We Are Unprepared (5 page)

I realized that we had already settled into a language for the new weather reality before us. There were
The Storms
: immediate, multiple and unseasonable storms of every variety that we should expect for several months, beginning soon. There was also, further off in the future,
The Storm
: the collision of several atmospheric forces that would create something so historic and violent that we still chose to believe it was a statistical improbability.

Pia went on, “Ash, I'm going to a meeting tonight and I would really like you to come. It's just a group of locals who are brainstorming about storm preparations. I think it's important.”

I didn't want to go to a meeting. I wanted to lie on the couch and drink a beer and read a book that had nothing to do with weather or survivalism. But she looked like she needed me.

“I guess it wouldn't hurt to listen.” I shrugged.

Pia jumped up to throw her arms around my neck and I was immediately pleased with how I'd handled the situation. I didn't mind being taken on her impromptu adventures and I appreciated the freshness they injected into married life. Freshness was never a problem for us.

* * *

“Let's memorialize this moment!” That was what Pia had said when we first arrived at our new Vermont home.

It was a brutally hot June day and we'd been driving for seven hours. The air-conditioning in our car had broken in Connecticut, so our clothes were damp with sweat when we finally peeled ourselves out of the seats at the end of our journey. I got out first, sending Dunkin' Donuts cruller crumbs everywhere as I stepped away from the car to relieve myself. Pia wiped her sweating face on her shirt and stretched to touch her toes.

It was just us and our new house on that steamy, overcast day. The movers weren't expected to arrive with our belongings for another two hours and, although we were tired and dirty, it was euphoric to kick our shoes off and feel the grass under our feet. Our grass. Grown by the clean air and rich soil that was ours now, too, free of the pollutants and cynicism we had left behind. We were in Eden.

I walked to Pia and wrapped both my arms around her, squeezing hard, and we held each other silently for a long time, exhaling.

Finally, we walked up the porch stairs to the front door and turned the key. It was just as I remembered the house when we last saw it, but even better now: clean and scrubbed of any evidence of previous lives lived there. We hugged again quickly and then ran from room to room to reacquaint ourselves. After so many years of small urban apartments, it felt obscene to be in possession of so many rooms dedicated to subtly different activities. The kitchen was bright and airy with shiny outdated appliances and plenty of counter space. A stream of blinding light in the living room drew a straight line to the ancient woodstove—the most substantial machine I had ever been responsible for. And the two upstairs bedrooms oozed charm with their countless gables and unfamiliar angles. It was gluttonous to us then, but we hungrily ate it all up.

There wasn't much to do without furniture, so we eventually walked to the back porch and sat side by side.

“We have to do something that we'll never forget to mark the beginning of our new life here. What should we do?”

For once, it came to me first. “Let's go skinny-dipping in the creek.”

“Yes, I love it.”

We stepped off the porch and began peeling clothing off. The enormous trees around us were lush with leaves by then and we were hidden from the rest of the world on every side.

I'm not a prude, but I've never been the sort of person who's entirely comfortable with nudity in nonsexual, broad-daylight situations. All that pink flesh rubbing and bouncing is a little too much reality for me. But Pia was just the opposite. She was entirely comfortable with her own nudity—which wasn't much of a feat, since she looked fantastic naked—and she also appreciated the naked form on others, marveling at the beauty of human imperfections. She once told me that she saw God's artistry in the way time drags and molds our bodies into new shapes. It was as if she didn't understand shame at all. What a gift that must be.

I was happy to ignore the embarrassed voice inside me as we stripped down and ran toward the creek at the far end of our backyard. Pia let out a celebratory holler and we stepped into the cool woods to look for just the right spot for our swim.

It wasn't swimming, exactly—the creek was only a foot deep in most places—but there was one perfect little basin lined with rough sand where the incoming current pooled and swirled before moving farther down the rocky path. We stepped carefully along mossy rocks and into the pool, startled by how cold the water was. It was almost numbing, but we didn't care. We were hot and happy and so insanely in love at that moment.

“It's incredible to think that almost two hundred years ago, another family was living in this house and probably washing their clothes here in this creek,” Pia said as she squatted in a little shivering ball in the water. She had created a romanticized historical narrative of our new location in the weeks before, and I couldn't resist teasing her about it.

“Ah, yes. The Green Mountain Boys probably washed their uniforms in this creek.” I smiled and blew bubbles into the dark water.

Pia moved in and wrapped her legs around my lower half. We kissed and laughed in high, frigid octaves, working hard to stay in the icy bath.

When finally it got to be too much, we stepped out of the creek and walked up the bank toward our home. The humid air of our new backyard was a relief as we roamed aimlessly around waiting for the air to dry our bodies. I picked a young green blackberry from its bush and tasted its tart flesh. Pia lay flat on her back in a cluster of red clovers. Our red clovers.

I went to her and lay down on my side, one hand resting on her bare stomach. The new, verdant smells of late spring were all around us, competing for our attention. Wet moss, honeysuckle, stinky trilliums. It was hotter than it should have been in June, but we didn't mind. In those early days, we still thought hundred-degree June temperatures were just flukes, delicious details in our sweet homecoming story.

Pia rolled onto her stomach and kissed me while my hand wandered toward her smooth bottom. I began to inch closer toward her when we heard the sound of a nearby car door slam. We both froze.

A tall twentysomething man appeared in the yard and immediately spun around when he discovered us.

“Put some clothes on, Adam and Eve. Your shit's here.”

We erupted into laughter and scrambled to find our clothes while the movers waited safely at the front of the house. We pulled everything on and tugged it all back into place and then broke down once more, this time in a fit of laughter that had us choking and snorting on our knees. It was a perfectly memorable start.

* * *

At six o'clock that evening, Pia and I were sitting in folding chairs in the basement of the Elks Club in downtown Isole. There was no signage outside or handouts at the door or anything else that would have signaled that something formal was occurring. I wondered how Pia knew about the meeting. The chairs were arranged in a circle that filled up quickly around us and stragglers had to drag new chairs over to form an outer ring. There were seven men and four women, most of them decades older than us. A bearded fiftysomething man wearing a faded denim vest greeted Pia warmly, as if they had met before, then he walked to a chair at the center that seemed designated for him.

“Thanks for coming everyone,” the bearded man said. He rolled up his sleeves and pulled a military dog tag out from beneath his shirt. “My name is Crow. Glad everyone found the place okay. I'm not big on email—because of the surveillance—so we will continue to rely on word-of-mouth for these meetings. Please do your part to let people know about them.”

Several people nodded. An elderly woman I recognized from the local ski shop adjusted the position of her chair across the room. Then she patted the hand of a young man to her left who could barely keep his puffy eyes open and I felt a pang of jealousy at his freedom to be so unabashedly stoned.

“We have a lot of ground to cover over the next few weeks,” Crow continued, “so we're going to dive right in tonight with a focus on energy. Later we'll get to water safety, food supply, communication technology and, finally, personal protection.”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Pia glance at me. This meeting didn't feel as though it was going to be about what she had led me to believe it was about. But what was it?

A middle-aged man in neat khakis and a plaid shirt cleared his throat. “Crow, what's your advice on solar? It's easier to set up than wind, but it's too unreliable if you're planning on unplugging from the grid.”

“Good question.” Crow nodded. “The key here is to maintain a hybrid system. Ideally that would mean wind, solar and hydro. But you have to tailor that plan to the available natural resources on your land. I know you've got very little wind in your woods, Ron, but you do have that creek, so maybe look into hydro to supplement solar.”

An obese woman to my right took frantic notes whenever Crow spoke. I leaned to my other side.

“What is this?” I whispered to Pia.

She pretended not to hear my question and instead jumped into the conversation that Crow and Ron were having. “What about gasifiers? I've been reading about that as a viable option,” she said.

What did Pia know about gasifiers? The lady to my other side craned to see who had asked the question.

“Such a good point, Pia,” Crow said a little too enthusiastically. “Wood gas is a great option. It can be loud and a bit dirty—and I can't speak to its legality around here—but if all hell breaks loose, that's going to be the least of your problems.”

A round of nods ensued. The stoned guy smirked in apparent response to Crow's disdain for the law. What the hell was this, I wondered again. How did they know Pia?

“
When
all hell breaks loose,” a crouched older man corrected. He looked like Crow would in twenty more years. “And when hell breaks loose, it will be the preppers who survive.”

Preppers. I'd read a
New Yorker
piece about them several months before. These weren't concerned locals who needed advice on how to water-seal their windows. These were deranged weirdos fixated on the apocalypse. As I understood it, they were people like Crow whose minds hadn't recovered from the damage of earlier wars, and antigovernment recluses who trusted no one, and angry bigots who relished the idea of a race war and religious fanatics who thought God was coming to punish the unsaved urban intellectuals. I wasn't one of these people and neither was my wife.

A ten-minute discussion about superior brands of rechargeable batteries ensued (a “no-brainer”), and then we broke for coffee in small disposable cups. I was annoyed and itching to leave.

“Polystyrene cups,” I sneered to Pia. “It's almost quaint in its inappropriateness.”

She didn't laugh but sighed instead. “I should have known you wouldn't get this. You're too conventional for this kind of thing. I shouldn't have asked you to come.”

She was disappointed by my reaction, which I felt bad about, but her disappointment was mean, too. It was a new tone. All of a sudden, I didn't want to accommodate her.

“Let's get out of here,” I said. “This is pretty extreme. Can't we just buy a how-to book or something?”

She shook her head in apparent exasperation with my naïveté.

“Let's reconvene, people!” Crow shouted with a few claps.

I felt myself being shuffled back to my chair between Pia and the note taker.

“Before we move on to the next topic,” Crow started, “I'd like to say a few things about our little group and...society.”

He leaned into the last word and looked around, as if he was using a code that everyone in the room would recognize.

Crow went on, “At times like these—when we're lookin' straight into the eye of disaster—authoritarians will try to wrestle control from the people. Governments and power keepers will do their best to make the public frightened and submissive. They will take away the people's will and make them think they gave it up freely. What we're doing here isn't just helping each other prepare for a life of self-reliance—we're thinking for ourselves and protecting our free will. Let's all just keep that in mind.”

Several people nodded their heads, and I noticed the oldest man purse his lips together, angry at the sheer mention of our authoritarian government.

“This isn't my scene,” I whispered to Pia. “You can stay as long as you want, but I gotta get out of here.”

Wishing that I had made my exit before everyone sat back down, I took a few moments to plan a graceful departure. Finally, I forced a fake cough and walked out quickly to tend to my phony problem. I knew it was a bratty move and that Pia would be angry, but it seemed too late to avoid that now. We didn't fight often, but once a disagreement was sparked, its natural life cycle involved several childish acts by each of us, followed by a passionate recovery. It seemed a worthwhile price for leaving the prepper meeting.

I walked up a flight of stairs and through the front doors of the old building. A blast of cool, dark air hit my face as I peered down Isole's Main Street, relieved to be outside and alone. I was a five-minute walk from the cluster of downtown establishments that comprised most of our local commerce. The Blue Frog. That was where I would go, I decided. The Blue Frog was a newish bar that catered to people just like me. It had a sophisticated microbrew list, locally sourced chili, and, on most nights of the week, you could find someone singing folk or bluegrass in the corner.

As I walked down the dark street, the only other person I encountered was a shopkeeper locking his bookstore for the night. We exchanged a nod and I noticed that he was roughly my age. Seeing anyone from my own demographic living and working in Isole always puzzled me. How does a thirtysomething guy come to own a bookstore in a small mountain town? This stranger was a reminder that paths other than the one I had taken after college existed. It would never have occurred to me as a younger man to live in my home state and pursue something as parochial as running a small business there. But seeing it now, I wondered if there was any more perfect life than this guy's.