![]() ![]() In quarantine, he looked out the window of his cabin in Honolulu and saw school-aged children playing on rocks and climbing trees - all wearing face masks. She will miss hugs and “squishing five people on a bench to have dinner,” she said.Īmerican Matthew Butschek, who was also on Kure, said it would take time to adjust to the changed world they’d returned to. Thomas is now in a hotel in quarantine in Auckland, where she lives with her parents, sister and a dog named Benny. ![]() “I guess I didn’t really know what to think because we were getting so many different answers to questions that we were asking,” she said. Once on Kure, getting a full picture of what was happening in the world was difficult. “We were just seeing stories on the television and that sort of thing,” she said. By the time she left Honolulu for Kure, the virus was starting to “creep a little closer” to the islands. When Thomas left New Zealand for Hawaii, there were no virus cases nearby that she can recall. I don’t need to see all the horrible things that are going on right now.” ![]() “And I thought, you know, I am so excited to get rid of my phone, to lose contact with everything. “I was sick of social media, I was sick of everything that was sort of going on,” she said. The expedition was her first time being away from home for so long, but she was ready to disconnect. She finished school a year early to start her first job as a deckhand for an organisation dedicated to cleaning up coastlines before volunteering for the summer season on Kure Atoll. Thomas, the youngest member of the team at 18, grew up in a beach town in New Zealand and spent much of her free time with seabirds and other wildlife. Their primary job is removing invasive plants and replacing them with native species and cleaning up debris such as fishing nets and plastic that washes ashore. Two field teams go there each year, one for summer and another for winter. A former Coast Guard station, the atoll is home to seabirds, endangered Hawaiian monk seals and coral reefs that are teeming with sea turtles, tiger sharks and other marine life. Kure is the only island in the northern part of the archipelago that is managed by the state, with the rest under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The public is not allowed to land anywhere in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.įrom left, Charlie Thomas, left, Matt Butschek II, Matt Saunter, and Naomi Worcester, on Kure Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, one of the most remote places on earth. The group was part of an effort by the state of Hawaii to maintain the fragile island ecosystem on Kure, which is part of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, the nation’s largest contiguous protected environment. “All these … precautions, these things, people sick everywhere. “I’ve never seen anything like this, but I started reading the book The Stand by Stephen King, which is about a disease outbreak, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, is this what it’s going to be like to go home?’” said Charlie Thomas, one of the four island workers. They must adjust to wearing face masks, staying indoors and seeing friends without giving hugs or handshakes. Now they are back, re-emerging into changed societies that might feel as foreign today as island isolation did in March. They learned about the pandemic amid their own isolation, but have not experienced any of the seismic upheaval the Covid-19 virus has wrought around the world. ![]()
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