We Are Unprepared (19 page)

We drove in silence along the dirt road until both of us were shaken abruptly out of our thoughts at the sight of what was ahead.

“Whoa, look!” August shouted as I slammed on the brakes, causing us to slide sideways in the mud for several feet.

It was a black bear cub, about the size of a large sheepdog, lumbering slowly across the road. It showed no recognition of our presence. We watched it stop, move in one direction and then another, seemingly looking for something. And then we saw it: with a few great strides the mother bear was right behind. She batted the cub's head and it rolled over joyfully before her. They were playing just a few feet from us! We sat perfectly still, both mesmerized by the scene. I had spotted bears a few times in my childhood, but never been granted such an extended and close view. They were incredible—at once life-size cuddle-toys and ferocious predators.

After a minute, I grew nervous for the exposed animals. We needed to get them off to the woods, before a car came barreling down from the other direction. I explained this to August and he nodded sternly, appreciating the gravity of the responsibility. So we honked, loud and long. Both bears got the message, glancing briefly at us and then disappearing into the woods.

“That was so awesome!” August yelled when they were gone. “I've never seen one up close!”

“Incredible, really incredible. We're so lucky.”

“But, Ash,” he said, “they should be hibernating, right?”

“It's technically a state of semi-hibernation,” I said slowly, “but you're right that they do usually hibernate this time of year.” I didn't want to tell him the truth. Our weather patterns are broken and the bears are confused because it's warm outside and their caves are flooded and their habitat may never be the same again. It's happening to bears all over the world, actually.

I lied instead. “Maybe those particular bears woke up for a few days but are going back to sleep soon.”

“Oh, maybe,” August considered.

The Northeast Kingdom was densely populated with black bears. Its vast, mostly undisturbed forest made it an ideal place for females to bring cubs into the world. They shouldn't be out here, I thought, as August and I continued on our drive. But nature's signals were getting scrambled. The bears were responding to the warmer weather as they always had—as years of evolution had programmed them to—and changes were afoot that they couldn't have prepared for. Who among them would survive those changes was still to be determined. I didn't want to think too hard about why the bears weren't hibernating or the hopeful fib I had just told August. I wanted that day to be a good one. The Storm had been canceled and the sun was returning.

My time with August was almost up, so I drove toward the home of his new foster family. Like the bears, he was a nomad now. I promised to come back the following week and reminded him that he could call me anytime. He hesitated for a moment as I parked the car in the lumpy mud driveway, and then he was out and the door was shut again. August's walk to the front steps was slow and joyless in a new way.

“Everything good?” Pia asked as I walked back into our house. She didn't really want to know. She was growing bored with the August drama.

“Fine, thank you. Where are you going?”

A battered gray duffel bag sat near the door.

“I'm going to Connecticut. There's a thing in Bridgeport this weekend.”

I noticed a folded pamphlet peeking from the pocket of her coat. The little icon in the corner was familiar to me: a clenched fist that glowed like an industrial flashlight.

“It's a prepper thing?” I asked.

“Fine, yes, it's a convention. People are just going to exchange ideas. I can stay at my parents' place at night so it won't cost us anything.”

Cost was a strange argument at that moment. Everything we said and did to each other seemed to have a cost, always growing our deficit, never reducing it.

“There's no storm, though. How long will you be gone?”

She sighed, ignoring the former point. “The convention is three days, but I will probably just stay for the week, since my parents are still in Italy.”

How had we become the sort of people who go away without each other for days at a time with no notice? This seemed like a meaningful change, and one that I had no say in.

“No, don't, Pia.” As soon as I said it, I knew I had lost. My tone was too mild; the expression on my face unchanged. Maybe I didn't want her to stay.

Pia cocked her head, giving me a moment to try again, which I did not do. It occurred to me that this might be a welcome respite. With an empty house and The Storm's threat gone, I could do anything I wanted! Not that I wanted to do anything out of the ordinary. On the contrary, I wanted to do completely ordinary things without my wife's anxious presence.

So I made a choice to accept what was about to happen, just as I understood it. Pia provided me with no additional details on her whereabouts and I asked no questions. I chose not to go down a rabbit hole of worry about whether this long-distance trip to meet with a group of disturbed strangers still worried about a canceled storm signaled the end of her sanity or the end of something else. (And was she even going there? Was there really a convention?) For exactly two seconds, I closed my eyes and saw a wall of flashing neon questions that demanded answers. They were all scrolling at once, multiplying themselves on my eyelids. But then I opened my eyes and, miraculously, they disappeared. So I chose to ignore the questions and move on with the information I had. I would enjoy an ignorant peace, however forced.

Pia leaned in for a perfunctory kiss that never actually landed on my face and walked out to the car without any further fanfare. Being carless for several days would present a number of problems, but ignoring those logistical questions was a necessary part of my response. And it was worth it. Pretending to be cool about it all provided a satisfying shot of power. Maybe this was an important insight about how to live with Pia: ignore the flashing questions. I decided to revisit the idea later, when I was thinking about things again. For now, I poured myself a small bourbon on the rocks and went to the back porch to take in the view.

The bright sun was making fast progress at drying our waterlogged land and patches of earth were beginning to poke through the puddles. It was winter, technically, and the maples that normally shaded our lawn were entirely bare. But there were signs of life, too. I saw the bright white petals of diapensia developing in a cluster on a boulder in the far corner. I loved that flower. Diapensia and its alpine plant peers like bilberry and Labrador tea were Vermont's hardiest creatures, capable of surviving months of arctic temperatures and unshielded wind exposure, with little rain to sustain them. The species had been around for ten thousand years, watching its more delicate plant cousins at lower altitudes disappear with each frost. Such resilience was a testament to nature's persistence and a reminder of its strength in the face of adversity. I had only ever seen diapensia at the top of Camel's Hump and along the gnarly rock cliffs of Mount Mansfield. It wasn't known to grow so low. To see it now in my backyard seemed, like the black bears frolicking in the road, a pleasant glitch. But how many of these deviations could our natural world endure before the norm was lost altogether? That question cast a dark shadow on every warm winter day and unseasonable flower bloom. We couldn't really enjoy the glitches.

I reminded myself that The Storm was (probably) not coming and I could let go of the panic that had settled in my chest months ago. This was not the end; it was a return to normalcy. The asteroid headed toward us had reversed course, waters were drying and I had played basketball with a beautiful woman on that day.

Ah, Maggie.
My mind drifted back to her. Was this a violation of the marital code? No, no, no, I reassured myself. I had hardly any friends in Isole and the day's activities were innocent. They were chaperoned by a seven-year-old! It would be difficult to envision a more appropriate date with a woman who happened to not be my wife. Still, it felt dangerous. It was an afternoon I would never speak of with Pia, not ever. I remembered the look she'd given Maggie when I came home from the hospital, a jealous mammal reclaiming her mate. I could never let her know of the basketball and I could never do that—whatever it was—again.

I wondered what Maggie was doing at that very moment. Was she always engaged in such constructive activities as teaching, physical fitness and creative writing? Yes, I imagined she was, but not because she didn't know how to have fun. Maggie seemed like a doer. That was something she and Pia would have in common, though for very different reasons. Where Pia was driven by compulsion, I imagined that Maggie was the sort of Vermonter driven by a hardwired belief in the value of staying busy and being productive. Maybe that was a compulsion, too, but it's a respected proclivity in New England. Leisure has to hurt a little to be fun here. I had lost some of that intensity since moving away, but I knew it when I saw it and I was still impressed by it. I reminded myself that I didn't know Maggie at all and may have been projecting my romantic feelings about Vermont onto a perfect stranger.

I sat back on the porch swing and closed my eyes, trying to direct my bourbon-buzzing thoughts away from Maggie and toward my drying backyard. All I could hear were mosquitoes. I worked not to be annoyed by their ceaseless drone.

Suddenly, I had the urge to do something myself. I had too much energy coursing through me to just sit there. I decided that, since the ground was drying up, I should revisit the flood runoff plan. We had hit a wall with the prepper holdouts and I knew that the only way to get the rest of them would be to change Crow's mind. I would try again with the old coot.

I took out my cell phone and called Peg. I explained that Pia had taken the car and I would need to borrow hers. She sounded so relieved at the thought of me going to see Crow on my own that she heartily agreed.

Within twenty minutes, I was bobbing along the ravaged roads in her Subaru, squinting through the windshield as I searched for Crow's foreboding driveway entrance. He lived four miles from me, but the only time I had ever been on that road was the last trip we took to his house. It had been so dark then that I hardly recognized anything now at dusk. I passed several battered mailboxes and a broken metal bedframe that had been abandoned in the culvert along the side of the road. Two trucks clanked past me without the friendly nod that I had come to expect. Like much of the Northeast Kingdom, sprawling, pastoral estates were situated beside dilapidated trailers. It wasn't the place to insulate oneself from other classes. But as I neared Crow's driveway, the signs of unemployment and rural poverty outnumbered any trace of affluence. I wondered how Crow had arrived at this place in life and how long he'd been there.

I recognized his driveway by the absence of a mailbox or marker and turned slowly onto the dirt entrance, unsure of how far Peg's car might take me. I drove a few feet and then met a puddle of indeterminate depth, so I turned off the ignition and walked the rest of the way. I was grateful for the last glow of daylight before the sun disappeared entirely. I watched my footing carefully.

Crow's house was set in a lush, dense enclave of what may very well have been old-growth forest. I knew that the Northeast Kingdom was home to some of the continent's remaining old-growth forest, but I hadn't encountered much of it yet and wasn't entirely sure that was the real thing. It had the right characteristics: a thick, mature canopy of hardwoods above, sheltering tiers of trees at various stages—some that would eventually become the tallest in the forest and others that had already peaked and were beginning their descent back into the earth. Even without the summer's leaves, I could hardly see the sky. The ground under my feet was dark and rich enough to feed a host of native wildflowers in warmer months and I made a mental note to come back to see what grew in the summer. This was the land that we couldn't afford to lose to development or pollution or a changing climate. This was where Vermont's memory lived.

Knock, knock.
“Crow, you in there? It's Ash.”

I held my ear to his front door for a few seconds before banging again, trying to sound confident, but still polite.

After thirty seconds, Crow's face appeared in a nearby window and then before me as he cracked the door.

“You again. What now? I'm not changing my mind,” he said.

“That's fine. I just want to chat. I told Peg I would come out here, but I don't care what we talk about.”

Once again, I found myself at Crow's house without a plan.

To my surprise, he unlatched the chain and stepped outside. It was possible that he just appreciated the companionship of a visitor, though the expression on his face didn't reveal as much.

“Could I see your bunker again?” I asked, sensing that flattery might be the right appeal.

He softened visibly at the suggestion.

“All right, c'mon,” Crow said as he walked past me toward the shed.

I had to jog to keep up with his long strides and felt a familiar pang of unease as we approached his secret hideout.

Once we were inside, I took a seat on the couch and drank in all the details from a new angle. I noticed that one of the chairs was actually a weathered barrel, the kind Pia might buy for an exorbitant price at an antiques shop.

“It's rye whiskey,” Crow said, noticing my interest. “I've got a buddy downstate who does some small distilling and we made a batch together last year. It's not the smoothest drink you've ever tasted, but she gets better the longer she sits there.”

“That's so cool.” I wished I could taste some of it.

We sat there quietly, each admiring our surroundings and unsure of the purpose of the visit. I hadn't brought up the runoff plan and Crow seemed to be growing comfortable around me.