We Are Unprepared (3 page)

Pia had begun a shopping list of home supplies we would need for The Storms. She wrote, “canned goods, multivitamins, water filtration system, solar blankets.” It read more like a survival list for the apocalypse than a storm-preparation plan.

“Babe, I was thinking we would just, like, board up the windows and try to seal up the root cellar a bit,” I said. “Do you really think we need all that?”

“It can't hurt to be prepared.” Pia shrugged, still writing in the dark. “And if nothing comes of these storm predictions, then we'll have some extra supplies the next time we need them. No harm done.”

Her reasoning was sound, but there was an edge to her voice that surprised me. The coming storms excited her.

Pia came around to my side of the table and wrapped a wool blanket around both of our shoulders. It smelled like campfire from a previous summer outing. She put her arms around my chest for a quick squeeze and then turned back to her notebook. I listened to the leaves swaying with the wind and the din of summer insects that were somehow still abundant. Her hair fell all around us. I could smell the natural almond shampoo she had started using since adopting a more country approach to hygiene, which made her hair wilder than it used to be. Pia was getting charged with each new idea she recorded. I loved her like that: present and energized. I knew what my role was at those moments. I would be adoring and attentive, which I really was.

Pia pulled a knee up to her chest and I noticed a new drawing in ballpoint pen on her upper thigh. It was a tree with the face of an old man in its trunk. She must have done it that evening, mindlessly doodling in a moment of boredom. Our lives were filled with these small reminders of Pia's artistic gifts, washable and impermanent, but impressive. She had won awards in college for her oil paintings, and a prominent gallery in Manhattan had offered to show her photography years before. But Pia lacked the discipline to carry out long-term projects and she changed mediums too often to be truly great in any of them. With focus, she could have earned a living doing the kind of art she loved.

“You're going to be great at this,” Pia said.

“At what?”

“You know, bracing for these big weather events, finding industrious solutions to things, living without some of our old comforts. You like things a little difficult.”

She was complimenting me, but teasing, too. Since we'd started making real money, modern life was feeling a bit squishy for me, all morning espressos and personal trainers. I secretly feared that I was growing too attached to it all. A tiny alarm in the primal recesses of my brain had been going off, warning me to stay sharp and focused in case of future uncertainty. I never told Pia about this growing discomfort, but I should have guessed that she could sense it.

“Fingers crossed for frozen pipes.” I smiled.

We stayed outside until nearly eleven, building our plan for The Storms and laughing—flirting even—as we huddled together in solidarity. When I finally convinced Pia that it was time to go to bed, she took my hand and led me upstairs to our bedroom, where she instructed me to sit in a small antique chair to watch her slowly peel off each layer of her clothing.

It would have been comical on a less beautiful woman as she unbuttoned her oversize flannel shirt and pulled off fading green cotton underwear, but it wasn't. My physical response to Pia's naked body hadn't flagged in the years we'd been together. If anything, it had grown more intense as sex tapered off a little. When she was done undressing, she turned and walked her naked body to the bed to wait for me. Her ears and nose were still cold from the evening chill, but the rest of her body was warm, hot even. I attempted restraint at first, but that didn't last, and what followed was the wild, forceful passion that we'd founded our relationship on years ago. Better even. We fucked like two people desperate to occupy one another. It was feral, afraid. Pia was alive, the weather was our common enemy and I was relieved.

As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn't ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia's desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn't know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?

TWO

WE WOKE UP
early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom naked for a few minutes, checking her phone, tying her hair up and then taking it down again in front of the mirror. The warm mood of the previous evening still lingered, though daylight had brought a new urgency to our self-assigned task of storm shopping.

I walked downstairs and turned the radio on even before making coffee, hoping for the latest from NPR on the new weather predictions. No one seemed to have any more information, but overnight, countless opinions had been hatched and opposing teams established. A conservative commentator suggested that this was part of a wider liberal scheme to divert public funds to global-warming-research and climate-change “slush funds.” Someone from a think tank feared that the president was withholding information and called for a congressional investigation into what the Department of the Environment and NOAA knew. Pia and I drank coffee with sweet local cream while we watched old men on network TV discuss how this might influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. The Storms dominated everything, but they were still only an idea. It was just a Saturday project for us.

We took showers and climbed into the Volvo, bound for the closest family-owned hardware store, twenty-five minutes away. That morning felt like what I thought our Vermont experience would always feel like. We were close, she was smiling and the landscape unfolded before us like a picture painted by a child in crayon: all blue skies and red barns. The windows were down and we talked about how the smell of manure made us feel. Pia said she hated it but couldn't resist taking a few deep breaths. I took a native's pride in sharing that I loved that farm stink. It evoked for me a million childhood experiences, most real and some fabricated in the haze of nostalgia. She leaned across the front seat to kiss my neck and call me a hick as I pulled into Dewey's Hardware.

* * *

“You're so country.” That was what Pia had said to me when we met nine years earlier. We were at a raucous costume party in Williamsburg and I was fighting my way through a wall of bare male torsos, trying not to touch the smooth, sweaty shoulders standing between me and the keg. The host, a mutual friend, was a professional party thrower and an amateur drug dealer. His events were always predominantly gay and half-naked, but this one was exceptional even by his standards. My chances of talking to a pretty girl seemed better than average, given the demographics, so I took a risk and smiled at Pia, who was still unknown to me then. She immediately grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd until we found safety in an unoccupied corner of the room.

“You're not from here, right?” she yelled in my ear.

Her costume was composed entirely of a vine that snaked around her curvy body, with plastic leaves covering all the critical areas. It was held in place with flimsy green tape.

“No one's from here,” I said. “This isn't real. It's a costume party within the costume party of Brooklyn. This is a redundant party.”

Pia seemed impressed by the profundity of this drunken observation, so I kept going. I explained that I had been living there since I graduated from Amherst, that I was working in graphic design and that I had no intention of staying in Brooklyn forever. “I miss trees,” I said, which she liked a lot. When Pia, who had attended Middlebury, learned that I was from Vermont, she touched my arm and told me that she was “madly in love with the dirt there.” I told her about a harvest festival near my hometown that she would enjoy, which was when she smiled an amazing smile and decided that I was “very country.”

We slept together that night. There was no courtship or pretense. She just took me back to her messy apartment and, without a hint of modesty, pushed my head between her legs as if she was giving me a gift I had been waiting for. For the briefest moment, I considered fainting in the humid, earthy cave of her body, but I didn't. I came alive. Pia didn't exude the soapy perfume of the girls I'd been with before; she was all salt and musk. She was the most animate being I had ever encountered and a switch was flipped inside me. I wanted to consume her and she wanted to be wanted by me, so our frenzied union felt like a perfect fit. I knew from the start that with her passion came a moody and mercurial element, but that was fine with me. Life was so much more fun with her in it. So we built a relationship there, on a lumpy mattress, beneath glittery, draped tapestries, surrounded by stacks of books in unreal Brooklyn.

My confidence in those initial days with Pia can be largely attributed to the recent realization that my specific brand of geekiness was in high demand in that particular corner of the universe at that moment in American culture. I had always been a tall, slightly awkward dork who would rather be reading nature journals or distance running in the woods than mingling at a party. In Brooklyn, this was misinterpreted as sensitive, progressive and cool. Even my accidental wardrobe (workman pants, flannel shirts, hiking boots) seemed to impress. I would have resented the objectification if it didn't work so well with hot hipster girls.

* * *

“I knew we should have left earlier,” Pia said from the passenger seat as we approached the hardware store.

The parking lot was surprisingly crowded for nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, but we found a spot in the farthest corner, next to a pickup truck with giant, muddy wheels. Two rows down, a woman hurried small children into the backseat of a car filled with shopping bags.

“Whoa” was all I could say when we entered the store. The normally orderly establishment was roaring with people pushing squeaky shopping carts, many holding lists of their own.

A young man wearing a navy Dewey's Hardware polo shirt nodded at us from the entryway. “It's the latest storm report,” he said. “Everyone's getting prepared.”

I wanted to talk further with this teenager, who probably could have been helpful to us then, but Pia had already claimed a cart and joined the melee. We moved quickly up and down the aisles, most of which had been picked so bare that it was impossible to know which essential items were no longer available to us.

“Tarps have been sold out since seven this morning,” one man reported, “and don't even bother trying to find sandbags.”

Neither was on our list, but they sounded important all of a sudden.

As whole sections of the store were emptied, shoppers veered to other areas looking for creative uses for seemingly useless items. One man bought all the remaining plastic sleds from the previous winter. I watched him jog to the register with his purchase, satisfied with whatever discovery he thought he'd just made.

It wasn't the bare shelves or the full parking lot that unnerved me that morning; it was the behavior of the patrons. We were in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom with people who had lived through dozens of epic weather events. They had seen ice storms kill harvests, barn roofs collapse under wet snow and heavy winds bring trees down over livestock. They adapted to bad weather with whatever was in the shed or could be borrowed from a neighbor and they never, ever panicked. This wasn't full-blown panic, but it was something close. (We would learn later what real panic looks like.)

Pia crumpled up the list in her hand and stuffed it in the pocket of her jean shorts. We wouldn't find anything on that list. Taking a cue from the shoppers around us, she started just grabbing random items: gardening gloves, a box of large nails and a hammer, three bungee cords, shipping tape. I considered stopping her, but she looked committed, so I stood back. We went around the store like that for a while before finally making our way through the checkout line and out the door, arms full with plastic bags of odd items. As Pia had said the night before, there's no harm in being prepared.

When we stepped outside, fat raindrops hit our faces and the temperature seemed to have dropped dramatically.

“Shoot, the windows,” I said, remembering our exposed car.

We broke into a clumsy run toward the Volvo, hoping to beat the rain, but the unexpected storm was much faster than us. The raindrops grew larger and somehow sharper as we ran. I felt one sting my ear and heard Pia shriek from up ahead. When we finally got to the car, we jammed our bags in the backseat, rolled up the windows and huddled in the front, stunned. I blinked the water out of my eyes and realized that it wasn't rain anymore, but hail. Icy golf balls were pelting cars and frantic shoppers. The sky was dark directly above us, but bright and inviting just to the north. On the grassy border in front of the car's bumper, I could see two birds—more flycatchers on their way south—lying dead, their faces frozen in shock or pain. I hoped Pia didn't see them.

“Fucking biblical,” she said. Her hair was wet and she was shivering, so I reached into the backseat for a dirty sweatshirt that I'd left there weeks ago. She pulled it on and shook her head in disbelief at the weather change. There was a slight smile on her face.

“Ash, we should keep shopping...track down the stuff on our original list. This isn't going to get less weird, you know?”

I did know. I felt it, too. The sun was already returning, but an uncertainty had stung us with that hail. We needed to start
doing things
. So I steered the car toward Burlington and the big-box stores that would have what we needed and the countless new items that popped into our heads as the distant notion of catastrophe inched closer.

Pia laughed out loud as we gained speed on the highway. “It's kind of fun, isn't it?”

“What?”

“Waiting for disaster. It shouldn't be, but it's kind of fun.”

I knew what she was talking about. Candlelit blackouts and immobilizing snow days always thrilled me. To be briefly thrust into a more primitive lifestyle awakens something in us. But it must be brief and risk-free to be fun. It can't be real. The storm predictions before us sounded more consequential than those fleeting adventures of the past.

“Remember that summer storm in our old place when we lost the power for three days?” she asked.

“It's one of my favorite memories. My sister still talks about it.”

Years before, soon after I had proposed to Pia, a hurricane hit New York on its way off the coast, bringing torrential rains, followed by three hot, powerless days. My sister and her girlfriend were visiting from London at the time, and I was already uneasy about their first encounter with Pia. But I needn't have been because Pia was at her best when life went off script.

* * *

We spent two boring days playing board games in the dark and finishing all the wine in the apartment. Without air-conditioning, we were grumpy and smelly, just waiting for life to return to normal. Pia was bouncing off the walls and I could tell that she was going to manifest action imminently. Finally, the rain stopped and Pia went outside. She ran to the corner store for a thirty-pack of Miller Lite, turned our speakers out the window toward the wet street and started knocking on neighbors' doors. She had started a block party. People poured out of their apartments, many contributing to the beer tub, calling their friends to bring more. Makeshift barricades of chairs and garbage pails were set up on either side of the block to keep cars out, and someone filled a kiddie pool with fresh water. Within twenty minutes, there were close to a hundred people in the street, shaking off the sweaty cabin fever of the preceding days. It felt organic and spontaneous—the big bang of block parties—and no one remembered later how it began. But it wasn't organic; Pia created it out of nothing. She saw the world for its potential and made interesting things happen. Life with someone like that is limitless.

“She's rad,” my sister said later. “Fucking nuts, but rad.” That was Pia's effect on people.

* * *

We drove along in silence, thinking about that party and the complicated pleasure of doom.

“I saw the birds,” Pia said quietly. The sun had reappeared. “The dead ones. It's spooky—the hot weather and the sudden hail. Everything is a little wrong.”

I nodded and put a hand on her bare knee. There wasn't much more to say, so I kept driving silently. It was eighty degrees when we woke up, and now the dashboard said sixty. The hail, the birds, the panicked shoppers. It
was
spooky, but I was grateful for the simple, shared task before us.

Forty-five minutes later, we were making our way up and down the aisles of Home Depot, joking about the impending apocalypse and thoroughly enjoying each other's company.

“Of course, the dollar will crash after The Storms come, and we will have to turn to primitive forms of currency,” I said with a wide sweep of my arm as we passed the lawn mowers.

“Like spices and fermented cider and stuff?” Pia played along.

“No, much more primitive than that. Blow jobs primarily. Hand jobs also, though they aren't worth nearly as much.”

She shrieked with laughter, turning several heads around us. Pia never cared who saw her laugh (or cry). I felt proud to be responsible for delighting this beautiful woman.

We bought a snow shovel and two pairs of work gloves, caulking and sheets of insulation. We didn't know what we were doing, but it felt proactive. The hurried shoppers around us made small talk about which items were essential in which types of weather events and I studied them closely, eager to pass as an experienced local. We bought what they bought and hoped they were right.

Several hours and hundreds of dollars later, Pia and I were drinking wine on our back porch again, surrounded by bags of items that promised to keep us safe from whatever was coming. The back porch was the best part of that house, looking out on our unkempt backyard that dissolved into dark woods. It was home.

I don't remember the indoors of my childhood. I grew up in a pretty Victorian house, bigger than most of my classmates' homes and lovingly cared for, but I didn't spend much time inside it. My parents were strong believers in the character-building properties of outdoor play, so they hurried us into the woods behind our house as soon as the sun was up each morning. We played until we were shivering, hungry or injured and then slept as if we were dead each night. My siblings eventually resisted this parenting technique, which would undoubtedly classify as some form of neglect today, but I embraced it until high school. The woods were freedom to me: undeveloped; unregulated by grown-ups and infinite in their potential for discovery. There was an order to the woods, but it wasn't dictated by man. I wanted to understand that order, to have dual citizenship in both the natural and human worlds. Passing freely between them seemed the ultimate power. So I became a voracious consumer of science and nature writing. I wanted to know every species of wildlife and the subtle languages with which they spoke to one another. I wanted to be a part of that organism and welcomed by its inhabitants.