Vicki Shurly, director of the Peninsula Community Library, spent years building a new library for the Old Mission Peninsula. Once it opened late last year, she planned a cruise vacation. Shurly never expected the library’s first year in it’s beautiful new space would go like this. By Patrick Sullivan As the pandemic descended upon Northern Michigan and changed all of our lives, Vicki Shurly, director of the Peninsula Community Library, was on the frontlines at the beginning, when on Traverse City’s Old Mission Peninsual, the virus turned from abstraction to reality, and at the next sea change, when places like libraries, shuttered for months, reopened. In the beginning, Shurly and her husband had embarked on a cruise of the South Pacific that launched from Australia, a dream vacation that turned into a frightening odyssey. More recently, Shurly was tasked with reopening a critical institution on the Old Mission Peninsula and figuring out how to run a library in these new times. Northern Express chatted with Shurly about her travels, her thoughts on reopening, and how she turned her South Seas misadventure into a must-read daily journal published in the Old Mission Gazette newsletter. Shurly is working on a book about her experience, which she is writing alongside Gazette editor, Jane Johnson Boursaw. Northern Express: How it was that you were out of the country earlier this year just as the pandemic began?
A NOVEL PERSPECTIVE 10 • july 20, 2020 • Northern Express Weekly
Vicki Shurly: I had spent some three years on the library’s new building project [the library had been housed in the building occupied by the former, Old Mission Peninsula elementary school, and it was joyful. There was so much community support for the building. People from every walk of life helped, but it was intense. It consumed most of my life for three solid years, if you can imagine. And my husband, I don’t know when it was, probably October or November — we moved into the library September [2019] — he said, “We need to get away.” And he’s a bargain hunter and found this lovely cruise to places that we’d always wanted to see. It hit many south Polynesian islands, and we went ahead and booked it. It was scheduled for a little over three weeks beginning in the middle of February, and we were excited to just disappear from our normal world for a little while. Express: Just before everything started to happen. Shurly: Yeah. There were rumors of things going on. They were pretty much contained in Asia. The [virus] was in China, and we’d heard that it had spread to Japan, but there was no threat here. We had planned to fly into Hawaii and spend a few days there. While we were in Hawaii, we were told that certain
