We Are Unprepared

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.

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.