We Are Unprepared (28 page)

The next hour passed like a coma—I was alive, but incapable of moving and only faintly aware of my surroundings. I could hear the occasional tinkering of Pia around me, but I made no effort to see what she was doing. I couldn't even investigate the rising water levels downstairs, though I knew they were close because the incessant sounds of sloshing water grew louder with each minute. It was as if I was dying very, very slowly. And it wouldn't have been a terrible way to go, given the options at that moment. That's how my paralyzed brain reasoned—moving back and forth between hope and utter despair, alternately fantasizing about our escape and considering accepting my own death.

It was sometime in the late afternoon when I saw the lights outside the window. That was enough to jolt me out of my state and onto my feet. When I pressed my face against the cool glass, I could see there was a massive machine parked on our road. A tank maybe? Was that possible? Pia, who had been writing in her notebook on the floor, stood up and stared out the window. She ran to the radio and tried again to connect with the outside world while I tugged my rain boots on.

“Let's just go!” I whisper-screamed at her. I didn't want to startle August, who had begun to wake up. “This might be our only chance to get August out alive. We have to go NOW.”

“That could be anyone, Ash!” she yelled back. “You probably can't get to them anyhow!”

It was true that I didn't know who was out there or why, but what choice did we have? Even if it was a daredevil attempting his own escape or a crazed marauder, was that worse than staying in our house to drown or freeze or starve? August deserved this chance and I would have done anything at all to keep him alive.

“I'll get the old canoe from the shed. I can swim to it if I have to. Quick, let's wave our flashlights out at them to let them know people are here.”

Pia didn't move.

“You get him dressed while I get the canoe!” I yelled as I opened the bedroom door.

The water had begun to creep up the stairs and I hesitated for only a moment before running toward it. It was about six feet deep on the main floor of the house. My boots went in first, reminding me that clothing was useless—a hindrance, really—for the challenge. Next, my long johns and torso went under. It was cold and disgustingly dark, but I was moving too quickly to observe much more. With a frantic sort of doggie paddle, I could keep my head above the water, which was about two feet from the ceiling, and move toward the open front door. Flotsam bobbed all around me—household items that I recognized and invisible objects that crashed against my body as I fought through the underwater maze.

The claustrophobic pool inside my house finally spat me through the front door and outside, where the water levels were lower but the rain posed a new obstacle. Nothing around me looked as it had before. It was like a nightmare, dark and surreal, with haunting flashes of familiar objects appearing out of context. I was still floating, though I could feel my toes graze the porch now and then. The outline of August's house was in the right place, but many of the trees between us had fallen, revealing parts of the horizon I'd never noticed before. Our car was the same color and shape, though it had drifted into the woods and was resting at an odd angle against a tree. I saw all of this in an instant, aware of the precious passing time.

I took an enormous breath and yelled as loud as I possibly could to the vehicle parked in the road:
“We're coming!”

The vehicle flashed its lights through the rain and I felt confident that, good or evil, the driver was acknowledging me. I pulled myself along the side of the house and paddled the ten feet it took to get to our shed. Inside, tools and toys floated around. Most of its contents had been left by the previous owners and I hardly remembered what was there. Mercifully, the canoe was floating within an arm's length of the entrance with two oars in its dry belly. I yanked it toward me and pulled it awkwardly back toward the house in a hybrid walk-swim. As I approached the house, I saw the ladder I had been using days before and threw that into the canoe.

I parked the canoe on the front porch and let it bounce back and forth between the house and the porch beams while I positioned the ladder beneath the bedroom window. The ladder moved around unnervingly until I got to the fourth rung and I was out of the water entirely.

Before climbing up, I looked back toward the vehicle on the road again and yelled one more time.
“Stay there! We're coming now!”

This time, there was no flash of lights and I knew we didn't have much time.

A blast of wind hit my right side as I balanced on the ladder and worked to ignore the terrifying cold that had taken hold of my body. I was growing weak to it and suspected that hypothermia might not be far behind. I climbed to the top of the ladder and banged on the window for Pia to open it.

August was inside, dressed for a blustering day as I had been before the cesspool pulled my boots and coat from my shivering body.

“We gotta go now!” I yelled from outside the window. “August, I need you to climb down this, buddy, quickly and carefully. Can you do that?”

August nodded with a forced brave face. I took two steps down and made room for his small body above me.

With my arms on either side of August on the ladder, I yelled again, “Okay, Pia, now you! There's no time left. Just leave everything.”

“I'm not coming,” she said from inside the bedroom. She sounded apologetic, but sure.

“What?” I gasped. “No, Pia, we can't do this now! Just come out here. I've got you.”

“Ash, I'm not coming. I need to see this through.”

“What are you talking about? Get down here! You're going to die!”

“Maybe,” she said with a strange buzz in her voice. “But I think I'm prepared. I don't want to leave the house. I want to stay here and
experience this
.”

I knew that was it. She needed the chaos; it fed her. Pia had been more alive in those final days in our flooding house than I'd seen her in months, and she wasn't eager for The Storm to end, even if it killed her.

Just then, the tank in the road made a honking noise and I realized how much time we were wasting.

“We have to go, Pia! August and I have to go. We have to find his parents... I love you, you know.”

“I know,” she said.

And that was it.

I rushed August down the ladder and yelled as loud as I could to the mystery driver in the road,
“Wait for us!”

As we climbed into the canoe, I could think only of getting August out to the road. I had never felt anything close to the feeling I had for that boy at that moment. I would have sacrificed my life if I knew it would keep him alive. There was nothing else I needed. The sick, sad emptiness of leaving my wife alone in that house would come later, but in that instant, my only thought was to save August.

PART THREE

The flowers will bloom, when we are gone,

As fresh and sweet as now,

And droop in beauty o'er the clay

That wraps our mouldered brow.

The stately trees will rear aloft

Their leafy heads as high,

The gladsome breeze that through them steals

Will not our requiem sigh.

Those beauteous hills of green, o'er which

Our youthful feet have trod,

Will still remain the same when we

Are slumbering 'neath the sod.

—“When We Are Gone” by Mrs. A. D. Hemenway of Ludlow, Vermont.
First published in 1860.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE MOMENT OUR
shivering bodies felt the hard metal of the tank, we left isolation behind for a new, communal existence. August and I had been saved. At the urging of the governor, Vermont's Army Mountain Warfare School had deployed all of its resources to help people stranded in rural pockets of the state, with a priority placed on flood zones, which was why a tank drove down our impassable road on that day. Two soldiers and three civilian volunteers were manning the vehicle. They had been driving around the hardest-hit areas of the Northeast Kingdom all day, picking up the unprepared and unlucky.

I don't remember all the details of how it ended, but I know that we were both hoisted onto the tank and wrapped in blankets. We huddled together on a long seat with a middle-aged couple who lived two miles up the road. An elderly woman joined us later and we all said very little, understanding only that we would be deposited at the nearest emergency location with the other storm refugees. From the fuzzy radios the soldiers spoke into, we caught glimpses of what was out there: destroyed roads and houses, many people waiting to be rescued from treacherous conditions, some deaths. I did the only thing within my power while we rode to the emergency shelter: I held August tight, assuring him that we would be okay.

We
were
okay. When the tank finally stopped, we were at the high school, only a few miles from my home. It was the same place we'd played basketball with Maggie weeks before, but now it housed two hundred dislocated people. It was barely recognizable to me from the outside. The entire parking lot was submerged in water and large chunks of broken pavement floated along the surface like icebergs. A blue Ford Focus that had flipped upside down leaned precariously against the far end of the building. The only signs of human life were on the flat rooftop, where volunteers in waders and masks used chain saws to cut a massive fallen telephone pole into segments small enough to roll off the side of the building.

When I realized where I was, I felt dizzy again, as though the earth was spinning faster than before and its contents swirling around me. Nothing looked as it once had. Where houses should have been, there were only piles of debris. The roads were torn up and empty, aside from the occasional out-of-place object that had been deposited on them (a mangled child's swing set, a dead cow) and the military tanks that crept slowly above it all. Most disturbing—and this was what made it seem so foreign—was that the cozy forest walls that insulated our hamlet on either side of the valley appeared to have been shorn bare. I could see straight across town and right up to the bald head of the mountains. Most of the trees had been pulled down by wind or uprooted by flooding, regardless of size or age. They seemed to fall in patterns, with one cluster leaning to the east and an adjacent group pointing toward the south. It told the messy, ruthless story of how The Storm had moved through—a story that had no forest survivors. August saw it all, too, and his body quivered beside me. I clung tightly to his hand as we were led into the makeshift school shelter. As the only familiar thing in August's young life at that moment, I wasn't going to let him go.

Inside, dozens of people stood around in groups, some crying or silently hugging. A young woman with a sympathetic smile directed us to two empty cots at the far end of the room and handed me a paper bag filled with ill-fitting donated clothes that smelled like someone else's attic. She explained that the sandbags and the cinder blocks saved the school and then hurried off to greet another group of refugees. We changed into the dry clothes and burrowed under the blankets for a while, working to bring our body temperatures back up to normal. Medical professionals were bustling around the room, but our chill seemed too small to warrant their attention as others were bruised and bloody. We were content to just lie there and watch; safety and warmth were enough.

Eventually, a line started to form at the other end of the gymnasium and we followed the crowd. With the other terrified faces, we waited patiently for soup as it was ladled into disposable bowls. I was so grateful for the nourishment, and for everything we'd been given in the period after our rescue. We were still in shock then; I could barely speak. The only thing that remains clear to me is the profound gratitude I felt to the strangers who kept us alive that day—people who had no doubt suffered losses along with the rest of us. Sometimes, today, I'll remember a flash of someone's face from that shelter or I'll catch the smell of soup-kitchen food as it floats by, knocking the wind out of my chest for a moment. If it's possible to feel gratitude in your body like a fever, that's what I felt as we stood in line for lentil barley soup.

“Lost your house?” an older man asked us from behind.

I turned around. His head was bald and smooth and he had soft creases around his eyes.

“Ah, I think so,” I sputtered. “I don't know. Couldn't stay there.”

“Yup. I understand.” He nodded. “Well, you and your son are going to be fine now. You've got all you need right here.”

The older man gave August a light squeeze on the shoulder, sensing his fragility. We didn't correct him about our relationship; there was no reason to. I felt August hold my hand a little tighter and wondered how his own parents felt to be so far away from their child. They didn't deserve him, but I prayed that they were still alive. I needed to find someone at the shelter with information about what had become of everyone. I needed to track down Pia, too.

With our full bowls and plastic spoons, we joined a group of people talking quietly on the floor nearby and began to make friends.

In the days that followed, we created a sort of community among ourselves in the high school shelter, with enough small gestures of privacy and politeness to maintain a sense of civility in a living arrangement that would have seemed uncivilized before. We had food, electric generators, a roof and clothing, which was so much more than the people we saw on TV and heard the rescue crews discuss in hushed voices. We didn't see death immediately before us, but it was omnipresent—an inevitability on the other side of those cinder-block walls—and that fear kept us huddled closer.

There was the rash of deaths that occurred during The Storm from drowning, hypothermia, fallen trees and collapsed buildings. But what came after was more frightening. People started dying from contaminated water and exposure to raw sewage lines. A violent gastrointestinal illness that originated at a pig farm in Pennsylvania spread rapidly, killing hundreds across the country in less than two days. There were stories of biohazardous materials leaking into rivers in upstate New York, which caused skin to dissolve on contact. Our bodies weren't armed for the waste and toxicity that had escaped our neat containment systems. It was killing us. And not just us—it was killing livestock and crops, fish and birds.

All of these stories made our survival feel more precarious—and filled me with guilt and anxiety. I tried to focus on my self-assigned job of shielding August from the horror, but my mind was always on Pia. I'd left her there. She may have died and that would be my fault. I went over those final moments over and over in my mind, working to convince myself that there was nothing else to be done. She refused to come with me. Could I have wrestled her out of the house? Perhaps, but certainly not down a ladder from a second-story window. Would August have lived if we'd stayed there with her? I was sure at that moment that his survival depended upon our escape, which still seemed true, but provided no comfort. I spoke silently to that higher power that I barely believed existed, praying for her to be alive.

Still, though I spent those days trying to see through a thick fog of guilt, I never wished that she was here with us. I wanted her to be alive, elsewhere, while I tended to August and worked to understand the new world we lived in. It would have felt like relief to have her gone, if only I'd known she was safe. This semi-relief feeling was worse than longing or heartbreak because it only compounded my guilt. What could be more callous than relief at such a time, I wondered. Did it take the deadliest storm in earth's history to provide me with a cowardly escape from my wife? I hated myself intensely.

The kindness of the people around me was a welcome, if undeserved, antidote to my self-loathing. Some of the people in the shelter we already knew. Bill, from the Subcommittee, was there for a brief period with his wife and two children while they waited for his road to become passable again. And a woman I recognized as a cashier at the food co-op was friendly to us. Others came from nearby rural towns: Irasburg, Derby, Glover. Sometimes people would arrive from other shelters that had exceeded capacity, or someone from a nearby cot would disappear after a family member made room in their home. It was a changing community, but a community nonetheless.

Most of our days were spent watching CNN as the destruction elsewhere was chronicled. An entire portion of the country had been decimated in the first forty-eight hours of The Storm and tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people were missing—many of whom would never be located. Lawmakers in Washington had activated every emergency aid tool at their disposal and the international response was impressive, but so much more was needed. The Storm looked different from emergencies of the past. The devastation was too grand, too expensive and too lasting for easy solutions. With Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington obliterated, it was hard to find hope in the news. Even the polished, smiling correspondents on cable had a difficult time maintaining composure in the face of that reality. There was little attention paid to the more rural and forgotten corners of our country that had been washed away, which was fine with us in the Northeast Kingdom. Staying under the radar was a way of life and source of pride for Vermonters; The Storm didn't change that.

As soon as we had enough generators in the shelter and the internet connection was restored (one of the only in the region), we lined up at the aging high school computers to check emails and message boards for signs of life from our family members. It took four days to find August's parents, who had been moved to a shelter an hour away after their hospital was evacuated. When we finally connected by phone, we all cried for our own reasons. August's father would need physical therapy, but he was going to be okay. As soon as we heard their voices over the phone line, I found myself thanking that unnamed god I'd been speaking with; it seemed ungrateful not to.

I'm never going to know why the universe decided to save August's father, but I felt indebted to some divine power for the outcome. The expression on August's face at the sound of his mother's voice changed me forever. He heaved an enormous, primal sigh of relief at first, which changed quickly to unease at the realization that his fate was unknown. He wanted to melt at his mother's breast, secure in the knowledge that she would shield him from further atrocities. But she wasn't that kind of mother and they didn't have that kind of relationship. So August was relieved, but frightened and unsure now, too. I wanted to never give him up.

“I wish you could come,” August said as I helped him onto the rescue tank that was to deliver him to his parents. He looked nervous.

“Me, too. But I have to stay here and find Pia.”

He nodded. “Maybe, after I see my mom and dad, I can come back here to be with you?”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn't want to overpromise. I had no idea what was possible. The world had been overturned and I was at that moment without a wife or even a home. I had no idea what options still existed for either of us. “I'm going to find you as soon as I can.” This I knew to be true.

I helped buckle August into the massive tank, possibly the same one that had rescued us a week before, and gave him a hug that lasted long enough to make him squirm. I would miss his small body, his clammy hands that reached for mine at night, the way his dirty hair matted around his pink face when he woke up in the morning. I felt a love for August that was unlike any other variety of love I'd ever experienced and I ached to give him up.
He isn't yours
, I thought. But then, whose was he?

The tank pulled away and I waved until it was long, long gone.

I wasn't just sad to be without August. With him gone, I was left alone with my panic over what had become of Pia.

I spent another two weeks at that shelter. Mornings were devoted to looking for my wife and the rest of my family online while intermittently reading heartbreaking news of the tragedies that others had endured during The Storm. My parents and siblings were all okay. Their homes had suffered various levels of damage and I suspected that my parents weren't being honest about just how bad their living situation was, but I didn't have anything to offer them, so I didn't press for details. I couldn't even visit, not without working roads or access to a car.

One afternoon, after exceeding my allotted time at the shared computer, I found Pia on a live storm chat board. She had posted her full name and location and, just as I'd hoped, was looking for me. My heart beat quickly as I saw her name and the little icon beside it that flashed to indicate she was online.

Pia, it's me, Ash!
I typed frantically.

Oh, thank God, Ash
, she replied.
Where are you?

We rushed through the details of our location and state of health, desperate to know that the other was safe. She explained that she had stayed through the final days of The Storm while the first floor of our house filled with water and then everything in our life washed away. Learning all this in text that scrolled across a very public screen was strange, inappropriately casual and distant, but there was no other way.

Pia: I was dehydrated and in the early stages of pneumonia when they found me, so my memory is a little foggy. I think a rescue crew carried me out, but I'm not sure how they knew I was there.