We Are Unprepared (10 page)

Salty took the opportunity to look through his notes at the podium while the disruption ensued and the row of select board members behind him whispered distractedly.

Suddenly, a woman cried out and Roger's arm shot up toward the ceiling holding a cocked handgun. Everyone in the room was watching now and they let out a collective gasp at the sight. Roger's angry face was transformed by a demented smile, eyes wide at the realization of the new power he wielded. The rest of the select board sat frozen, as if the slightest movement might detonate the weapon remotely.

“Roger, do...not...move,” Salty said, taking slow-motion steps toward the man.

Roger waved his arm around, causing another wave of gasps. Some people dropped to the floor.

“Don't test me, man,” Roger said. “I've been saying this for a while, but
no one listens
. I gotta get out there to do the deliveries early. I gotta get plowed.
We are unprepared
for this shit, man.”

I saw that look again, the one that reminded me of my brother when he was high.

Salty continued to make a slow catwalk toward Roger as everyone looked on. Suddenly—
Bam! Bam!
The gun went off twice, sending a puff of ceiling plaster down around us. As our ears rang, there was a split second of stunned disbelief in the room and then everyone sprang on their most immediate impulse. Salty leaped at Roger, knocking him onto his stomach, but losing control of his body as soon as they hit the ground together. A large man about my age dived into the melee and sat on Roger's backside, pinning his flailing body to the ground. That was when I burst forward, shoving several people aside to get to his arms and the hand with the gun.

He was skinny but possessed by the superhuman strength that only drugs or madness can inspire. As soon as I had Roger's forearm in my grasp, I dropped my knees down on top of it with enough force to make him yelp in pain and loosen his grip on the gun. I pulled the weapon from his hand like someone who actually knew how to hold a loaded gun, which I did not.

The room was buzzing around me. From the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman with long red hair scoop two small children up and carry them into a nearby janitors' closet. I heard later that Peg had hustled a pregnant woman into the closet right behind them, before pulling out her phone to call for help. As for the rest of the crowd, most pushed their way to the doors at the back of the gym (Pia was among them) or simply dropped to the floor with their hands over their heads.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, before we had time to decide who we wanted to be in a crisis. I was most surprised by my own response; I don't remember
deciding
to do anything. I was like one of those people who wake up from sleepwalking to find that they are already making a sandwich or driving a car. That was what it felt like, except that I wasn't making a sandwich, I was wrestling a gun from a maniac.

Someone took the gun from me—Salty, I think—because it made its way to the authorities. By the time the police arrived, Roger had stopped resisting. He knew that his powers had been revoked, and he was once again a pitiable local man, now with new legal troubles. Two police officers handcuffed him and took him away while everyone else straightened their coats and dusted off their dirty knees, which had been pressed into the cold floor moments before. I noticed that Pia was in the corner, twisting her long blond hair into a bun on top of her head, over and over as if the precision of that particular bun mattered immensely. I was relieved she was safe, but I didn't go to her.

At first, it seemed that we might try to just pick things up where we'd left them before the fracas began—discussing where to build the water runoff routes and which trees needed pruning in the parking lot and how much more money was available to salt the roads... But as Salty stood at the podium and readjusted the microphone volume, it became clear that too much had happened. Competing whispered conversations were taking place around the room as everyone worked to piece together what had happened. A toddler clung to her mother's torso while the crying mother thanked the pretty redhead for acting so quickly. I saw another woman say something angrily to her husband and storm out through a back door. Something had changed. We were no longer a civilized group of locals discussing mundane municipal concerns. We had been forced to take a fleeting glimpse into each other's souls and we didn't like everything we'd seen.

One of the police officers stayed behind to interview witnesses, memorializing the role that each of us had played. I noticed that some of the people looked sheepish and sad as they relayed their own reactions to the scene. Others were boasting, lying really, about their heroics. I enjoyed sharing my version of the story with a polite, young officer. Without any exaggeration, I could proudly explain my role in disarming the man. I had never done anything like that before. It felt strange and wonderful to know I had such valiance. I suspected it had something to do with August; he was changing me somehow.

When Salty finally announced that the meeting would have to be postponed, someone shouted, “So, what, the ten of you will just make all these decisions for us, without our say?”

“Yeah, what about the goddamn plow plan?” someone else said. “We still haven't figured that out.”

Salty tried to respond into the microphone, but his words were inaudible over the yelling. The bossy lady from earlier was shushing people, which seemed to be doing more harm than good. Order had been lost. Still, most of the people in the room were watching in silence or quietly pulling on their coats and heading for the door.

“This isn't a productive environment,” Salty shouted into the microphone. “I don't see how we can move forward tonight.”

A large, middle-aged woman in a chunky sweater responded, “I think you and the rest of the select board are happy Roger acted out, so you could cancel this little democratic show. Screw the regular people when the big storm comes, right?”

A few people nodded, but most just kept their eyes on Salty, waiting for his response.

It seemed outrageous to me that anyone could have seen a conspiracy in that room. Mostly, it seemed unbelievable that this group of people whom I had been regarding as a monolithic demographic saw such dramatic divides among themselves. In that small gymnasium, there were rule makers and rule followers, the untrusting and the marginalized. Angry Roger had dissolved the thin veneer of civility that had held things together only twenty minutes earlier. I had the overwhelming urge to rescue Salty, a man I had never met before, from this awkward moment. In the time it took to wrestle the gun from Roger, I had become part of Isole. I felt entitled to join the group.

“Salty's right,” I said. “We can't do this tonight.” The sound of my voice was strange at that volume.

Now everyone was looking at me, some with approval, most just curious. I could see in the corner of my eye Pia taking two steps back, embarrassed perhaps. She looked over at the chunky-sweater lady, who was visibly unhappy with my comment.

“Okay, well, the authoritarians have spoken, so I guess that's that,” the woman said sarcastically. Then she looked directly at me and pointed her finger. “Don't try to intimidate me, big guy. I don't go quietly.”

Intimidating anyone hadn't occurred to me and, in fact, I was quite terrified of this woman, but the lines had been drawn, so I wasn't backing down. And I didn't entirely hate being Intimidating Big Guy.

Salty cleared his throat and said unconvincingly, “We will pick another date and let everyone know about it. Thanks for coming tonight.”

Salty and the rest of the select board hustled out quickly. I looked at Pia, who was near me but not recognizably
with
me. We both moved toward the door when someone grabbed my arm and I spun around. It was Salty.

“Thanks for the backup there,” he said. “I'm Salty, and you are?” His voice was low.

“Ash,” I said.

“Listen, we're putting together a sort of subcommittee to address a bunch of these issues and we'd be happy to have you join if you have the time.”

“Different from these meetings?” I asked, though I knew I would join whatever he was inviting me to.

“Yeah, it's a smaller group,” he said, glancing at Pia, who I could tell was straining to hear. “We need something more efficient than this. It's...additive... It will help move things along. Time is not on our side, as you know.”

I took Salty's number and told him that I would be in touch.

When we got to the car, Pia was furious with me, which I was not prepared for. She had heard enough of the last conversation to get the gist and accused me of “joining the authoritarians.” Apparently, her prepper friends had warned her about the possibility of this happening, but she hadn't expected that I would be so eager to join them, the shadow government. Those were the words she used:
shadow government
. I knew I shouldn't, but I laughed out loud. This, of course, made her more angry and I thought for a moment she might try to dive out of our moving car.

I remember everything about that ride home because I felt charged in a way that I hadn't in a long time. Pia was mad at me, but I didn't feel desperate for her to forgive me. She was beautiful, I remember that, too. Her cheeks were pink from the cold air and her little blue cargo coat—the one I teased her about looking like Paddington Bear in—fit neatly around her body. At one point, I stopped listening to what she was saying and just stared at the road, thinking about whether or not she might let me touch her that night. I still felt high from the adrenaline of the scuffle, and I wanted to fuck something.

But sex would not be in the cards. Pia was angry, and not in a hot-angry-sex kind of way, which we were no strangers to. She was angry in her new paranoid way, which was a solitary state with no room for me.

I needed to bridge this growing gap between us somehow. I felt confident that this particular fight would come and go, but I was more worried about this drifting trend in our household. I wanted her back, not only for me, but for the fantasy of a family that I envisioned with August. The three of us would be great. The Storm would pass and we'd start anew together. If only I could keep her attention with me and her growing fears at bay.

NINE

THE SNOW MUST
have started right after we'd gone to bed because there was almost a foot on the ground by the time we woke the next morning. Still, roads were plowed neatly and schools were open. It takes more than ten inches of powder to keep Vermonters home. I was home, of course. I pushed through three hours of client work at my computer and made two unnecessary calls to colleagues in an attempt to obscure my eroding attention to work.

At eleven, I walked back downstairs for coffee to find that I was alone in the house, but there was a small piece of paper, the size and weight of a playing card, placed next to the coffee press. It was from Pia, who must have left quietly while I was working. On the card was a fine, intricate pencil rendering of the backseat of our car, as seen from the front. It looked exactly as I remembered leaving the backseat the day before: there was a small pile of dirty clothes on the left side of the bench seat, two dog-eared books behind the headrest to the right and a shoe box on the floor. “I'm sorry” was written in tiny letters along the spine of one of the books. It was an apology. It was also a call for our old selves. Years before, when one of us stumbled financially or professionally, we would remind each other that all we really needed was what we could fit in the backseat of our car, and each other. “The backseat” became shorthand for our ability to handle anything and keep things simple. I appreciated the gesture. We hadn't spoken since our fight after the town hall meeting the night before, so this was a nice turn, but surely she knew as I did that we needed to talk face-to-face. Time was moving quickly and we needed to come to an agreement about August. I considered that perhaps the backseat drawing was another subtle argument against taking more into our life but decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and just accept the little apology picture. I slid it into my wallet and made coffee.

I thought of my father, who would be puttering around outside on mornings like this, and I decided that my first order of business would be to shovel snow. The roof over the back porch was already bowing dangerously and the snow showed no signs of slowing down. So I left my coffee and pulled on long underwear, ski pants, a flannel shirt, boots, a hat and a puffy coat and went out to inspect my project.

With an enormous broom that the previous owners had left behind, I reached awkwardly above my head toward the porch roof and tried to sweep the accumulating snow toward me. Several clumps fell—some down the back of my neck—but most of it resisted my efforts. I jumped a few times, hoping to get a better glimpse of what I was working with. All I could see was an undisturbed blanket of heavy snow that threatened to collapse my porch. There did seem to be something else on the roof, farther toward the center of the house and out of my view. I pointed the broom in that direction and attempted to pull some more snow away to get a clearer picture. When I jumped again, I saw the perfect silhouette of two birds that lay dead on the roof, their wings splayed out as if in midflight. They weren't flycatchers, the fallen birds I'd seen during the hailstorm earlier in the fall. These were much bigger; I might have even guessed that they were broad-winged hawks if it wasn't far too late in the season for them to be around. Then again, the strange weather could have disrupted hawk migration. Broad-wings are particularly sensitive to changing weather patterns because they need predictable waves of warm air to migrate south. I remembered reading that rising thermal air lifts them and then they follow the warm bands away for the winter. It seemed cruel to me that a species' survival should depend upon something as fickle as bubbles of warm air passing at just the right time. It was an arrangement too delicate to last in this new world.

I had forgotten for a moment that this wasn't just the first snowfall, an event that still thrilled me as an adult. It was a foreshadowing, a possible threat of greater things to come. We didn't know whether it was the start of The Storm itself or just the first of many strange, not-right weather events, but we knew it wasn't an innocent first snow because there was no such thing anymore.

I heard our phone ring inside and knew it would be Bev The Social Worker. She had been calling every few days to make sure I was still watching August closely and to see if we had come to a decision about taking him in. I didn't want to have the conversation that morning. We needed more time, so I let it ring.

Even with the eerie threat it posed, the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont was breathtaking before me. The sky was silver through the fast-falling precipitation and there was an absence of sound. Our backyard had the warm, insolated feeling I knew so well, like standing in an infinite blanket of soft down.

I pushed the sight of the dead hawks, and Bev's call, out of my mind and tried to focus again on removing the snow from the porch roof. It was clear that I would need better tools if I was to prevent the roof from collapsing, so I tromped through the pristine woods bound for Peg's house on the other side of the trees, where I knew I would find whatever specialty item could handle the job.

I walked slowly toward her house, enjoying the neat impressions my boots left in the snow—the only human interruption in an otherwise undisturbed tableau. It didn't occur to me until that moment that Peg would likely be out in the world doing her work like a normal person on a weekday.

“Ash, perfect timing!” Peg said from the doorway, as if she'd been expecting me. “I've got Salty in here and we're talking about next steps for the Subcommittee and need help managing the politics of it all. Not my area, thank God.”

As Peg led me into her kitchen, I saw Salty sitting in front of a steaming mug of black coffee. He looked up from his notes to greet me.

“Ash, good to see you,” he said. “Great cover out there, isn't it? I love the first snow. Hate to be inside on a day like today, but there's work to do.”

“Ah, yeah, great cover,” I agreed, making a mental note to adopt the term.

Apparently, this was the group Salty had been referring to at the town hall meeting the night before. I explained the reason for my visit while I pulled off my boots. Peg assured me she had the right tool and hurried me to the table with the others. “Here's the deal,” Salty said, anticipating my confusion. “We don't have time to have a dozen town hall meetings and endless votes on all the minutiae. The Storms are coming.” He waved an arm toward the window dismissively. “This is probably just a flurry, but the big one—that's the one we have to be ready for. It's going to be hell on our land and drain town resources, and we need smart systems in place if we're to have any chance of ever recovering.”

I hoped that Salty was right that this wasn't the big one.

Peg put a mug of coffee down in front of me, which I could have hugged her for. It was such a tiny gesture, but I realized I hadn't been on the receiving end of it in a long time.

“It's not that we're trying to circumvent the formal process,” she jumped in. “It's just that we can't indulge every wacky idea and bout of hysteria. The select board is big and slow and those meetings are open to the public. So we're creating this little group to just start ticking through the list of things that must get done quickly. There are a couple other guys from around town we've already approached about this. There will be five of us, including you.”

“Why me?”

“Because we need someone young and smart and a little...detached.” Salty smiled. “You haven't been here long enough to be entrenched in the inertia that tends to slow things down. You hardly know anyone, which is a great asset in this case. You'll see things more clearly.”

“I'm not offended at all,” I joked.

They both nodded, not quite getting my humor, which hadn't been tested on other humans in a while.

“Also,” Salty went on more slowly, “our main priority is the flood runoff plan we've been working on. We'll explain further, but let's just say it's controversial, and we need one of the affected property owners on our side. It will be easier to make our case.”

I nodded at the still inscrutable explanation. In truth, I didn't really care why they wanted me; I was happy to be a part of something.

“And we like you!” Peg said. “So, will you do this with us?”

“Sure, yes.” I nodded. “So are we
allowed
to do this, form a subcommittee?”

Peg waved off my question. “We don't know. Probably not, but everyone will be glad we did when the flooding starts and there are enough sandbags to keep the library from turning into a swimming pool.”

This all made sense to me. I had seen the town hall meeting; it was a disaster. Not only because of the gun incident, but also because too many people were there with too many disparate concerns. Nothing would ever get done. Plus I trusted Peg and Salty—the worldly intellectual and the wholesome leader. They were good people adapting to new challenges for a place they loved.

We sat at the kitchen table for two hours, creating a list of the most immediate municipal needs that would be addressed by the Subcommittee in the coming weeks. We would need to find a location for an emergency operations center, determine who the points of contact would be for all communications with the governor's office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, allocate money for repairing fire-and-rescue vehicles, create a plan for reaching out to local media and the public when the power went out and much more. I had little practical advice to contribute, but my project management and communications experience was useful. The town of Isole didn't know how to prepare for a threat of this size and scale—no one did, we would learn later—but it felt right to try.

When we neared the end of Salty's exhaustive list, he looked up at Peg and said, “Okay, so what about the runoff analysis?”

Peg took a sip of coffee and looked at me to indicate that she would start at the beginning. This was the real reason they needed me on the Subcommittee.

“Ash, the runoff analysis is a statewide study examining the waterways that we know are going to be a problem during a large storm. A number of small tributaries in the Northeast Kingdom have become regular flood zones during spring thaws and every heavy rainstorm. We need to start addressing the problem either way, but we really need to do it before the superstorm...if it's not too late already.”

Salty jumped in. “We're particularly concerned about the Isole Creek because it runs through dozens of folks' properties and crosses Main Street. A catastrophic flood could wipe out the whole downtown. We need a runoff routing system, which in this case means that we need to widen the creek itself and dig some new routes that will draw water away from our homes and businesses. It's a construction-heavy project.”

“Is the state involved?” I asked. “This seems like a big undertaking.”

“They are,” Peg said with hesitation, “but they are moving too slowly. The governor's office has given unofficial permission to townships that want to move forward with their piece of the flood runoff plan. We get some state funding for it, but it will cost us some money, too. Doing nothing would be more expensive.”

“So what's our job here?” I asked, still unsure of why we were discussing it at Peg's kitchen table.

“We need to convince everybody affected that it's in their best interest to consent to the changes,” Peg said. “For instance, your property, Ash: we are going to need your permission to widen the portion of the creek that runs through your backyard, which would mean encroaching on your yard by a few feet. We will need to have that conversation with eighteen other owners in Isole.”

“But what about the snow?” I asked, looking outside.

Salty sighed. “It's a problem, for sure. But the ground isn't frozen yet, not down deep anyway, so as long as we can get another warm spell, we'll have time to start digging. There are crews from out of state that have said they are ready to go as soon as we are and can get it done within a week. All we need now is to get consent from each of the landowners in the flood zone. That way, when it's warm enough, we can begin digging immediately.”

“Which is why we need to skip the town hall debate over this and just start knocking on doors?” I asked.

“Right.”

“Exactly.”

“I'm happy to help in any way that I can,” I said, and I was.

Salty and Peg nodded, apparently already counting on my participation and ready to move forward with the plan.

We decided that the Subcommittee, as it would cryptically be known, would break for the day and reconvene early next week. Salty had to get to the office and we all had driveways to clear. I followed Peg and Salty out to the porch, where a long-handled tool designed for rooftop snow removal was waiting for me. Peg shook both of our hands and left us alone on the porch steps. The snow was still coming down in fat chunks that sparkled under a dim sky.

“I'm sure I don't have to tell you that we should keep talk of the Subcommittee to a minimum,” Salty said as he wiggled into the bindings of enormous wooden snowshoes.

I nodded.

He finished strapping in and looked up. Salty was significantly shorter than me, but his presence was substantial.

“Ash, I love this town. Isole is a civilized place. But fear makes people behave strangely. It dissolves the glue. We're not trying to undermine a tradition of participatory democracy. We would never want that. We're just trying to protect everyone. The Storm isn't going to wait for democracy. You get it, right?”

I nodded.

“Then I'll see you Tuesday.”

Salty took deliberate moonwalking steps away from me and into Peg's apple orchard, leaving giant snowshoe prints in his wake. His family farm was nearby, though it seemed a long distance on foot.

I remembered that Pia and I had snowshoes, somewhere, from a vacation we'd taken in Stowe three years earlier. We had rented a luxury condo with two other couples. It was supposed to be a ski trip, but it had been unseasonably warm and rainy, so we spent the whole week drinking, playing board games and shopping in overpriced alpine stores. It was one of the best trips we ever took together, and I think that was when we realized how badly we wanted to be in Vermont. We bought snowshoes, of course, because that was what all the natives seemed to be doing, along with expensive, unfussy outdoor gear that we thought would camouflage our glaring outsiderness. We wanted to be windburned and fit and
real
like the locals. We wanted to bottle it all up and drink it, whatever it was that they had. Salty certainly had it.