Tips From Someone With Nearly 50 Years Of Social Distancing Experience

"We're all social distancing these days, and it's unclear when exactly that will end. But Billy Barr has been doing this for almost 50 years. He's the only full-time resident of Gothic, Colo."

"'I'm the mayor and chief of police,' he said. 'I hold elections every year, but I don't tell anybody when they are, so it works out really well.'"

"He lives in an abandoned silver mine at nearly 10,000 feet in altitude in the Rocky Mountains. 'The snow's going sideways, it's swirling,' Billy Barr said of the local weather."

"Barr has tips on social distancing, but he's the first to say they may well be entirely useless."

"''When I first got here, it was a relief for me to be on my own, but that's not necessarily what a healthy person does — isolate themself,' he said. 'I mean, I'm good at it and I do it because I like it, but what works for me, it works for me. It quite conceivably wouldn't work for anybody else.'"

"While Barr has been called a hermit, he doesn't consider himself one. He occasionally interacts with skiers who pass through, he talks to his sister on the phone, and he works for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory nearby, which gets flooded with scientists in the summer."