We Are Unprepared

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 The kitchen was bright and airy with shiny outdated appliances and plenty of counter space.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.

As I approached the door of the Blue Frog, I saw a large group of people five years younger than me laughing around a rustic wood table, and I became suddenly aware of my aloneness. Normally, I wouldn’t mind having a beer on my own, but I wasn’t up for it at that moment, so I kept walking. When I got to Polly’s, the darker, sadder townie bar several doors down, I opened the door.

Polly’s smelled like old cigarettes and my feet felt sticky on the worn carpet as I stepped to the bar. There was one other patron in the room—a large, red-faced man at the far end of the bar who was busy circling things in the classified newspaper pages before him.

“What can I getcha?” a petite, female bartender asked me as I took a stool. “We have draft Bud. Everything else is cans and bottles.”

She wore a tiny cropped shirt that appeared to be constructed of macramé over a denim miniskirt. It was distracting how much of her body I could see and I was grateful for the curtain of dark hair that hung behind her. How old could she have possibly been—twenty-two, maybe? I couldn’t tell.

“Budweiser is fine, thanks,” I said. “Are you guys always this quiet on Tuesdays?” I couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say than that.

“Yep, until the preppers let out. Then we get another wave.”

I tried to look casual in my curiosity. “Oh right, the preppers. So what’s the deal with them anyway?”

She handed me my beer and started drying glass mugs, one hip gently leaning against the sink in front of her.

“They’re freaks,” she said matter-of-factly. “I get some weirdos in here, you know? But these guys are, like, totally paranoid. And they never shut up about it. They come in here all fired up after their meetings and lecture me about how I need some kind of bunker for when the end of the world comes. I tell them, if the apocalypse comes, I’m not sticking around this shitty world anyhow.”

“Yeah, they sound really weird.” I nodded into my beer.

She stopped drying mugs for a moment and looked up at me. “So what’s your deal? You’re not our usual type. You hiding from a girlfriend or something?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“That’s what I figured. Not like it’s such a genius guess—most guys are doing that. But you’re more of a Frog type,” she said, referring to my original destination. “I bet you guys live up the hill in an old house, and you’ve got a little organic garden and some nice wine in your basement. What’s wrong with your life that you gotta hide? Sounds nice to me. Did you cheat?”

It was embarrassing and somehow emasculating to be summed up so neatly by this tough little girl.

“No, I didn’t cheat. And we hardly have any nice wine at all!”

I smiled and she tossed her head back to laugh. This was the first time I had spoken with anyone other than Pia in days and the conversation was refreshing.

“I just needed some air, I guess,” I said, sipping my beer.

“That’s what everyone says when things are going bad.”

“Oh, no, things aren’t bad. I wouldn’t say that. Just not good tonight.”

“Sounds like the same thing to me, but what the hell do I know?” she said. “I’ve been living in this town my whole life.”

“I love it here.”

“Sure, because you don’t have to be here,” the bartender said as she dried one mug after another with great efficiency. “I wouldn’t even care if I was in another shitty town, you know? It just wouldn’t be the one I grew up in. That’s the difference.”

I was sure that I didn’t know what she meant, but I nodded my head like our problems were all about the same.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “I got a friend who runs a fancy bar on Martha’s Vineyard, and as soon as I have enough savings, I’m going to meet her there. I figure it will be like a working vacation.”

She walked away to check on the other guy and I puzzled over the idea that someone could be stuck, financially marooned in our town. This was a side of Isole I hadn’t experienced much of since moving there: the real locals. There are pockets of immense wealth and worldliness in northern Vermont, but the state wasn’t built on those people; they’re just interlopers in its history. At its core, Vermont is defined by tough, industrious people who live modestly and know the land intimately, even if they no longer make their living from it. They prize independence and privacy over any allegiance to a nation or political identity, and they resent the ceaseless push by outsiders to transform the state to a socialist utopia. (I knew such generalizations made me seem like a patronizing asshole, but the locals had their own generalizations for me, too; it was how we made sense of our cohabitation.) Pia’s prepper meeting was a funny mix of the old and new Vermont, I realized, though it wasn’t a flattering light for either camp.

The clock above the bar struck eight, so I paid and thanked the bartender for her wisdom, which sounded stupid as soon as I said it out loud. I just wanted to get out of there before the prepper meeting ended, and Pia and her new friends made their way to Polly’s. It seemed important that this nameless bartender never find out that I had been at that meeting. Plus I was concerned about how angry Pia might be.

I walked back in the cool air and waited in the car as people streamed out of the Elks Club and said their goodbyes. Some were laughing as they emerged, but there was a seriousness to the whole enterprise. That was perhaps the part that bothered me the most. On its own, preparing for disaster was inarguably a wise thing to do. And if Pia hadn’t dragged me to that meeting, I would probably have regarded those people as nonthreatening curiosities. But Pia was always searching for religion. When she was a vegan, she emptied our fridge of all my favorite foods; and when she was a performance artist, she announced that she needed to be surrounded exclusively by creative people; and when she was a political activist, she accused her parents of being fascists.

Then there was the time that she actually did find religion, when she decided that we should be Buddhists. It involved a lot of Tibetan prayer flags in our apartment and mercifully little else. Her zeal was always genuine, but she lacked the conviction to see any of it through. And, inevitably, her avocations failed to deliver on whatever promise she thought they held. I regarded all of these phases as the hobbies of a passionate artist seeking purpose. They gave her focus, briefly, and a frenzied sort of pleasure. It wasn’t a placid existence, but it was interesting.

This particular hobby, though, seemed more morbid. Her new friends weren’t the ethereal waifs she used to bring home from tantric yoga class. (Weirdos are always harder to spot when they’re bendy and beautiful.) No, this was darker and stranger. And maybe I knew it appealed to something frightened inside her, a part of her that I never fully understood. I wanted to believe this was out of character, but somewhere in my brain I knew that wasn’t true.

The passenger door opened violently.

“We can go now. Are you happy?” Pia said, dropping into her seat like a child.

I looked at her in disbelief. “No, I’m not happy at all, Pia. I’m annoyed and a little freaked-out about the meeting you just tricked me into. What was that about?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “It was about seeing the truth, Ash.”

And with that, our fight was under way. I didn’t bother trying to reason or even argue; I just drove and let her fume. She pinned her hair up and took it down again, making the faintest huffing sounds to herself. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an argument. My plan was to just get home, open a bottle of wine and, after she’d consumed most of it alone on the couch, feel her groggily fall into bed beside me. That was how it was supposed to go.

But when we got home, Pia wasn’t interested in wine or the couch. She sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out her little book of lists and nonsense. The handwriting was wild—alternately big and sharp and then small and controlled. She was making notes in the margins in a tiny new cursive style.

“You can go to bed, or do whatever you do,” Pia said without looking up.

Whatever I did wasn’t such a mystery, really. Unlike my wife, I was predictable, boring even. When it was warm outside, I would drink one or two Otter Creek Ales on the porch with a book until I got tired enough to pad upstairs to our bedroom. Pia would join me outside sometimes and we’d talk about all our plans for life in Vermont. And on the rare night of marital discord, we would just give each other space to ride out our anger privately. It was comforting to know that the parameters of our conflict had been set.

What I wanted to do at that moment was storm into another room and watch cable television loudly, but that wasn’t an option. I missed ESPN and the foggy passivity that only mindless TV can enable. But Pia said that it would be “counterproductive” for us to get cable in our Vermont life. And, even though we had it in Brooklyn, thanks to a spliced wire from a neighbor, she felt that we didn’t really have it have it. We didn’t pay for it and, most important, we had an Argentinean tapestry draped over the shameful box when it wasn’t in use—like it didn’t exist at all! This always struck me as comically pretentious, but in truth, I’d adopted enough of these pretensions by then to go along with her. So the tapestry and its dirty secret followed us to Vermont, but our only option on that night was fuzzy network news.

I decided instead to sit on the porch with a wool blanket and a book about bird migrations of North America. The temperature had cooled to the low sixties, finally, but the sounds of summer weren’t completely gone yet, which was disorienting. I could hear the unmistakable call of an American bullfrog—a rare treat anytime, but unheard of in late September. When we were little, my older sister and I used to go for walks down our dirt road in bare feet, collecting any living thing we could find in buckets. It was red salamanders mostly, sometimes dozens if we went out on the right day, but wood frogs and bullfrogs on occasion, too. They were hard to contain, so if one of us was lucky enough to capture a bullfrog, we’d stop everything to consult my pocket guide to amphibians before letting the terrified thing go again. I thought about digging around for that old book, but instead I rocked on the porch swing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

FOUR

“ASH, OPEN UP!” Bang, bang, bang. “Are you in there, Ash?”

I pushed my laptop aside and jumped off the couch for the front door. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was August’s mother standing before me. She wore a knitted red cap over long gray hair and a terrified look in her eyes. This was the closest I had ever been to her and I could smell something on her that reminded me of dorm-room incense.

“August is missing!” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

My stomach jumped as I worked to take in the scene before me. It was late afternoon on a cool, windy day. August’s father stood a few steps behind the mother. I couldn’t remember either of their names, so I wasn’t sure how to address them. He was thinner and sadder, but they could have been siblings, they looked so much alike to me.

“No, I don’t,” I sputtered. “How long has he been gone? Wait, let me get my shoes.”

I stepped outside again with sneakers and a light jacket. This time I noticed a short, round, middle-aged woman with a nice face standing in the driveway. Despite the cool air, she wore a large T-shirt with a picture of an amusement park on it. She was moving her cell phone around, trying to find a signal. I had a hard time focusing on the scene before me as panic took hold of my body. Pia had left early that morning, still angry about our fight the night before, and I wished that she was there with me.