Inside a California Covid Revolt

Some people who are good in a crisis need a crisis to be good. They’re better wired for hot zones than for ordinary life and so they do whatever they can to turn ordinary life into a hot zone. Matt Pontes is not like that. He’s big and easygoing and has the air of a man who really doesn’t want any trouble. Still, trouble has had a way of finding him. He spent the first part of his career fighting wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service but, after six knee surgeries, moved on to emergency response for various California counties. “He could handle himself in a bar fight and he could handle himself in the Oval Office,” said a colleague who watched Pontes run the responses to fires, floods and mudslides for Santa Barbara County. “He’s a thick-sock guy in a thin-sock world.”

Pontes is now the county executive officer of Shasta County in Northern California and goes to work in thin socks, but another crisis has found him. “You cannot get closer to total disobedience of any kind of law,” he said, referring to the local response to Covid-19 strictures. “What’s happening up here is full-on anarchy.” Then he listed for me a few of the things that had happened recently: The county sheriff had announced that he wouldn’t enforce the state’s pandemic restrictions on social gatherings and businesses. People who had never before attended county board meetings were accusing local officials of treason. The county’s health officer, who had the unhappy job of imposing the state’s Covid rules on the citizens of Shasta County, was now receiving so many threats that Pontes had brought in a new threat-assessment team; he’d also ordered the bushes cut back away from her house, installed a security system and floodlights, and ordered police patrols of her neighborhood. “She still doesn’t feel safe out there,” he said. “At all.”