We Are Unprepared (21 page)

I felt prematurely embarrassed about having to tell the Subcommittee that we'd lost Crow. They would be devastated. What would this mean for the town when the next big storm did eventually hit? I sat and stewed for another ten minutes while the group continued to discuss their guiding purpose or lack thereof. Finally, Crow called for a break and everyone migrated toward a folding table that held coffee carafes and store-bought doughnuts.

I walked straight up to Crow, who was standing in the now-empty circle of chairs, talking to Professor Brownstein.

“What the hell, man? I thought you were going to consider it,” I said, louder than I had intended.

The professor excused himself for coffee.

Crow cleared his throat but said nothing. He looked sheepish.

“You're really putting the town at risk by taking this position,” I went on. “It's not just about you.”

Crow shook his head. “I can't do it. It might make sense in this particular situation, but it opens the door to bigger compromises down the road. It's important that I take a stand. I've got an example to set.” He looked around the room at the attendees who were chatting genially.

Crow thinks he's the goddamn savior of these weirdos, I thought to myself. It seemed incongruous that a group defined by its desire to separate from society should be unified on any issue or led by any oddly charismatic individual. They were supposed to be loners.

“This is a huge disappointment,” I said. I was running out of ideas for where to take the conversation.

“I'm sorry.” Crow did seem genuinely sorry. He opened the palms of his hands in a gesture of surrender, but of course, he had won.

I shook my head and delivered a stern look that was intended to convey my deep disappointment, from which I suspect he recovered quickly. There was nothing left for me there, so I walked through the crowd and out the back door. I saw August's parents on my way out and avoided eye contact.

As I drove home in Peg's car, my anger grew, thinking about how selfish Crow and his cohorts were being. It seemed impossible to me that seemingly intelligent people could willfully put the rest of the community in danger. It was contrary to everything I believed about Isole. I knew it was The Storm—fearful people were clinging to what was theirs—but that didn't excuse it. And The Storm was off, indefinitely postponed by Mother Nature, so why did it still have a hold on people?

The strangest thing of all was how closely the preppers flirted with rationality. For most of that meeting, the discussion careened back and forth between reasonable information and total paranoia. I felt myself agreeing with them more often than I was comfortable. They were
this close
to being the smartest people in Isole.

Peg answered the door with a hopeful grin. “So?”

“It's not happening,” I said, handing her the car keys.

Her face dropped, but she nodded as if she had expected that outcome.

“He's just not going to budge.” I put my hands up. “I tried, Peg. I'm so sorry. I don't know what's wrong with these people.”

“I know it's frustrating, but I believe that you did your best. Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?”

I shook my head. “No, I'm not feeling social anymore tonight. Thanks, though.”

I walked down the porch steps, toward the dark road.

“Ash,” she said as I walked away, “unfortunately, sometimes people just need to see the damage to believe it. It's not your fault.”

I nodded and began my walk home in the dark woods. After a long shower and a neat bourbon, I curled up in bed with the latest
National Geographic
. I was trying to read an article about displaced bears on the other side of the world, but my mind kept drifting back to the lecture I'd heard at the prepper meeting. The professor was urging us to learn from the past. Americans have faced hardships before and successive generations have learned from them. Life goes on, people make babies and those babies are a little smarter than their parents had been.
Voilà: the human race evolves.
That was what Pia had said to me years ago as we sat on the living room floor, pledging to live a not-bad life. It's the most optimistic of ideas, the belief that the world is always improving incrementally. But in recent months, Pia had abandoned that optimism. She came to believe that the mistakes we'd made on this earth—and
to
this earth—were beyond redemption. Future generations can't fix it and shouldn't be asked to endure it.

I didn't know what I believed. I was discouraged, but not yet ready to give up hope for the human race. I thought about calling Pia; instead, I fell asleep.

NINETEEN

UPON INVITATION FROM
the town, spring arrived early for the Isole Festival. It was fifty-three degrees outside, but a warmish fifty-three of the sort that beckons short-sleeve shirts, Frisbee tosses and girls in flowy, shapeless dresses with bare legs and free breasts beneath. (Fifty-three on the latter side of winter always feels so different from autumn's blustery fifty-three.) While technically a winter celebration, no one objected to the unseasonable and unabashedly cheerful weather. The tyranny of The Storm's threat had been lifted and we were positively giddy.

At most, we would see another round of rain and flooding the following day, but that was probably going to be the extent of it. The possibility of a superstorm was still present in the weather forecasts, but I was among those who chose not to hear it. All I heard was hope.

I had spent my week of solitude leading up to the festival reclaiming my home and righting the parts of my life that had fallen out of balance. I had worked hard, first on the clients I had been neglecting and then on the design for an Isole Festival logo. Making good on both of those promises felt right and created a pleasurable momentum inside me. When I was done with those tasks, I cleaned. I straightened and swept and vacuumed and mopped. I washed sheets and scrubbed dishes. Even the worm smell was improved with the open windows and cool breeze. It was hard not to indulge my anger at Crow for refusing to listen to reason, or at Pia for helping to leave the house in such squalor.

But when I was through, I was too pleased to be angry with anyone. The house looked like ours—the one we had fallen in love with when we first visited Isole and decided it would be our home. Light streamed in through the old windowpanes and illuminated the historic wide-board floors. I especially loved how the kitchen appliances, which were unintentionally retro because we didn't have the money to replace them, gleamed in chrome and white. Everything around me seemed animate again. Even the maple tree that grew right outside the kitchen window was blossoming, pushing its fertile green buds against the glass. (It was months away from the proper growing season, but who could argue with those buds.) All of this had dulled in the months before under the suffocating effects of the dark rains and growing marital discord. To see everything glistening again reawakened an irrational hope inside of me that life with Pia could still unfold as I once imagined it. Second chances abounded. We spoke once while she was away; the conversation was short and polite enough to leave room for possibility.

Peg dropped me off at the festival early Saturday morning and I was happy to be there. The base camp was a large village green at the foot of Main Street, where the parade was scheduled to deposit all the revelers. I was proud of the art I had created for the festival and had offered to help lead the team of volunteers who were tasked with hanging it all. The design was unlike my usual work—uncomplicated and exuberant as our mood. The basic logo, which appeared on everything, was of a sun rising behind Isole's distinct eastern mountain ridge. Bright rays shot out and projecting from the tip of each ray was a twinkling letter, which together spelled
Isole
in a perfect arc overhead. The ridge itself was spotted in snow, which I intended to portray the transition from winter to spring, but could have just as easily been interpreted as the perpetual state of seasonal ambivalence we lived in then. It was artfully executed but simple. A child could have conceived of it.

“I didn't know you had this in you,” Peg had said over the phone when I sent her an early draft. She laughed a little and told me she liked it, which I took as a compliment and my signal to stop tinkering. “You love it here, Ash,” she concluded.

I was immensely proud to have my design displayed around Isole that day. It was on signs, bandannas, tote bags—whatever we could have printed quickly at the last minute. Locals can still be spotted wearing old T-shirts from that festival or drinking from chipped coffee mugs with the image. That design made me an inextricable part of Isole's fabric.

“Raise it a little on the left and then—right there, that's perfect!” I yelled to a young female volunteer with pink hair at the top of a stepladder. We were securing the last of the signage, a grand banner that arched over the entrance to the village green. It was just us and the vendors setting up, but soon the place would be packed.

I wandered around, feeling a sense of ownership over the event. A space where kids could pet cows, horses and llamas from local farms was set up next to a crafting area where tables stood and all things knitted and felted were for sale. Beyond that, a table of local Vermont cheeses were available for sampling. And at the far end of the green, a folk band unpacked their van beside the beer tent. It was indescribably wholesome, but only “country” in that way that appeals to Northeastern sophisticates: a kind of staged country experience, rural but not provincial. There was political art to be purchased and green energy petitions to be signed and macrobiotic food to be eaten. To be sure, the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
could be found at select gas stations nearby. Isole's brand of “country” was marketable and safe to the urban tourist.

I missed Pia, but I felt relieved that she wasn't there for the festival. She would have loved the scene and the retelling of it to our old friends in the city, but it seemed as if she had grown incapable of truly enjoying anything by then. Without her, I was unencumbered and free to immerse myself in the experience. I had gone to so many events like this in my childhood and was excited to reacquaint myself with a beloved old feeling.

I could hear the cowbells—rung by a team of first-graders at the head of the parade as they turned the corner toward the green. I wanted to catch the end of the parade and the scene on Main Street, so I ran toward the commotion and found an empty space beside a row of families with strollers. The street was lined thick with people, waiting for the procession that grew louder as it neared. First came the high school band. That was followed by a group of adults wearing elfin costumes and bells around their ankles, dancing to lute music. Our lone fire truck rolled slowly by with Salty at the wheel, waving like a seasoned politician, and Isole's hockey team walked alongside in their jerseys. Prepubescent ballerinas from the dance school threw candy from the next float, followed by the members of the local Democratic Party office and the slightly more rumpled Progressive Party office staff behind them.

Parades aren't a representative sample of any town, and certainly not Isole. Neither the methadone clinic at the edge of town nor the Veterans Affairs office that had been all but forgotten by the federal government were represented. The local dog shelter had a float, but not the battered women's shelter that sat next to it along the highway. I don't know why I thought of this as the contra dancers spun past—maybe it was what Crazy Roger had said to me by the side of the police car about this place not being so nice after all. It was incongruous with my life, but I knew he wasn't wrong.

The onlookers were a handsome mix of pink-cheeked local families and well-dressed tourists from Connecticut, New York and Montreal. A woman snapping pictures beside me had the thin, taut severity of a Manhattan resident. Her husband stole regular glances at the stock ticker that scrolled across the phone in his hand. I imagined that they had a second home in Manchester or Stowe. The Isole Festival would be one of their annual trips. She would buy cheeses and a handmade cutting board in the shape of a cow and they would drive back to the city calmer, but relieved to return to their luxurious life.

My attention to the onlookers was broken when a loud voice sang out from the parade line: “There's still time, Isole! Let's come together in hope and faith while there's still time!”

It was Rodney Riggins. He was yelling into a megaphone from the back of the same monster truck that facilitated his last grand entrance at the high school parking lot. The truck was waxed and sparkling this time and Riggins wore a spiffy new flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows.

“Our prayers have bought us time—let's use that time wisely, Isole!”

It was a convenient adaptation in message: Riggins's followers had thwarted the superstorm through prayer, but his services were needed more than ever now. Brilliant.

Most of the spectators smiled politely, unaware of who Rodney Riggins was, but small pockets of watchers cheered in solidarity. It wasn't the place for jeers, but I could see plenty of dissenters in the crowd, too. As the truck rolled by and Riggins scanned the faces looking up at him, we locked eyes for the briefest moment, and I thought I saw him smirk a little, taunting me.

Riggins had been visibly active in Isole throughout the week, organizing prayer sessions in outdoor parks and handing out flyers downtown. He never was allowed to use the high school for one of his talks, but that only strengthened the resolve of his followers to work harder to get the word of God/Riggins out. They were a small antagonistic group and an awkward fit for a culture organically wary of overt religiosity. The unofficial strategy of Riggins-doubters like myself was to wait it out. Riggins was there to capitalize on The Storm's threat, so once that was gone, we expected he would disappear, too. For now, most of the locals just avoided him on the street and averted their eyes when his disciples made a scene.

“Don't give him another thought,” a voice said nearby.

I spun around to see Maggie grinning behind me while she wrestled with a large shaggy dog on a leash that I assumed to be Badger. She looked characteristically casual in a purple sweatshirt and snug jeans that hugged her impressive legs. Her long strawberry hair fell everywhere as she straddled the enormous dog.

“Hi!” I said with unabashed enthusiasm. “Do you need some help?”

“Uh, maybe,” she said as Badger attempted to chase an alpaca parading down Main Street. “This was a terrible idea. I'm in denial about what a bad dog he is.”

I grabbed Badger's collar and held it firmly until he relaxed a little. “Nah, he's just enthusiastic.”

Maggie laughed and organized her wild hair into a twist to one side. “Are you busy? I'm starving. Let's get a falafel wrap before the green is too crowded.”

The idea of getting falafels with Maggie sounded perfect, but I worked to keep my eagerness in check. “Yeah, I think I'm off duty now. Let's do it.”

“Oh, were you working?” she asked.

“Yeah, actually, I designed the festival logo and all this stuff.”

I tried to sound casual as I waved my arm toward a cluster of balloons that bore my design.

“Oh wow, that's so cool! I will have to get a T-shirt.”

Her guileless support disarmed me. I wanted more of her and I wanted to be more like her.

We walked up Main Street, weaving through children and noisy groups of tourists with the excitable Badger, dropping thank-yous and sorrys along the way as necessary. The sun was high above us by then and it was starting to feel downright hot outside. Maggie handed me the leash so she could peel off her sweatshirt, revealing a taut, muscly torso in a faded gray T-shirt. I tried my best to take in as much of her body as I could in the flash of one glance. Everything about her seemed to spring forth with movement. I imagined that her muscle fibers were made of something different from the rest of us, a superhuman material that mortals weren't privy to.

Most of the parade spectators were migrating toward the green by then, which was filling up quickly. Badger and I followed Maggie's lead toward the falafel truck, but when we got there, the vendor told us that he wouldn't be set up for another hour. We decided to roam around for a while in the interest of wearing Badger out.

We started at the circus-arts tent, where children no older than August swung and dangled from ribbons suspended high above with astounding grace. I was hypnotized, but Badger lasted only as long as it took for a squirrel to bound by. We let him lead the way, sniffing horses and small children, eating fallen cider doughnuts and puddles of handcrafted soda. I couldn't have been happier. There were hundreds of smiling people around us, enjoying the incredible festival in our incredible town. And I was with incredible Maggie.

“I still can't believe you designed all of these,” Maggie said, looking up at an enormous banner above. “You're really talented, Ash.”

“It's not as impressive as shaping young minds,” I said. I tried to sound modest, but I enjoyed the compliment.

Maggie looked back down at Badger, who was gleefully shredding a popsicle stick. “What are we going to do with him?”

We.
I loved the sound of
we
. The Badger situation had become our problem to solve and we would need to really put our heads together about it. I considered my next move.

“I know!” Maggie said before I could speak. “Come this way.”

I followed her through the happy crowd until we got to the beer tent at the other end of the green. Mellow clusters of people laughed over microbrews and listened to the old white guys playing blues music nearby. Maggie tied Badger's leash to a fat metal tent pole and gestured toward a folding chair.

“Let's drink!” she said, as if there was no other option with her unruly animal.

I bought two draft Long Trail Ales and a bottle of water for Badger's bowl and we set up at a tipsy plastic table. With the dog tethered, we could relax and watch the party unfold before us. I was my most charming self as I made lighthearted jokes about the characters walking by. We still hadn't eaten and the warm wave that washed over me with each sip of beer felt calming. Maggie seemed as relaxed as me, maybe more so. She laughed easily, throwing her head back for my better jokes and running an absentminded hand through her soft hair. I was enamored with everything about her, but mostly her ability to be completely forthcoming and at the same time uninterested in talking about herself. Conversation wasn't a maze to navigate, but an effortless ride.