Carrie Welch found herself in the backyard of her Northeast Portland home Wednesday night, the nicest evening of the year, throwing her kids’ plastic cups against the wall of her garage in a fury.

Her world, and that of so many other Oregonians, had come completely and appallingly unwound. Welch runs two businesses tied to Portland’s restaurant industry, a sector completely obliterated at the beginning of the week when Gov. Kate Brown ordered all bars and restaurants closed to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

So Welch responded as hundreds of other businesses across the state did, laying off employees in a desperate bid to conserve resources so they can last for however long it takes for the crisis to pass.

“We’ve gone through the worst week ever,” Welch said. “There’s no standard to compare this.”

On Tuesday alone, 18,500 Oregonians filed jobless claims with the state. More people filed for unemployment assistance that one day than in any entire week during the Great Recession, according to state economists.

Hourly workers in restaurants and retail shops were often the first to go in layoffs that seemed to come from out of the blue and left many wondering how they would pay this month’s rent. Business owners who had operated their firms for decades are preparing to shut their doors, knowing they may never open.

Powell’s Books closed all five of its stores and said the business is fighting to survive. The whimsical McMenamins chain of brewpubs and hotels laid off “almost everyone” Tuesday, 3,000 workers in Oregon and Washington.

At a moment when it seems like everyone needs a hug, Oregonians instead find themselves awkwardly walking around one another on the sidewalk. Buses rumble down the street, nearly empty, past shuttered storefronts and vacant offices.

And the worst of Oregon’s health crisis is surely yet to come, with the pace of the deadly infection rising sharply. The economic calamity will almost certainly grow worse, too, with the governor set to decide Monday on a plan to further restrict activity – potentially shutting down manufacturing and construction, two pillars of Oregon commerce that have thus far escaped the brunt of the crisis.

Yet amid the wreckage Oregonians found reasons to hope.

Passersby stopped to shop for seniors afraid to join the crowds inside grocery stores. And crowdfunding sites sprang up for idled musicians and workers. Shuttered restaurants gave away meals.

Already, people are looking toward a day when Oregon’s spirit emerges from shuttered houses, farms and apartments and Oregonians make the state Oregon again.

“With complete and total devastation,” Welch said, “comes incredible generosity and help and kindness.”

Blindsided

Oregon’s outbreak felt sudden and shocking in the moment. In hindsight it looks inexorable.

“It definitely felt like there was a moment when it was like, this is for real,” said Anna VonRosenstiel, who owns a ceramics shop called Carter & Rose on Portland’s trendy Southeast Division Street.

The street is normally bustling and alive and VonRosenstiel is accustomed to a steady flow of customers. But the energy swiftly drained away last week and her shop was abruptly empty. Ceramics classes that usually draw more than a dozen students abruptly had just one or two.

“We were making, like, $50 a day and I was like, I can’t keep my store open,” VonRosenstiel said. She laid off her four employees and shut her shop last Sunday.

It’s impossible to know just how bad the outbreak will be, or how long it will last. VonRosenstiel, 41, is beginning to come to terms with the possibility she may not reopen.

“I think I’ve got about two months that I can float,” she said. “And then I’ll just start looking for a job. I don’t know where that is.”

The state’s first confirmed coronavirus infection was just three weeks ago, February 28, in a custodian working at an elementary school in Lake Oswego. Anxious Oregonians rushed to supermarkets and Costco, stripping shelves of bottled water, toilet paper, hand sanitizer and rice.

At Costco in Tigard there was a line 100 people deep the morning of Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, snaking to the back of the store and around.

All the while, the state nervously eyed its neighbors in the Seattle area who were already coping with a tragedy – a single nursing home that now has 35 deaths associated with the outbreak.

It soon became obvious that Oregon had no special immunity – from the outbreak, or its devastating effects.

Well over 100 people in the state have tested positive for the coronavirus, despite an acute shortage of tests. Four have died from COVID-19, the disease associated with the virus.

The horrors in China, Italy and Spain make the peril clear.

On one day this month the governor said she would close Oregon’s schools only as a “last resort.” Brown reversed course the very next night, shutting them all down statewide.

Then on Monday, she ordered all restaurants and bars to close in a desperate bid to contain the outbreak, calculating the risk of the disease far outweighed the economic damage that resulted from shutting down an industry that employed 155,000 Oregonians.

And that was just the beginning. The Oregon Zoo, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Portland Art Museum, the Oregon Symphony, the Portland Japanese Garden, college and high school graduations, the Portland Trail Blazers, Timbers and Thorns – everything that gathers people together has stopped and no one knows when it may start again.

The outbreak may permanently change Oregon’s landscape by wiping out everything from neighborhood stores to favorite cafés and festivals, which may not have the resources to weather a long crisis.

‘It’s absolutely terrifying’

It didn’t take a government order for scores of retailers to close down. Some didn’t have any customers. Others had too many.

“This last Saturday was a very busy day,” said Patrick Ahern, a bookseller at Powell’s Books flagship store downtown. With so many people packed into the store, he said it was obvious they couldn’t keep a safe distance to avoid infections.

“I think it was the customer flow, the sheer volume of customers in the store on Saturday, that kind of freaked everybody out,” Ahern said.

So Powell’s closed down the next day, laying off Ahern and hundreds of other workers at its five stores. The bookstore, which ranks near the top of Portland’s most popular attractions and is among the city’s most cherished institutions, now counts itself among the outbreak’s potential casualties.

“I am doing everything within my power to keep Powell’s alive for the next generation of readers and writers, for the next generation of Portland and Oregon,” CEO and owner Emily Powell wrote to employees Tuesday.

“We are having that resilience tested as never before,” Powell warned.

For Ahern, 33, everything is in question. He said he will file for unemployment and has a little financial cushion saved up, but he doubts it’s enough to get him through and he doesn’t know what’s next.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” Ahern said. “We’ve never experienced this as a state, as a city, as country. This is unprecedented, the entire thing.”

Oregon’s unemployment rate was just 3.3% last month, the lowest level on record. Testifying before a hastily assembled legislative committee this past week, though, Oregon Business & Industry CEO Sandra McDonough’ suggested the state’s unemployment rate might hit 20% during the outbreak. That implies nearly 500,000 Oregonians could find themselves looking for work.

Even during the worst days of the Great Recession, McDonough noted, Oregon’s jobless rate never reached 12%.

“Our small businesses have been devastated and the level of fear they’re expressing exceeds anything I heard in 2008,” she said. “We’re very concerned that these businesses may end up closing down and may never come back.”

State economist Josh Lehner said one of the biggest challenges with this crisis is that it’s governed not by the laws of economics but by the course of a contagion. So conventional tools to gauge its severity and duration don’t apply, at least not until the outbreak is contained.

“There are going to be permanent changes to the economy. What exactly those are is a little hard to know at this point in time,” Lehner said.

If public health measures snuff out the virus quickly, he said Oregon may enjoy a sharp bounce back. But the longer the outbreak continues, the more profound the long-term impacts.

And he warned that retailers and restaurants may be slow to recover as Oregonians recover their confidence and fear of the coronavirus slowly eases.

“Even if we all go back to work in six weeks, whenever that may be, maybe we don’t go out to eat as often,” Lehner said. “We (may) still have some of that fear and uncertainty.”

Coming to terms

Travel Essentials has been selling luggage, guide books and other travel gear for 26 years in downtown Ashland. Nancy Bestor, who owns the shop with her husband Bob, says 2019 was their best year ever.

But the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is now among the state’s many institutions closed by the coronavirus and the streets of Ashland are empty. Just two customers came to Bestor’s store Wednesday.

“We had six employees, outside of my husband and I. Last week we laid them all off,” Bestor said. She said her husband are both in their 50s and the business is her family’s only source of income.

They’re now struggling to come to terms with how quickly it all went wrong and how little control they have over what happens next.

“We have continued to remind ourselves, we didn’t do anything wrong. We did everything exactly the way we did every other year,” Bestor said. “But it didn’t matter.”

Normally bustling by spring, downtown Ashland was a ghost town this week.

Thursday was the beginning of spring and Chas Hundley had plenty of time to enjoy the brilliant skies and warm temperatures at his home in Gales Creek, a rural community near Forest Grove. Hundley, 25, had just lost his job as a bartender at McMenamins Grand Lodge and his wife had just been furloughed by a nearby café.

Playing with a passing dog and listening to a neighbor build a chicken coop, Hundley said he cannot reconcile the upheaval in his life and community with the apparently ordinary landscape around him.

“It’s weird to feel normal when everything around you is not normal,” he said.

“Then you try to go do something normal. I went to the bank and tried to open the door and the door is locked,” Hundley said. “People are avoiding each other. It feels odd to be so conscious of how close you’re walking to someone.”

Amid the isolation and social distancing, though, Hundley said he was struck by another realization – that we need one another and that this crisis defies politics and party. It’s a health crisis that affects everyone in the same way, all over the world.

“I hope people are more aware of what an interconnected world we are,” Hundley said. “It’s like dominoes.”

‘We really need contact’

Back in Northeast Portland, Carrie Welch said that the coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated that we cannot get by with just our screens and apps. She said we need our schools, our gyms, our restaurants and our neighbors, that we need to be able to reach out for a connection and support.

“We all want to know that we can gather as just regular human beings,” said Welch, 41. “We really need contact.”

Welch runs a public relations firm that serves restaurants and the Portland food festival Feast, which attracts 20,000 each fall. She said it’s not clear there will be a festival this fall but she’s confident her event – and the rest of Portland’s restaurant scene – will eventually return.

Welch said she’s heartened to see chefs reaching out to one another, emptying their restaurants’ cupboards to feed laid off employees and people passing by on the street. Not all businesses will return, she knows, and those that do survive may be irrevocably changed.

But whether it takes weeks or months, Welch said she believes the same forces that made Portland distinctive will make it that way again.

“That creativity and ingenuity that Portland is known for will explode,” she said.

Troy MacLarty owns Bollywood Theater, which has Indian restaurants in Northeast and Southeast Portland. As his restaurants shut down this week, MacLarty began handing out meals to people on the street – barely holding back his emotions as he wrestled with his business’ uncertain future.

“Laying off 70 people through an email was not what I thought was going to happen this week. I’m just horrified at the situation. I’m heartbroken for them,” MacLarty said. “I’m really terrified about the situation we all find ourselves in.”

The week’s catastrophe unfolded just as spring began in Oregon. Tulips and daffodils emerged under shimmering skies and comforting, warm temperatures that beckoned for Oregonians to step outdoors.

“There’s always this week in Portland when the sun comes out and the whole town’s super fired up,” MacLarty said. “I imagine that times 10 when the time comes and we’re able to go out to our favorite places and sit down and enjoy dinner and things that we’ve always taken for granted.”

Oregonian staffer Brooke Herbert contributed to this report.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.