We Are Unprepared (25 page)

“Maybe this is all The Storm. Pia's anxious and I'm feeling alone. I know I still love her. When this is all over and everyone is themselves again, maybe we can start to repair things. I don't trust that I know what I want right now. You should probably forget that I said that thing about Maggie. It's not real.”

The wind howled outside and I was reminded that, with every additional minute I sat at Peg's table, my walk back home got more treacherous.

“Be careful about blaming everything on The Storm, Ash,” she said. “It's the catalyst for a lot of this malcontent, but it's not the cause. If there's something rotten in your marriage, it won't leave with The Storm. Fix things between you and Pia, or don't, but don't explain your problems away with The Storm. You're not that cowardly.”

It was alarming to hear the state of my relationship summarized so coldly, and embarrassing to be so transparent. I knew that everything she said was true, but I didn't have the energy for self-examination. The world was closing in on us and it wasn't clear that we would live through The Storm, let alone thrive on the other side. I didn't want to hear what Peg was saying, not then.

“I think all I have is survival right now,” I said with a tinge of anger in my voice. Peg should have known this. “I'll have to worry about becoming a courageous person later, if there is a later.”

“Yes, of course,” she said quickly, recognizing my hurt feelings.

The conversation was over, and I felt stupid for sitting there in front of Peg's vegetables in my long underwear all of a sudden, so I started to get up. As I did, she let out a sigh and I remembered the purpose for my visit.

I sat back down and looked across the table. “Peg, why were you outside earlier?”

“No reason, exactly. Taking it all in. Saying goodbye.”

“Goodbye to what?”

“To these woods,” she said. “There's a lot of loss ahead, Ash. Nothing is going to be like it was before. Your generation will experience the brunt of these changes. You'll see.”

It wasn't the answer I wanted. The sadness that I'd seen flashing behind Peg's eyes in recent weeks now seemed to weigh down her whole body.

“Peg, are you going to be okay here?”

She smiled slightly. “You mean, will I be okay all alone? Yes, I'll be okay. And thank you. This isn't the way I envisioned things unfolding, but I'll be okay.”

“Why
are
you alone?” I asked gently.

She took a deep breath and paused for a moment. “This may sound strange, but I've never felt alone in my life, not even recently. I've been in love twice, with wonderful men who made me very happy. Ultimately, they wanted things that I didn't need—marriage and children, primarily—and we parted both times, but I have only great memories of those relationships. I've had a very full life thanks to my travels and my studies and all the friends I've made along the way. Most of all, wherever I was, I felt loved and protected by the natural world. I know it sounds strange and maybe even antisocial, but that's the truth. The woods have been my greatest love.”

It was the kind of sentiment one might read in a book and laugh at it for its poetic naïveté, but Peg said it with such conviction that I didn't question her. She got something from nature that most of us could not, or would not, be open to receiving. It would have been fairer for her to have been born an animal, to live outside, without boundaries. She was wiser than most of us, but still not quite fit for this confined human life. Maybe, I considered for a fleeting moment, she
had
been one of those animals before, or would be in another life. All of a sudden, Peg's aloneness seemed bigger than my own.

“But these woods are changing.” I nodded quietly. I understood what she was telling me: the most consistent thread of her life was vanishing.

“Yes,” she said into the table. “Irreparably and permanently.”

I wanted to hug her and tell her that this was just one storm, that it would end, but I knew that wasn't true. This storm would change our world forever and, more important, so would every weather event—dramatic and subtle—that came after it. A transformation had been set into motion years before that was bigger than my optimism or Peg's love. There was nothing to say.

In the silence we listened to the dim crank-radio voice coming from the other room: “Most of the state of Vermont has lost electrical power at this time, with the remaining northern parts expected to go dark in the next few hours. Emergency management is warning everyone to shelter in place for now and avoid travel of any kind. If you are in immediate danger, 911 operators are working around the clock, but response vehicles are in high demand and emergency shelters are filling up quickly. A priority is being placed on people in buildings that have collapsed under fallen trees, anyone near exposed electrical wires and areas at a high risk for both flooding and hypothermia cases. I repeat—all others are encouraged to stay where they are and conserve heat. This is just the start of what is expected to be a very long and destructive weather event...”

“You should go,” Peg said.

I nodded and walked to the entryway to begin pulling on layers. Peg brought my wet gloves, hat, scarf and pants from the woodstove, which were hot, but still soggy. I dreaded going back outside, fighting through the sleet and then hunkering down with Pia and the worms. I wanted to stay there with Peg and eat roasted root vegetables for days.

Her phone rang while I was pulling on my mittens and Peg excused herself to answer it.

“Jesus!” I heard her say to the person on the line, but it sounded like “jay-sus” in her accent. She said it again and then something I couldn't hear and then hung up.

“August is missing,” Peg said from the doorway. “He sneaked out of his foster home and they can't find him. There's a search team out now. That was a social worker. She apparently tried you at home.”

“Oh my God, I gotta go,” I said.

Peg nodded. “Get home first. Don't do anything crazy.”

I yanked the door open to break through a layer of ice that had been forming around its perimeter, allowing a blast of wet air to spray inside. For a moment, I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be going or why I was standing there. Peg handed me my hat.
Get home, find August. Or do I go out looking for August now?
I had no idea where to start.

“Thank you, Peg. Good luck,” I said.

“You, too, Ash.” She gave my arm a little squeeze and then sealed the door behind me.

Visibility had somehow worsened and the ice balls falling from the sky were noticeably larger. They came down as if pitched by a furious god, aiming directly at the exposed patches of my face.

I stepped from Peg's porch into a foot of slush that was just the right mix of rain and ice to be more uncomfortable than either on their own. I couldn't think about the wet, numbing sensation that crept around my ankles and up my shins or the pain of my still-healing foot as I forced it to work. To consider any of the frightening variables around me would have made that short trip impossible. So I heaved one leg after the other, swinging my arms for momentum and pushing forward. Every few steps, I closed my eyes against the stinging ice-rain, which made it difficult to see even when they were open. “Don't stop, don't stop, keep walking,” I chanted. My thighs were burning from the sheer athleticism each step required and my heavy breaths were almost audible amid the howling wind.

How long could August survive in this, I wondered. Not long. Even in the screaming weather chaos around me, I had to fight to keep the frightening images of August alone in those woods out of my brain. Just get home and call the police to find out what's going on.

I had nothing to guide my steps but the faintest porch light coming from our house, which blurred into spots and danced away from me as my eyes—or my mind—lost focus. I knew I was roughly halfway there when my groin smashed into the fallen tree trunk I had climbed over earlier that night that crossed the path. It had a slick casing of ice around it by then and I realized our whole world was being enveloped in the same deadly cast.

I hoisted my weaker leg up and over the trunk, straddling it momentarily before putting all my weight down on the other side as I attempted to dismount. At that moment, my throbbing foot slipped on something beneath the slush, causing my knee to crumple and my entire body to fall on top of the useless limb. I put my arms out to prevent myself from submerging into the water entirely, which left my face exposed to a sharp branch that stabbed directly into my right cheek, just below the eye. The pain was acute, but the panic that burst from my heart and raced through my veins was worse. At first, I thought I had been blinded. I squeezed my eyes tight and imagined having to crawl the rest of the way, my face in the icy stew below. When I finally attempted to open each eye, blindness was ruled out, but my face was too numb to gauge what exactly had happened and how fast I might be losing blood.

I pulled myself up and forged on, each step more frantic and inefficient than the previous one. I had to get home before I died of hypothermia or blood loss or cardiac arrest—any of which seemed possible to my panicked mind. All of a sudden, I became aware of the countless branches and rocks that threatened to take me down, swarming forest tentacles, eager to pull me apart as punishment for doubting nature's absolute power.

My hat had come loose and was wet; cold wind screamed into one ear, which I didn't attempt to correct because I was afraid to use my hands for anything other than steadying myself and clearing a safe path. Pull up, step long, push down. I talked myself through each labored step in the slush, working to ignore the fatigue, the cold and the terrifying numbness that had now reached my upper thighs. It seemed impossible that everything hadn't frozen entirely, given the low temperatures, but the speed at which it all moved—in no discernible direction—must have allowed it to persist as a liquid.

Finally, my left boot hit something hard and, as I considered freaking the fuck out again, I realized it was the first step of our front porch. The light glowed in front of me and I could make out the handle of our front door. I crawled up the stairs on hands and knees, relieved to surrender to the pain, and banged on the door three times until it cracked just enough for Pia to peek through.

“Oh my God!”

She dragged my dripping body inside and began tugging off layers as my limbs went from numb to freezing, and then back to a burning numbness that felt permanent and frightening. Eventually, I was naked, drying on the floor in the entryway. Pia threw a blanket around me and we both massaged my moist, pink body to restore circulation. When I began to feel like a living human again, Pia ran to get her first-aid supplies to patch the shallow puncture wound and salve the aching bruises on my face.

“Have they found August?” I asked.

Pia nodded. “His parents have him. The cops just called. He walked all three miles back here a few hours ago—before it got really bad outside—so I guess they're going to just let him stay. They don't really have a choice at this point. Crazy.”

“Jesus.” I shook my head, intensely relieved to know that August was alive. It wasn't good that he would be trapped inside with his awful parents for the storm. But he was found, and that was good.

Pia didn't ask right away about how Peg was or what I'd done at her house or why I'd felt so strongly about going. As the primary initiator of erratic behavior in our family, those weren't questions that would have occurred to her. My guess was she didn't really care by then either. And I was back now, so she could play the role of doting nurse until her own obsessions forced their way between us again.

When finally I was clothed and wrapped in blankets, Pia and I sat together at two ends of the couch sipping tea again quietly. I appreciated her attentiveness at that moment. I didn't have to convince her of how terrified I'd been; it was all over my battered face. And it thrilled her more than a little.

I took a deep breath in and exhaled loudly, letting my head fall back onto a pillow.

“So,” she said, eyes wide. “Tell me everything.”

TWENTY-TWO

WE WOKE UP
the next morning to what sounded like an explosion in the guest room. I jumped out of bed and felt my numb toes hit our icy floors. The power had gone out hours before and, even with four blankets and a winter hat, we had been shivering for a long time. I ran to the next room and found that a fat branch of a large tree had gone straight through the boarded-up window, sending wet, shattered glass in every direction. Sleet was coming in at an alarming rate and the temperature in the room was just high enough to melt it into massive puddles on the hardwood floor.

“It's bad! Put some shoes on—we need to fix this
now
!” I yelled to the bedroom, but Pia was already behind me.

“I'll go get a tarp,” she said. “Let's just get the window covered.”

For someone who had had as many tumblers of cabernet as she had the night before, she was impressively alert. But of course, these were her moments to shine.

I pulled rain boots on over my woolly socks and ran downstairs to search for duct tape. There were several rolls of varying widths for me to choose from, duct tape being one of the more obvious items in the prepper's tool kit. We met back upstairs at the broken window; with the hard, stinging sleet blowing in our faces, we coordinated our actions to hold the tarp in place over the opening and tape it to the wall. We went around and around the perimeter of the tarp and then just stretched the tape vertically and horizontally across the window. I slid an empty dresser across the room to stand in front of the flimsy setup. The dresser only covered the bottom half, but it kept the tarp from billowing too violently.

“Should we try to clean up? Mop or sweep or something?” I asked, looking down at the glass shards submerged in water around our feet and splayed across the bed that no one ever used.

“What good would that do?” Pia spat, ending our collaborative moment.

We shut the door to the guest room and jammed towels in the crack between the floor and the door in an effort to contain the cold air that was pouring into the rest of the house. The entire episode had lasted only about five minutes, but we were both heaving with exhaustion. As we walked away from the door, we realized that there were still hours and hours of frigid, powerless daylight ahead together.

“Let's just make coffee,” I said, walking down the stairs.

The woodstove was cold to the touch as I threw split logs into its belly and fired it up. Thank God for this stove, I thought. There was nothing else to huddle around and nowhere to be comfortable in our house. On those cold mornings, the only difference between the indoors and the outside world was the absence of accumulation in our living room. The winter air was everywhere and we moved like ghosts enveloped in a cloud of our own condensing breath. When finally heat was detectable, we pushed our bodies as close to the stove as possible without catching on fire. Pia poured water into an old iron kettle that sat right on top of the stove and worked as efficiently as any modern appliance we owned. (Later, after The Storm had completed its punishment, that indestructible kettle would be one of the few items from our former life that remained intact.)

When she was warm enough, Pia went back to the kitchen and began pulling items from our cabinets, which overflowed with nonperishable goods. Canned beans and vegetables, pasta, rice, quinoa, wheat berry, peanut butter, almond butter, cashew butter, whole wheat flour, chickpea flour, rice flour, tamari sauce, olive oil, truffle oil... She was rearranging, creating a new system and order for the rationing of our sustenance. I didn't recognize it at that moment, but this would be her primary obsession for our remaining days in that cold, dark house. With no end to The Storm in sight and a finite amount of food in the house, Pia was devising a system for meals that would utilize the most immediately perishable of the nonperishable items while factoring questions of nutritional balance, digestion and—I hoped—taste.

“Can you leave the peanut butter out?” I yelled.

“No peanut butter yet,” Pia said without looking up. “That's for later. You can use the cream cheese in the fridge. That will be bad by tomorrow.”

I didn't want to argue, so I walked past her to pull a sweating tub of cream cheese from our powerless refrigerator and got to work on my disappointing breakfast. I watched two pieces of bread warm on the top of the woodstove, where my wet gloves normally rested, and tried to imagine other culinary possibilities for the days ahead. I wasn't particularly hungry, but this seemed a comfortingly simple project to focus on.

I returned to my post under the visible strip of window to observe the day's weather while I ate my toast. The wind was as strong as the day before, but the precipitation alternated between sleet and heavy, wet snow. It was trying to accumulate on the ground, but there was so much rushing water on the oversaturated earth that it sloshed around when it landed before melting into the mess. This was a troubling development. If the water levels continued to rise at that pace, I knew it wouldn't be long before it reached our doorsill and eventually even our windows.

I stood up and turned the radio on, hoping for cooler heads to inform me that my fears were unwarranted.

“What we know right now,” started the familiar male voice of an NPR host, “is that all five boroughs in New York City are underwater. That includes Manhattan, which was evacuated two days ago. Unfortunately, not everyone is heeding these evacuation orders and there are a dozen confirmed dead as of this morning. That number will likely rise as temperatures continue to drop and rescue opportunities diminish. The next phase of this storm is snow, so things are about to get significantly more difficult.”

The voice was hoarse and rushed. I could hear the sound of papers being shuffled and murmuring voices in the studio.

“We're getting new information now from Boston, as well,” he went on. “I'm...I'm just going to provide the confirmed reports as we receive them, so please bear with us as we skip around a bit this morning. We're working hard to report on everything as it comes in. For now, we'll turn to our colleagues in Cape Cod, who are operating at low power thanks to a satellite feed from WGBH in Boston. They have a correspondent on the ground with the latest from The Storm. Let's go now to Roger Stearns in Barnstable. Roger, are you there?”

The sound went dead for a moment, clicked twice, then connected with a distant voice in the rain. “Yes, this is Roger. I'm standing about three hundred feet from the shore, which is as close as I can get to the water without being knocked off my feet by the wind.”

Roger on the cape in Barnstable was barely audible above the roaring ambient noise, but his terror was apparent.

“Roger, what can you see?”

“What I'm looking at now... I've never seen anything like this... What I'm looking at is a dark, almost black sky—at ten o'clock in the morning. There are low clouds moving quickly and the rain seems to be turning to snow. There isn't another soul on the beach and we can't stay much longer. It appears that most people have followed the governor's evacuation order. Yesterday, you could actually see the hurricane moving toward us from the southwest, and today the dark clouds are approaching from the north. When those two fronts meet—which could be very soon—the beach will be a deadly place. Already, you can see small boats that have gotten loose from the harbor and are being tossed around like toys in a bathtub. The vacation homes behind me all have broken windows and collapsed decks. And earlier I saw two cars floating down a flooded side road about a half mile away. This is no place for humans. And something seems to be...”

There was a pause and then a thunderous crash.

“Roger, what's going on now?”

“I can't hear anything... I'm going to have to sign off now!” Roger yelled. “The rain has turned to hail! As big as baseballs! I have to get back to the van...”

There was a loud commotion as a microphone smashed against something and the NPR switchboard turned back to the serene sounds of a dry man in a sound booth.

“Thank you, Roger, and stay safe,” the voice said.

I looked back to find Pia standing only a few feet from me, listening to the radio with wide eyes.

“Whoa,” I said.

Pia shook her head back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no. This just can't be happening,” she said. “I need more time to start filtering the water. If the worst of it is already in Boston, it will be here by the end of the day! We aren't ready for this yet.”

She went to the kitchen, but instead of beginning work on whatever water filtration project she had lined up, she poured chardonnay into a beige mug from her ten-year high school reunion and took a long gulp. Reunion Regatta & Clambake was written in delicate cursive on the side of the mug.

“We need to make good use of the daylight,” she said, like some sort of pioneer wife.

“Fine, so what do you want me to do?” I asked. I was almost relieved to be put to work.

“We need more wood, Ash! You
know
that we need more wood and you're just stalling because it's a shitty job. Do it now, before the path to the shed is completely underwater.”

I couldn't argue with any of those points, so I stormed to the front door and pulled on as much winter clothing as I could before going out to demonstrate that I wasn't afraid of a little weather.

Once outside, the sleet found its way under my thick collar, into my boots, through my gloves and around the edges of my hat so quickly that I may as well have walked out naked. It had been nearly twelve hours since my injurious trip to Peg's house, but the frigid wetness felt too familiar. I carried one armload after another into the house, each heavier and more waterlogged with each trip. I stacked them neatly against the wall for a while and then began dropping the piles in heaps around the living room. It was enough wood to keep us dry for a week, which I hoped would drive the point home to Pia that I was as committed to this survival shit as anyone.

After hauling the wood, I wanted nothing more than a hot shower, but when Pia reminded me that we needed to conserve the last of the hot water, I was forced to simply peel layer after wet layer off and jump quickly into a new set of warm, dry clothes. It was fine, for now, but what would happen when we ran out of dry clothes? How would anything dry now in the cold air? I decided to ration my clothes for the time being, doubling days on underwear and T-shirts. That reminded me that there were bigger indignities ahead as I had been avoiding a pending bowel movement for nearly two hours. (The water pressure would be enough to keep the toilet working for a while, but eventually the water tank, which was attached to our private well, would get too low.)

“Where do you think everyone went?” I asked Pia as I returned to the living room in dry clothes.

“What do you mean?” She didn't want to talk to me. She was busy.

But I had too many questions to stay quiet, so I went on. “They're evacuating entire cities—New York, Boston, everywhere—but where are they all going to go? The Storm's path covers the entire eastern seaboard. It's not like they can send them all to Ohio today.”

Pia stopped moving for a moment and considered the question.

Before we'd arrived at an answer, the sound of another loud, sharp crackle sent us running to the kitchen. Everything looked the same.

“Over here!” Pia yelled, pointing to a window above the sink.

The enormous maple that stood only a few feet from our house—the one that we could touch and smell as we washed dishes in the summer—had split about six feet up from its ancient trunk and fallen to a ninety-degree angle beside the house. We could see little else around its wreckage of broken branches. The center of the trunk was hollow in places, apparently dead for a long time. This was the sort of thing I should have anticipated as a homeowner, but I was still learning such skills. The Storm hadn't given me time to get smart about country living. Large branches of the fallen tree were sinking into the accumulating puddles, joining sloughed-off bark and decomposing leaves. The north side of our house would look different without this great shade, I lamented. But of course, everything was going to look different.

“I don't think anyone takes them anywhere,” Pia said as she returned to her food-labeling project at the table.

“What?”

“All those people who've been evacuated from the cities,” she said. “I think the government just tells them that they have to leave, and then they're on their own. You just get in your car and drive for as far as you can until The Storm catches you... If you have a car.”

This seemed too grim a possibility to consider at the moment, but Pia's theory would prove largely right. People of means and foresight left the cities early on their own—before the ice and snow made roads impassable. They fled to second homes, family members' houses and the couches of distant friends and relatives. But the majority of urban dwellers sat for hours in bottlenecks of traffic, finally driving as far west as they could get before fatigue overtook them. There were stories of entire highways filling with water or snow as drivers sat immobilized for hours, praying for the precipitation to end. On Route 76 in Pennsylvania, an old couple was found dead in their car near Harrisburg after the heat stopped and the temperature dropped. And two college students who had abandoned their truck on Interstate 80 and attempted to walk the rest of the way to Cleveland were crushed when a flooded bus tipped over onto them. We knew none of this then, as we bickered in our cold house.

“They probably have some system for getting people out,” I said weakly.

We spent the rest of that wet day alternately drinking coffee and wine. (Alcohol was apparently the exception to Pia's inflexible food rationing system.) I fed the fire regularly and we dragged the kitchen table into the living room, which had become the only habitable part of the house. Pia talked nervously to herself a lot. She talked aloud through her meal plans, methods for staying warm through the night and an emergency bathroom strategy that involved a hole in the back deck and suspended tarp above. I spoke only when one of her ideas warranted discussion.