We Are Unprepared
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“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.
With puberty and the new concerns of young adulthood, my commitment to that mission waned and I eventually left the woods. I went inside. I didn’t think much about that departure at the time, but I’ve come to realize that it came at a cost. The sense of purpose and belonging I’d had in those woods hadn’t been replaced by anything in adulthood.
Pia had her head resting in my lap as we swung back and forth on the bench watching the sun set. It was warm again and there was no evidence of the surprise hailstorm that had barged through earlier that day.
“This isn’t what September is supposed to look like,” I said, shaking my head. I was comfortable with her there in my arms, but unable to relax entirely.
“But this is lovely,” Pia said with her eyes closed. Beauty, she believed, had inherent value. “Remind me what September in Vermont is supposed to look like.”
I swatted a mosquito from her forehead and thought for a moment.
“I don’t know... Colder, quieter... The wind should be louder than the bugs and animals. Do you know that some years on Halloween, we would have to trick-or-treat in the snow? That’s only a few weeks away.”
Pia opened her eyes and touched my face. “I don’t think that’s going to happen ever again, my love. It’s sad, really. Lots of things are going to be different for our kids.”
It was a surprisingly dour observation considering Pia’s recent obsession with having children. But I didn’t know then that her attention had already shifted away from those hopeful plans.
THREE
“SURFACE WATERS ARE expected to reach eighty-two degrees—maybe even higher—sometime in November. We will also see warm, moist air traveling up the Gulf Coast and very low wind shear.”
A familiar NPR storm reporter’s voice issued from my desk radio as I stared at the computer screen, attempting to work. It was only a few days since news of The Storms broke and the first day since we moved to Vermont that I deviated from my morning work routine. Normally, I woke up around seven, drank one cup of coffee at the kitchen table with Pia, who was less enthusiastic about mornings, and brought a second cup back upstairs at eight, where I posted up at a large antique desk in our airy bedroom. From my desk chair I could see the backyard over the top of my computer screen and a banged-up thermometer that had been nailed outside the window by a previous owner. If I worked until two—including breaks for more coffee and lunch—I could get more client work done than I ever did in the office. My colleagues back in Manhattan seemed satisfied with the arrangement, so I was careful not to abuse it.
But on that day I couldn’t sit still or will myself to turn off the radio. I was already on my third cup of coffee, which was bad pacing. “It could start with a series of nor’easters this winter, each moving up from the southeast and hitting inbound arctic systems from the northwest,” the deep radio voice continued. “Everyone from Chicago down to DC and as far north as Maine can expect several feet of total accumulations and high, damaging winds at various times. Those storms alone will be costly and dangerous. But there’s another possible scenario that would be worse. The frequency and intensity of this year’s hurricane projection makes it likely that a tropical storm caused by the record-breaking ocean temperatures will be gathering around the same time as these snowstorms. Because the water temperatures are higher than we’ve ever seen, we don’t quite know how large any one of these hurricanes might get, but we know they could be enormous. If the arctic air coming in from Canada and the Midwest collides with this warmer air from the Atlantic and the Gulf, we will face the ‘frankenstorm’ effect that we saw back in 2012. But in this case, that cold air will be moving faster and covering more of the US than we’ve ever seen before. Here, again, we’re in uncharted territory.
“There are so many variables that could determine this winter storm season, but given what we know, it’s wise to assume that the eastern side of the US is looking at several hundred square miles of direct contact with at least one massive hurricane and several blizzards, with accompanying flooding and broad wind damage. I’m not even sure hurricane and blizzard are adequate terms for what could happen here. If any of these storms are as large as the most pessimistic forecast models project, it won’t matter if you’re in their direct paths because wind and flooding in surrounding regions from storms of this size can be just as damaging as what occurs in the path itself.
“Even in the most optimistic scenario, forecasters are expecting tens of billions of dollars in losses to the US economy and our basic infrastructure. The worst-case scenario is almost unthinkable at this point.”
I heard the car door slam outside as Pia drove off in search of groceries and probably a hidden antiques shop or two. She was better with a job, we both knew that, but her motivation to find one seemed to have diminished in recent weeks. As someone who believed in routines, I wanted badly for her to find somewhere to go each day or something to do. She was good about leaving me alone while I worked, though I knew it was hard for her to fill the time. She ran errands and took books out from the library. At the start, she’d spent hours researching possible job leads in area arts organizations, but that wasn’t happening anymore. We had enough in savings, for now, as a result of my buyout from the firm, but my income wasn’t as high as it used to be and it wasn’t a sustainable financial arrangement. She would need to find at least a part-time job by spring if we were to stay afloat. Still, I liked the companionship, hearing her putter around the house planting things and cooking things as the spirit moved her. It felt more like playing house than actual domesticity, as if we were putting on an ironic performance instead of careening toward an inevitable financially precarious rut. Every few days, Pia would find a recipe that inspired her and dance around the kitchen for a few hours until something delicious emerged. Or she would decide that we needed a new accent table and spend the whole afternoon browsing quirky local shops. But we were really only playing; there was no consistency or order to it. Dinner was often organic frozen pizza, and dust gathered in the corners of our beloved home at an alarming rate. We hadn’t been playing house long enough to get the act down.
I spent the first hour of my workday looking past my computer screen through the dirty window that framed our backyard. The browning grass was about six inches tall and peppered with old dandelions. Lady ferns spanned the perimeter of the lawn, claiming more of it all the time. I thought I saw the vibrant blue of a closed gentian flower, a comforting sign that autumn was close and nature’s clock wasn’t entirely out of whack. This day didn’t look like the previous one. Darker clouds had moved in and parked right above us, as if daylight had never quite arrived. The thermometer said sixty-eight, so it was moving in the right direction, but still too slowly.
August emerged with a soccer ball from the path in the woods that connected our homes and I watched his little body dribble around imaginary opponents. It was just after eight, so he wouldn’t have to leave for school for another half hour. My stiff legs twitched at the sight of August’s weightless movement around the yard and couldn’t resist joining him. With a few brief words, we were passing the ball back and forth between us. His kicks were usually too far to one side or the other, so I spent a lot of the time chasing after the ball and dribbling back to the center of the yard. After a thoroughly aerobic kickabout, a wild shot to the left planted the ball into a dense blackberry bush.
“This one’s all you, buddy,” I said, but August was already parting the prickly branches.
I bounced on one foot and then the other, trying to revive the spring I remembered in my feet from youth soccer games.
“Hey, look at that.” August pointed to a patch of moist earth beneath him where a perfect footprint had been left by a small animal.
I leaned in. “A fox maybe? I don’t know...” I crouched down to get a closer look as August pulled himself out of the bramble and fastidiously cleaned the soccer ball with his hands.
“When I was a baby fox...” he started.
“What?”
“When I was a baby fox, I liked to run through these woods.”
When I was a baby fox. He wasn’t talking to me, exactly; just reminiscing to himself. He was in his own head now. He said things like this from time to time, weaving imaginative fantasies with the tangible present. It wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed worrisome, not to me anyhow. No, these were precious clues about who August was. This was a small, open door to a brilliant and busy interior life. A vibrant ray of light poured out that door, illuminating a slice of our backyard. I wanted to see more of it. Were all children this amazing and I’d just failed to see it before now, or was there something special about this dirty, neglected little boy who roamed these woods alone whenever he had a chance?
I knew that the neglect was in some part responsible for what made August extraordinary. He hadn’t been properly socialized. August was unschooled in the parameters of our adult reality. He was smart—above average at least—but like a baby, he still lived in a world in which you could hear colors and touch sounds and reach back to memories from lives lived before this one. The curtain between real and unreal hadn’t yet come down for August. I don’t know when it comes down for the rest of us, but tragically, it must be so early in our lives that we retain no recollection of the change. Or perhaps that’s an act of mercy committed by our brains because the memory of our former selves would leave us wanting forever. August was still that early self, unmolested by reason and order. I hoped for him to never change. Like a collectable figurine, I imagined boxing him up neatly and preserving him on a shelf. But of course, that impulse was in direct opposition to the conditions that enabled him to grow this way. He needed safety, but not captivity. How a parent maintains such a balance, I couldn’t imagine.
We kicked the ball back and forth for another ten minutes before August announced that he needed to catch the bus for school and disappeared into the path that connected our homes. I spent two more hours at my computer before calling it quits and heading out to the shed. I’d been making incremental progress on a maple coffee table for weeks and was itching to get back to work on it. It wasn’t real woodworking—I bought each of the raw pieces precut from the lumberyard—but the act of sanding and hammering and staining was no less satisfying. I had a compulsive need to drive each day forward with projects, tangible evidence of progress made. But more than other hobbies I’d flirted with over the years, making furniture felt like the best fit. To be dirty, scraped and physically tired—these were admirable male traits to me. As a child, I most loved my father when he was building things. I can distinctly remember the smell of his sweat mixed with sawdust and the way his thinning T-shirts clung to his skin. Even after years spent in Brooklyn, living among the overeducated creative class, that was what truly stirred admiration in me. It was self-improvement by hammer, and I nearly believed I was building a better version of myself with each swing.
I moved a hand plane slowly back and forth along the underside of the tabletop and thought about August in that small dark house. He was the only child of two reclusive, spaced-out aging hippies. The father never seemed to leave the house and the mother was a part-time cashier at the yarn shop downtown. They were poor, but not hungry. What worried me was their absence from August’s life, his unfettered freedom to roam and their apparent disinterest in his whereabouts. There was something going on inside that run-down little house that wasn’t right, but I hadn’t put my finger on it yet.
Swish, swish, swish. The plane moved rhythmically with me until it felt like a part of my own hand and the texture of the smoothing wood passed right through it to my fingertips. I thought about August, the dimming woods behind our house and the enormous changes our lives had undergone in just a few short months.
I must have been out there for several hours because I didn’t notice how cool the air had gotten until Pia’s voice shook me out of my trance.
“What are you still doing out here, Ash?”
She stood in the doorway of the shed, her keys dangling in one hand and a cloth shopping bag in the other.
“I’m working on the legs to this table. Come take a look. It’s really coming together. I need advice on the finish.”
I suspected that she wasn’t interested in the finish. It was getting dark out, though I guessed it was only about one in the afternoon.
“We need to go inside and start preparing,” Pia said, slightly agitated. “Have you looked at the sky? Those snowstorms are coming. This isn’t a joke.”
Behind Pia’s silhouette in the doorway, I could see charcoal clouds moving in. I hadn’t noticed the weather change from dim to ominous in the time I’d been working, but something had indeed shifted. Anyhow, I was tired and happy to have her back, so I followed Pia inside to the kitchen table, where she unpacked the contents of her shopping bag. I mentioned that the nor’easters weren’t expected for another month or so, but she pretended not to hear me.
“Heirloom seeds are the way to go here,” Pia said as if I’d asked. She pulled handfuls of small paper seed envelopes out of a cloth bag and stacked them on the kitchen table. “Hybrid and GMO seeds are going to be useless in the future because they aren’t stable, or can’t be stored, or something. Apparently, we have to have heirloom.”
She was lining the seed envelopes up in rows, according to variety.
“I have black turtle bean, snowball cauliflower, green sprouting broccoli, champion radish, golden acre cabbage,” she went on. “Plus I got these moisture-sealed containers, which will protect seeds in even subzero temperatures.”
Pia pointed to a cloth shopping bag on the floor that held small hard boxes one might take on an underwater expedition. She stopped to take inventory of her purchases, her finger nervously tapping a bag of radish seeds.
“Wow, you’re not kidding about these disaster preparations!” I laughed, assuming she’d appreciate the humor in it all, but she didn’t laugh back, so I stopped. “Pia, do you really think our food supply is going to disappear because of a big storm? In the United States?”
She looked up at me, frustrated. “Maybe not right away, but eventually, yes, it could. Ash, you know you have an almost fanatical trust in the system—our government, capitalism, whatever. It’s possible that our civilized society is only a few bad storms away from chaos, you know?”
Her humorlessness was a surprise to me, but I got the message: take this seriously. I didn’t have any reason to fight with her about it, so I shrugged and walked to the refrigerator to take stock of its sad contents. Should it matter that she was going a little overboard with this disaster planning, I wondered. What was the harm in being prepared? It irked me that she couldn’t laugh about it as we had in previous days. But, whatever. The refrigerator housed a slimy bag of scallions, separating cream in a precious glass bottle and a growler of lager. My stomach fluttered.
“Okay, I have no problem with all this, Pia, but don’t make this about me.” It came out meaner than I intended.
“It is about you,” she said. “It’s about you and me and our life here in the woods. Will you help me get ready for these storms or not?”
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.