apples to supply our demand.

If that’s the case, why would we plant an orchard?

There are a few reasons.

First, there is a long history of apple production in Virgil. With written records of plantings as early as 1808, documents showing the “export” of apples to market in Cortland and Binghamton in 1840’s, and the noted “first barrel of cider” produced in either 1818 or 1819. As in many aspects of agriculture, profit pushed people to specialize and industrialize, and the apple industry settled in places where the margins would be larger. But if you pay attention to the sides of the roads, out in successional fields, or in hedgerows, abandoned orchards and their wild offspring abound to this day. I’d like to honor that tradition by showing that it’s still an option and an opportunity here today.

Most importantly, while we are confident in the quality of apples we are bringing to sell and process here (our family is the most regular consumers), there are kinds of apples or methods of production that don’t really exist on the wholesale market. In listening to our customers we have found that a decent number want things that exist in those gaps in the market, and I’m confident we can provide them. The biggest thing we are aiming to provide, are production methods that you can always feel good about. People often ask for organic apples, and I always follow up with why do you want organic? Often the answer is that they don’t want anything sprayed on the apples. Unfortunately organic does not mean no spray, and no spray apples don’t exist in a commercial sense. The only way to get no spray apples is to grow them in your yard.

The nugget I have gleaned from the many conversations about customers desire for “organic” apples, is that they want to feel confident in the safety of their food production. Some people don’t with conventional agriculture, I would argue it is more likely down to the individual farmer than their broad category. Unfortunately I find that a lot of those same people don’t have a good grasp on what "certified organic” actually means. For one organic does not mean no spray, and in some cases it means more spraying because the things being sprayed are less effective or less targeted.

In taking DEC pesticide applicator classes I got to learn a lot about the things that can be sprayed on our food, and I started to hone in on a couple of attributes of them. The two that stood out to me were Return Entry Interval (REI) and Pre-Harvest Interval (PHI). In simple terms what those mean is how long after you spray before you can safely return to the field and how long before you can safely eat the produce sprayed. I designed our orchard with the idea that the things we spray are things with an REI and PHI of 0, meaning that you can safely be in the orchard and could eat our apples immediately (though you should always wash your produce, just because something is safe doesn’t mean it’s tasty).

While the trees are in the ground and growing, it will be years before they crop. Trees require patience, one of the rootstock/cultivar combinations we planted this spring probably won’t crop for 20 years. So remember, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is today.

Summer 2021

We’re open for the “Summer” on Friday, May 7th. As in all things nowadays, somethings will be the same, some won’t.

We’re going to keep operating drive-thru only for the summer. Though now it’s mostly so we can keep doing big maintenance projects through the summer.

During our summer season, we’ve got no apples, cider, apple pies, or pumpkin pies. If you’re looking for the sweet and tart taste of apple, try our boiled cider, an old shelf-stable preservation method for the fall harvest. All of our retail goods in the store and cheese case are first come, first served. We’ll be baking fresh, scratch made goods everyday we’re open. You’re able and encouraged to order pies at least a day in advance, by phone during open hours, or online anytime. We’ll also be baking pies, breads, pull-aparts, and cookies for first come, first served. Our new and very popular chicken pot pies are available for pre-order only. You can order them days in advance and same day, by 2 pm. They are only available for pickup from 4 pm until close. Pizza and focaccia will be unavailable while our closing time is 6 pm. In a month or so we will extend our Friday and Saturday hours until 8 pm and begin making those favorites as well.

Shortly there will be a post about why our hours only until 6 pm to start, and the other fun developments and projects we’ve got going on around here.

See you soon.

Peculiar Times

A year ago, we closed for the season, as scheduled, the weekend before all the schools in NY closed due to the onset of the Pandemic. It was preceded by a couple weeks of stress about the incipient outbreak downstate and the mass start adult obstacle course with 3000 out of town attendees being hosted nearby.

The Monday following school closures, a friend, who happens to be a sales rep for a food distributor, began his weekly sales email with “Peculiar times.” Since then, a day hasn’t passed that I have not had that phrase cross my mind. While we have all found our groove for this situation, it’s still not normal.

Having just completed what I desperately hope is the only Pandemic Season, I’ve been reflecting back on it’s entirety. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for our customers, staff, family, and all of their support through this difficult season. I set out with three primary goals for this year: don’t be the reason Covid spreads through our community, pay all the bills, and be able to open again for the 89th Season. We’ve paid all the bills. We’re good to open again and continue/resume the tradition. Most importantly, through planning, diligence, sacrifice, hard work, and good luck, no one working here ever tested or was suspected of being positive. While it was a season filled with extra work for less business, getting to those goals mean I’m still counting it as a success.

Vaccine supply increasing and the coming spring, fill me with hope for a normal 89th Season. Which is a welcome change from this time last year, when I was dreading trying to find a way to open for a Fall that I knew wasn’t going to be like any we’d seen before.

We will be open for our first ever Easter holiday pickups on Saturday, April 3rd. Which we are planning on still doing in the drive-thru style of this season. We’re planning on resuming our Spring/Summer season this year in May. How we will run that will get determined as we get closer based on the best practices for the situation at that point. Given the projections that there will be enough vaccine for all adults in the country by May we’re hopeful that we’ll be open again as normal. However as the last year has taught us, it’s that situations can change rapidly and we have to be prepared to roll with the peculiar times.

In the mean time, we’ll be busy deep cleaning, painting, doing maintenance, and maybe take a little time off. We’re incredibly thankful for all of your support and business through this difficult season. Your continued patronage made all the extra work worthwhile, and I can’t wait to see you all inside.

Late-fall/pre-snow-winter at a fall-themed business that relies on ski traffic during a global pandemic.

It’s weird.

I guess I’ll expand on that.

We’re a place that does the vast majority of our business in products people associate with and desire during a specific season, and/or are sweet treats. The vast majority of our peers/related businesses across New York State (and further afield), are closed for the season. We’ve found that it is worthwhile for us as a business to remain open through the winter, as we see a good deal of ski traffic come by to or from our neighbors down 392. However in years when there isn’t snow or viable snow-making weather anytime near Thanksgiving (which are becoming incredibly and troublingly regular), traffic slows considerably. Add to that the post-Thanksgiving, over-indulgence recovery period and it’s quiet times at the Cider Mill.

Normally this would be a time when we start working on projects, new recipes, equipment maintenance, planning for the summer season, and even planning for the following fall. This year however, every time I think we’re going to get into that sort of thing, we have some portion of our staff get hit with a quarantine order and staffing has to change. Ending last season straight into the full lock down, pushed a product launch that has been years in the making back to this season, and each successive quarantine means I’ve got push it to the back-burner (which is a groan inducing pun once you know what it is). Luckily (is it lucky that we’re so much less busy that it’s not worthwhile being open 7 days a week?) we’re closed Mondays and Tuesdays in the winter, and I’m able to make progress on days that I’m not supposed to be here.

Soon we’ll have an awesome product that I’ve been dying to share with you. In the meantime we’ve got the oven time/space to make all of the other non-pie, baked goodies you’ve come to love over the last few years. Come get a fresh, hot, scratch made soft pretzel, they were the first thing I added to the recipe box, because it was a thing I wanted and couldn’t get. Now we all can have some.

On politics...

I don’t have a personal facebook account, because I feel about it (and most social networks, reddit, 4chan, etc.) the way Obi-Wan Kenobi feels about Mos Eisley.

Early in my ownership of the Cider Mill I had decided that I was not going offer political opinions or endorsements. It followed from a number of different experiences, but mostly because of my understanding that the Cider Mill represents everyone that works here and the vast community of people who feel “ownership” over this long-term, beloved, small-town institution. I alone, am not the Cider Mill. The staff here represent the full continuum of political and moral beliefs, from libertarian, republican, democratic, socialist, apolitical, and everything in between. I’m not going to put out political views or endorsements via the Cider Mill, because it surely would not reflect the views of all or even most of the people who make up the Cider Mill. Both during the 2018 election cycle and the 2020, I’ve had a large number of primary and general election candidates come speak to me, both in a speaking to their constituents sense and in seeking the endorsement of a small business owner. I am always thrilled to speak about the issues facing my community and business, as I am a passionately engaged, vocal, and politically active community member. However, I’ve been consistent in my position that the Cider Mill not be included as a part of any campaign, and every candidate and sitting politician that I’ve spoken with has respected that position. That includes candidates that I’ve known for years and are personal friends, it also includes candidates that have asked to have campaign events here.

On a recent weekend a staff member came in to work and said, “Did you know [Random Political Candidate] put us on her campaign page?” I did not. I went through the rigmarole of going on facebook, instead of the work I needed to do, to see what they were talking about, sure enough there we are in the midst of exclusively campaign related posts and endorsements.

I (as the Cider Mill) wrote a comment on that post and went back to work. Between presses I went back to see if they have responded. I did it on my phone which does not have the facebook app and is not signed in, as I don’t have a personal page. I can see and read all the comments, but my own. They’ve hidden my comment, so I sign in on my computer to see if they’ve sent a message. They have not. Now I’m pissed. No one from the campaign has ever spoken to me nor identified themselves when they were here and taking pictures. Now they recognize their actions as problematic (otherwise they wouldn’t have hidden my comment) but still have not attempted to contact me or the Cider Mill. I wrote a facebook post calling the campaign out and why I called them out, including my desire to have the Cider Mill not express views that do not represent the whole of the “Cider Mill.” I also took a screen-grab of their post, with my hidden comment, over-written with the words “Hollenbeck’s Cider Mill is against [Random Political Candidate].” Needless to say the campaign unhid my comment and went on damage control, and the internet community started screaming at each other.

A brief aside to give a sense of personal context/reference. In college I played varsity lacrosse and club hockey, both teams were bad. During the late-fall or early-winter of my sophomore year the assistant coach of the lacrosse team gave me some hints that the head coach was going to tell me that I needed to prioritize lacrosse and quit the hockey team (of which I was club president and starting goalie). I had never missed a lacrosse obligation for hockey, and only hockey games trumped optional lacrosse activities. Sure enough the coach asked me to his office to have a talk about “my priorities.” When I arrived, I explained I had never had to choose between those two sports that I loved, and if one forced the choice, it would not be the one I chose. I continued to play both for my entire college career.

I felt as though this campaign had decided to publicly assign a political position to the Cider Mill even though I had explicitly decided not to. Every other campaign had respected and honored my decision, this one did not even have the respect to ask. “If one forced the choice, it would not be the one I chose.”

I feel strongly in the inherent correctness of calling them out, and of the body of the post. I also feel strongly that I made a mistake in the text over the screen-grab. Had I to do it over, I would put “Hollenbeck’s Cider Mill endorses no political candidates”, as that is a truer expression of my (and our) stance, is less inflammatory (though based on reading comments, I doubt any fewer people would actually be inflamed), and keeps it politically neutral. But being the person I am, with a touch of a temper and a strong sense of spite, I did not do that, and regret it. I regret both acting in passionate haste, and the particular wording as I don’t think it follows my desire to keep the Cider Mill’s statements apolitical. I also believe that editing or removing that post would be dishonest, so it lives on as it was born.

The post is an awesome Rorschach test, as it is clear that each comment-er sees what they want based on their own personal biases. Everyone is passionate in their belief that I am wrong, absolutely correct, the devil, a hero, that I am showing my biases as clearly a [insert their assumption], that they are going to never come back or redouble their purchases here. Time has passed, comments have slowed, business is Covid-normal, at least one person that was never coming back has ordered, bought, and paid for pies, and I’m sure some of my “supporters” will never come. Everyone scheduled, the libertarians, the socialists, the non-voters, the pastor, everyone came and worked their shifts as though nothing happened, because outside of facebook nothing happened.

In reading a lot (though not all, I’ve got a lot of work to do) of the comments, it’s impressive how near universally wrong people are in their assumptions of my political values. When the candidate in question stopped by (again not identifying themselves in anyway, but distinguished themselves by their actions), asked the person helping them if the owner was a Democrat or a Republican. The teenager could not answer the question as they didn’t know. The answer is neither! I don’t find my values well represented on the national stage in our wildly unrepresentative two party system. Though in local politics I regularly get to enthusiastically vote for people I know fully share the values of community, honesty, openness, and thriftiness. In the 2018 election cycle, the Cortland County Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians all asked me for donations of products for events. I gave them all the same deal, because most important to me is honest and earnest civic engagement.

If you want everyone to be the same party as you, have the same political beliefs as you, and vote for the same candidates as you, you should consider living under a totalitarian regime.

If you want to know my values and political opinions, ask me, because your assumptions are wrong.

If you want to know how I vote, it’s holding my nose.

This one has nothing to do with Covid

Hollenbeck’s exists in a weird place as a business. That’s because we are wildly popular for 17 days out of the year, quite busy for a further 30-40, and slow to closed for the remaining 310 days out of a year.

When we are busy (in the normal times), we are damn near our max capacity, when we aren’t we have what feels like infinite excess capacity. The great goal and drive for any changes I’ve made while I’ve owned the business is to bring that into greater equilibrium. The intent is not to drive customers away during the busy times (though intentional and intelligent contraction is not out of the realm of possibility), but rather to try and muster up business in the winter, spring, and summer. Ours is a strange business in that during the fall we have to hustle everyday to make fresh pies and donuts on the weekends, and then have other times of the year when we would struggle to give away the same products.

One of the results is that anytime someone asks me to do a radio spot, a tv news segment, an interview, or anything else of the like I always say yes. Even if we/I don’t really have time, we’ll take the free promotion, especially if it’s in the off times, or can be viewed/used then. That’s resulted in some awesome content that was a lot of fun to make, and things that would best be described as encounters.

A couple years ago we had the pleasure of making a video with Experience Cortland, that was the first that I had participated in. It went so well and was so easy that we did a couple live news spots that have been lost to the ether, and a commercial for the Dryden Bank that still plays on tv. Those were a little less fun, but still pretty painless and beneficial.

Fast forward to last year I get an email from the producer of a show called “A Walk Through America”, which is made and airs on Voice of America, Korea. I say yes, as I envision tours buses full of Koreans and/or US military service personnel. What followed was what we now refer to as “the Korea incident”. In retrospect, it was a hilarious experience, but goodness was it a wild and stressful day. They never sent along the episode, but with some internet sleuthing we found it on youtube. It helps if you speak Korean, as it is narrated and the hosts are speaking in Korean, we’re all speaking in English but subtitled in Korean. There is a super heart warming, fortuitous, chance encounter with a couple of customers, a Korean War Vet and his Korean-born wife. Her reaction and emotion that day makes all the stress in world worth it. Check out “the Korea Incident.”

This year in the lead up to, and first Monday of, this peculiar season I participated in an event organized by a couple of friends in CCE. It also happened to be with a couple of local apple luminaries who I very much look up to, and hope to emulate in some aspects of my business and life. This one was more stress relief than stressful.

Donuts are for weekends only

Being in retail/customer service gives you the opportunity to see a lot of people. In seeing all of those different people in the same environment and situations you get to see the inherent commonalities in people. The thing that I have found to be one of, if not the most commonly shared things, is that we are poor observers of our surroundings. I’d like to think that is because of our time and place in history and not an actually inherent flaw in humans, more that we are so wildly over stimulated and not designed for so much stimulus. Our phones, social media, the internet, heck even new washers and dryers connect to your phone to send notifications. Everything is always screaming for our attention so we are not able to be present in the moment and place we are existing.

The reason this is especially apparent to me right now, is because we are doing our absolute damndest to try to communicate and guide people through wildly new systems and still a shocking number miss all the cues we give. Now this is not a new thing I have observed here, but the web store has made it easier for people to act without on demand input from us and things like 20 ft bright yellow arrows in the parking lot that have no effect on where or how people drive/park.

This is why certain items in the online store now have names like “Donuts are for weekends only.” No amount of direction or description of the item that includes “Our Donuts are only available for pick up on SATURDAY and SUNDAY” can keep people from ordering them on another day. Nor can a bullet point in the Terms of Service that reads “You may not place orders for donuts on weekdays”, just as a preceding bullet point of “You may not place same day orders” can prevent that. Not even when the check box says “I have read, understood, and agree to the Terms of Service. I didn't just scroll to the bottom and click the box.”

It has led to me having to go in and edit the website nightly to change the pickup days available during checkout. The native mechanism in our online store for gathering a date has no way to restrict when is available to select, and the number of people who would order donuts for a weekday on that same weekday no matter what the words in front of them say is shockingly large.

It’s not that they are inherently bad people trying to break the rules it’s simply that they don’t perceive that which is right in front of them.

It makes me wonder about all the things that I am missing.

For now it means that Donuts are for weekends only.

That was a weird one.

What a strange opening day. Unlike any previous I’ve been a part of (hard to imagine any I haven’t been a part of was like this either), and while there were a lot of positives, I hope that it’s unlike all our future opening days.

There is a strange behavior that people (maybe just our customers) exhibit, and that is everyone arriving early to “beat the rush”. You all do it, and you form the rush you are trying to beat. Previously the example we all talk about is the “Wednesday before Thanksgiving line-up before opening” crowd, they’re all there to not get stuck in line, but they create a line and are the group that waits the longest in the longest line. Today topped that by a wide margin, we had people reporting a 2 hour wait (!) in the line in the morning. It had dropped to about 45 mins - half hour by noon, and was about 5 minutes by 1 pm, never to grow again. The first 3 hours of our 11 hours of being open, you had a 2 hour wait, the next 8 (!) it was a shorter wait than standing in line in a normal year. To me the lesson is, you can’t “beat the rush”, you can only participate/cause the rush. Of course, my dad was always the one to suggest we stay seated and wait for everyone else to leave the baseball stadium after the fireworks.

Also I came to a realization today, that I desperately hope is wrong. It’s that the vast majority of my customer interactions this year are going to be negative, even though the overwhelming majority with the business are incredibly positive. On busy days when I’m really needed as a part of the production staff, I’m not going to be able to do the curbside pick up role, meaning that I’ll do very little direct customer service. The only times when I’m doing direct customer service and interaction is when I am needed to address an issue. I direct the staff to get me whenever possible, or I am the one reading and responding to emails, because I want all issues to not just be listened to, but be truly heard in a way that can resolve the issues or bring a resolution that satisfies the customer. Missing for me now are seeing and catching up with regulars, or seeing how pie, cider, and donuts can (because they should) light up a face with joy. Instead of joy, I only hear when someone’s day is ruined (or they are ruining their day) over pie, donuts, or cider. I really hope I’m wrong, and that I can find a way to have interactions that uplift my soul the way that giving samples of cider 3+ generations of the same family does. Thanks Covid.

Maybe that was all too honest and revealing (it’s certainly riddled with typos), but I’m running on multiple days in a row of 4ish hours of sleep and here it is under 5 hours away from my alarm going off.

A pretty good explainer of my reasoning

Below is a lightly edited version (like removing personal details, and going from figuring out electronic payment to listing the solution) of the email I sent out to the multi-year returning staff. The intent was to explain how I thought we could open legally and mitigate all known risks, given the nature of the Cider Mill in the fall. It wasn’t to convince anyone to work (or not), it was simply to give them the information they needed to make good decisions for themselves. And perhaps to show them how much I had been thinking about how we could make it work.

~

I've spent a lot of my "off" season in webinars trying to learn as much as possible about the best practices for the Cider Mill during the pandemic. It's included training for food service, retail, manufacturing, and agritourism, because we are a confounding mix of them all.

First and foremost, this is going to be very different than in the past, and because of that the plan for the first day is just going to be based on a thought experiment rather than tweaks to something established. A thing that I have heard time and time again from other businesses and experts, is that you have to be willing to change your Covid plan as soon as it is apparent that it isn't working. So while this is going to be the plan, and some parts are non-negotiable, it might be wildly different by weekend #2. The biggest non-negotiable is that our first priority is the safety and health of our staff and customers.

All that being said, here's what we're going to start the season doing. The biggest change, for us and for our customers, is that I am not allowing customers in the building. We will be exclusively curbside pickup. This is because of a number of difficulties including the openness of the production/workspaces, managing numbers of customers (max of around 25 on busy weekend days), and managing/monitoring/enforcing customer behavior. As a simple exercise I had determined the rough number of people in the longest average donut line, and determined the length that would take if properly socially distanced. It stretches across town to the Methodist Church.

By not allowing customers in the building we lose all of those concerns and just have to worry about our own behavior in the Mill. Everyone will be required to wear masks while at work (we will be providing everyone with a supply of washable cloth masks that we will be laundering daily, but will also allow pre-approved masks that you already have if you have a preference for your own). Everyone will be required to have a health screening prior to every day of work (a questionnaire and a touchless temperature check). We have already installed a new hand wash sink just inside the employee entrance and will be prepared to sanitize all common areas/touchpoints at least hourly. Since we will not be having customers inside the building, the apple room will become the "breakroom", allowing us to have multiple tables separated by barriers allowing you to have a space where you can remove your mask to eat/drink/be maskless indoors. There will also be an area outside that will be cordoned off from the public for the same purpose when the weather is nice. Workspaces will also have dividers when we won't be consistently socially distanced.

Aside from all that we will be making all of the same products, but we will be offering far fewer of the usual retail items. Obviously the counters won't be a workspace as there won't be customers in the building. The way the customer-facing portion of the business will be working will be completely new for us. As I said we'll be starting exclusively doing curbside pickup, and initially weekends will exclusively be for pre-orders. The pickups will be occurring near the bakery exit all of the time, with traffic flow being slightly different weekdays vs weekends. The differences are to accommodate a larger number of vehicles in line on the weekend, and to keep the back parking lot free for deliveries on the weekdays.

To fulfill orders, we will be packaging pies and donuts as soon as they are cool enough to be packaged and will keep the supply near to the bakery exit, likely on the bakery counter and front counter respectively. Orders that include retail we will be bagging and marking as the orders come. Pre-bagged apples, cheese, cider, etc will remain in the deli case.

To start we will keep our offerings simple to smooth things, probably just cider (gallons and halves), donuts (6&12 of each variety, plus 4/4/4&2/2/2), pies (Apple, DA, and Pumpkin), and a small handful of retail items. We'll be taking orders over the phone as always, but will also be adding ordering and payment to the website.

Hopefully the addition of web-based ordering and payment will further reduce the direct interaction between customers and the outward facing staff. The orders taken on the phone will obviously need to accept payment at the curbside pickup location, while the cash/check option is easy to handle, we now have two wireless, hand-held terminals to handle electronic payment.

What this all means for business/demand is pretty unknown, which means we are going to need to be flexible. I'm operating under the assumption that we are going to do a ton less business than usual, but it seems plausible that people will be into the idea of just sitting in their cars rather than standing in line in a loud, crowded, and hot building.

So we're going to start prepared to do similar volumes of business to previous years, but with pre-ordering and experience we will quickly be able to see what our Covid-normal will be. With all of that, hours that will need to be worked could be very different than what we prepare for, and I hope that we can all be understanding of that. They will be available first to Full-time seasonal employees, then "seniority", and then on a first come basis.

This is, I'm sure, just the barest details of what this season might look like, but I wanted to make sure everyone was able to make an informed decision about whether or not they wanted to work this season. I look forward to hearing back from you all, in general, specifically about working, and any feedback or ideas you might have about the proposed plan. I completely understand if you don't want to or can't work here this year, there will be no hard feelings. As I said earlier the most important things are your health, safety, and happiness, and I trust you to make good decisions regarding those.

Thank you for your patience and time in reading all of that,

Matt

A return of the Blog aka Why!? aka How the sausage is made: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Right now communication seems key, and so does explanation. So, I’ve decided to add regularly writing on the website to what might be considered an already busy schedule. If I stop or go long periods without writing, assume I’m working, or I was crushed by an apple box.

I’m hoping that I can write a little about my thought processes for why this business, that we all so love, looks so different this year.

First and foremost, I love my community. They are the friends and family that make up the staff, our awesome neighbors, our passionate and loyal customers, the farmers and ag workers of Virgil, the front line workers and first responders, anyone that’s helping make Virgil a great place to live and still striving to make it better (to the handful that are all of those, you’re great), and last but not least this business. Its an institution, an icon, something Virgil hangs it’s hat on, and something that a lot of people feel ownership over.

In every decision I’ve made this season, the first thing I’ve asked myself is, “How do we mitigate the risks to the community?” (That might be a funny sounding question, but having worked in the outdoor adventure industry, they drill into your head that nothing is ever safe. “Is it safe?” “Nothing is safe, There is risk inherent in everything we do. We do our best to mitigate all the risks.” Ask a raft guide, or zipline guide, or someone like that, “Is it safe?” and see how they answer). In every case the answers to that question drove me to the systems I settled on. It’s a question that I will continually ask as we move through this season, because while we have an opening plan that I am confident in, if 2020 has taught me anything its that situations and plans can change.