Buch lesen: «We Are Unprepared»

This book is dedicated to the wild places worth protecting.

And to Dan, with whom I want to explore them all.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

PART TWO

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

PART THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WE ARE UNPREPARED READER’S GUIDE

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Copyright

PROLOGUE

Isolé—(French) / EE-zo-LAY / adj.: isolated, remote, lonely.

Isole—(English) / i-sol / n.: rural town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Population: 6,481.

IT WOULD BE narcissistic to assume that the earth conjured a storm simply to alter the course of my life. More likely, we’d been poisoning this world for years while ignoring the warning signs, and The Storm wasn’t so much a cosmic intervention as it was a predictable response to our collectively reckless behavior. Either way, the resulting destruction—to North America and our orderly life in Isole—arrived so quickly that I swear we didn’t see it coming.

Looking back, I realize how comforting those months leading up to The Storm had been as we focused on preparing for the disaster. News of the changing weather patterns gave each of our lives a new clarity and direction. It didn’t feel enjoyable at the time, but it was a big, concrete distraction in which to pour ourselves, even as other matters could have benefited from our attention. It was urgent, and living in a state of urgency can be invigorating. But the fear can be mistaken for purpose, which is even more dangerous than the threat itself.

PART ONE

I pine, I pine for my woodland home;

I long for the mountain stream

That through the dark ravine flows on

Till it finds the sun’s bright beam.

I long to catch once more a breath

Of my own pure mountain air,

And lay me down on the flowery turf

In the dim old forest there.

O, for a gush of the wildwood strain

That the birds sang to me then!

O, for an hour of the fresher life

I knew in that haunted glen!

For my path is now in the stranger’s land,

And though I may love full well

Their grand old trees and their flowery meads,

Yet I pine for thee, sweet dell.

I’ve sat in the homes of the proud and great,

I’ve gazed on the artist’s pride,

Yet never a pencil has painted thee,

Thou rill of the mountain side.

And though bright and fair may be other lands,

And as true their friends and free,

Yet my spirit will ever fondly turn,

Green Mountain Home, to thee.

—“Green Mountain Home” by Miss A. W. Sprague of Plymouth, Vermont.

First published in 1860.

ONE

WE WERE DRIVING east on Route 15 when the world first learned of the coming storms. Pia and I had just met with a fertility specialist in Burlington and we were both staring straight ahead at the road as we digested the information we’d received there. I didn’t want to see a doctor about having babies. That was for people who were old or sick or in a rush, and we were none of those things. But it was true that we had sort of been trying on and off for a year, so with little persuasion, I agreed to the appointment. Conceiving a child had become Pia’s obsession in the preceding months, and her determination trumped my ambivalence.

We sat completely still in our seats and stared at the empty road as we drove back toward our new home. I gripped the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, focusing on the act of driving to avoid looking over at Pia, who I knew was crying silently. I could feel the steam from the fat tears that rolled down her smooth face. I wanted to comfort her, to make them stop, but I couldn’t will myself to.

There had been soft Celtic music playing in the waiting room of the Full Moon Fertility Center and amateurish oil paintings of naked women in various states of pregnancy hanging on the walls, all of which annoyed me immensely for their obviousness. Weeks earlier, blood had been drawn and samples had been submitted, and this was the day Dr. Tan-Face explained to us in a soothing voice that conceiving a child on our own was unlikely. Pia had a hormone imbalance that would require “assistance.” It made Pia cry to hear this word, which made me almost as sad to see.

It was a hot September day in Vermont and everything that had been green was beginning to turn brown under the unrelenting sun. It was hotter and drier than it should have been on September 20. We passed roadside produce stands and fellow drivers occasionally but were mostly alone for miles of farmland. Fireweed grew along the edges of the road and, if I squinted, I could see fluffy dandelion heads mingling with drying milkweeds in the fields. There was a group of grazing cows and a carload of children pointing excitedly at the lazy ladies. I was trying to conjure more sympathy for my wife as I took this all in. Species were propagating all around us, but we needed assistance. I understood why this news was difficult to hear. Other couples had told us of the heartache of infertility and the shattering of a romantic fantasy for how this milestone is supposed to unfold. I wanted to feel that heartache with her, but any sadness was crowded out by an overwhelming sense of relief—relief that it was her faulty machinery and not mine and, mostly, relief that we had just been given the gift of more time. The doctor had explained that getting pregnant might take a little while, which was all I really wanted to hear him say—that I would have a little more time to live life like the young, happy thirty-five-year-old I believed myself to be.

The air blowing in from our open windows smelled like overheated livestock and corn that had passed its prime. I could picture the exact stage of transformation that the kernels on the mature stalks would be entering at that moment. The extreme heat had forced early harvests and they were already losing their plump, yellow corn complexions as the sugars dulled to starch. I knew those smells. I knew that the cut stalks were already so sharp that if you ran through them in your bare feet, they could slice right through the skin. These were passive memories, absorbed unknowingly in childhood and left dormant for the years I’d been away from Vermont. They surprised me in their specificity and sureness, awakened by the smallest triggers. It was as if a whole room in my brain had been locked for a long time, but when it finally reopened, every object was just as I had left it.

When the silent crying and focused driving got to be too much, I reached for the stereo dial on the dashboard of our aging Volvo, permanently set to Vermont Public Radio. It came on too loud, which was awkward at that moment. My hand rushed back to the knob, but as I started to turn it down, Pia grabbed my wrist and said, “Wait, Ash.”

A somber, male NPR voice was explaining that the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had just briefed the president of the United States about the latest long-term storm forecast. At first, it didn’t sound all that serious. Big storms had already become the norm. Tornados, wildfires, floods, hurricanes—it seemed as though some part of the country was always in a state of emergency. But the tone of the reporter’s voice and the odd timing of the report suggested that there was something new here.

“What we know for sure,” the reporter said, “is that, due to rapidly rising sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, we are now approaching a period of extreme weather events. NOAA is predicting as many as thirty named tropical storms and hurricanes in the coming months, along with likely heat waves and drought, and even severe blizzards. It’s too early to know precisely when or what we’re in for, but these water temperatures are unprecedented and the storms they trigger will almost certainly be record breaking. These storms have the potential to be very, very disruptive.”

He said disruptive with emphasis; we were expected to infer larger things from the restrained word.

“Jesus,” I said out loud.

Pia had stopped crying. She was leaning in toward the dashboard as if coaxing the news out of the speakers.

“How firm is this science?” a female interviewer asked the male voice, and I wished that we had heard the report from the beginning.

“Government scientists say the data on rising seawater temperatures and levels are reliable. They are less certain about how these variables will interact with other weather forces. Storm experts that I’ve spoken with say that there is a plausible worst-case scenario that the government doesn’t want to talk about just yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“If this warm air above the Atlantic collides with a colder pressure system from the west, they could create a sort of superstorm along the eastern seaboard that could be positively devastating. But again, no government officials have made such a warning. All we know for sure right now is that we have several months of extreme weather events ahead. But I believe this is the first time the federal government has issued such an early and emphatic warning of this kind, so it must be dire.”

The radio voices went on to discuss global ramifications of extreme weather—food scarcity, political unrest, war—but we had already drifted back into our own minds by then. Moments before, we were fixated on creating new life, and now we were confronted with the uncertainty of the life before us. We didn’t linger for long on the thought—our babies were as abstract then as the coming storms.

I turned right, toward our house, past the broken mailbox I kept meaning to replace and down the dirt path that served as our driveway. I loved everything about that house. I loved the way the overgrowth of sugar maples and yellow birch trees along the driveway created a sort of enchanted tunnel that spat you out steps from our expansive porch. I really loved the way the porch, crowded with potted plants and mismatched furniture, wrapped all the way around the faded yellow farmhouse. This was our dream home in our dream life and, though we had been there for only three months, it felt as if we were always meant to live there. The yellow farmhouse was the realization of all the fantasies borne from our marriage. To be there, finally, was a victory.

There was a creek that ran through the backyard, threading all of our neighbors and hundreds of spring thaws together. Some of the people in the area kept their yards neatly manicured, but most were like us: they mowed now and then, but they gave the wildflowers a wide berth and relished the sight of a deer or—even better—a brown bear, snacking on the ever-encroaching blackberry bushes. This was where you lived if you wanted not to conquer nature, but to join it. This was the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and there was nowhere else like it on earth.

I turned off the engine and looked over at Pia, whose expression had turned from sullen to intrigued. Her face had reassembled itself back to its baseline of beauty. Pia was gorgeous. Her thick, wavy blond hair was twisted off over one shoulder, frizzing slightly in the unseasonable heat. She had bright green eyes protected by long lashes that were still wet with tears. She sat back and looked at me with one bare heel up on the car seat, short cutoff shorts nearly disappearing in that position. Her body and her utterly unselfconscious ownership of her body was an invitation—not just to me, but to the world. Pia was that enviable combination of beauty, self-possession and grace that makes people want to be closer. She was magnetic. Not quite fit, but small and smooth in the most perfect ways. She attracted attention, male and female, everywhere we went. Every head tilt and arm stretch seemed effortless, though I knew that they were choreographed for an imaginary camera that followed her around. As an artist, she’d achieved only middling success, but Pia was unmatched for the artfulness with which she inhabited her own skin.

“I think this is serious, Ash,” Pia said. Her eyes were wide. “We all knew these storms were coming eventually, and now they’re here—not that they would ever admit the real cause.”

There had been no mention of global warming in the news report, but by then no one needed our reluctant government to confirm what we knew to be true. Pia was reflexively defiant of all authority and she seemed to enjoy the vindication that this weather report was already providing. I reached a hand across the front seat to squeeze her knee, sensing that the mood in the car had shifted. We had been drawn out of our own anxious heads and were feeling unified now by our fear and fascination with the coming storms. A familiar wave of guilty relief washed over me. I suggested that we relax on the back porch with cold beers, which she did not object to.

Pia stretched out on a hammock on the porch while I went inside to grab two Long Trail Ales from the fridge. The sun was low in the sky by then and our house was finally beginning to cool. Even though it was September, the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty-five during the day yet.

I held a wet beer against Pia’s thigh, which made her squeal. She pulled me into the hammock with her, an unsteady arrangement, but I was happy to have her body pressed against mine after a particularly trying couple of days. She was a virtuoso of affection—both creative and infectious with her demonstration of love. After years together, I was still always grateful to receive it.

I ran a finger along the curve of her breast and she closed her eyes.

“We need to start planning,” Pia said. “We need to start stocking up and fortifying the house and...getting seriously self-reliant.”

We talked about self-reliance in those days as if it was a state of higher consciousness. It was the explanation we gave for leaving our jobs in New York and starting a new life in Vermont. We wanted to grow things and build things, preserve things and pickle things. We wanted to play our own music and brew our own beer. This, we believed, was how one lived a real life. There was a pious promise in the notion of self-reliance—a promise that we would not only feel a deep sense of pride and moral superiority, but also that it would ensure eternal marital bliss. Some of this we were not wrong about: it was supremely satisfying to eat cucumbers that we had grown and sit on furniture we had made (two Adirondack chairs assembled from a kit, technically). Pia was taking a pottery class in those days and our house was filled with charmingly lopsided creamers and water pitchers with her initials carved into the underside, like a proud child’s bounty from summer camp. I had taken a weekend-long seminar on beekeeping and the unopened bee materials that I ordered online were still stacked neatly against the house. When the news of The Storms broke, we were only three months into this real-living adventure and we hadn’t learned much at all yet.

Pia and I weren’t alone in these aspirations. There were others like us around the country, young(ish) people, intent on living differently. In the aftermath of America’s economic crisis, a burst housing bubble and an overheating earth, we were part of an unofficial movement of people who wanted to create a life that wasn’t defined by a drive for more stuff. We wanted to spend less time at work and more time with each other. We were smug, sure, but I still believe we were basically right in our quest to find pleasure in simpler pursuits. It wasn’t so much a rejection of our parents’ choices as it was an admission that those choices weren’t available to us. The world was different and we were adapting.

Isole, Vermont, was an answer to those yearnings. It offered a delightful mix of hippies and rednecks, cohabitating in the picturesque valley between two small mountains. You went there only if you knew what you were looking for. There were old farm families and loggers who had been in Isole long enough to remember when it was pronounced in its traditional French way: EE-zo-LAY. But the economic engine of the region came from outside money in our time—reclusive liberals with trust funds, self-employed tech whizzes and socially responsible venture capitalists, all hiding out in a picturesque hamlet that was too far from a city to ever be truly civilized.

I liked to think of myself as a native because I grew up in central Vermont, but the real locals knew us as outsiders. We had come from Brooklyn, where we’d spent the previous twelve years building successful and lucrative careers. Pia had worked in advertising and I was a partner at a graphic design firm. The firm was well established by the time I sold my portion of the business back to my colleagues, but I had been there in the early days, before we had an in-house gym and black-tie holiday parties.

Pia and I fell in love with our Vermont farmhouse on vacation earlier that year. We had taken an extended spring weekend on Crystal Lake. It was too cold to swim, so we took long drives around the Northeast Kingdom, basking in the slowness and serenity. On the last day of our stay, we drove past a perfect yellow farmhouse on a slanted dirt road with a just-posted for-sale sign out front. It was our sign, we decided. We had been waiting for it.

Years before, Pia and I had made a pact to live a different sort of life one day. We had only the vaguest plan to escape the city and remake ourselves, but we were sure the details of this plan would present themselves when it was time. So when we found the farmhouse, we recognized it as the natural extension of the dream we had created together. I sold my piece of the firm and stayed on as a long-distance consultant. Two months later, we were unpacking in Vermont. It was such a fast and easy process that we didn’t have time to iron out all the wrinkles of our new life. Pia didn’t have a new job lined up yet and we hadn’t met a soul there.

It sounds reckless in the retelling, but that was an important part of its appeal. Pia was great at embracing the new and unpredictable, but I was far more cautious, so this leap to a new state also felt like a leap toward my wife. We were going to forge a new path together, armed only with years of shared daydreams about a country life.

The hammock rocked gently as the breeze picked up, and I could smell the goldenrod that was being mowed at the farm upwind. Pia was still listing things that would need to be addressed before The Storms came: gutters, faulty wiring in the basement, a stuck bedroom window. I knew she was probably right; if this storm was for real, then we did need to start preparing. But I stroked her hair and suggested that we spend the rest of the now-enjoyable Friday relaxing. We could get to disaster preparations tomorrow.

“Hey, dudes. What are you doing?” said a squeaky voice.

Approaching us was our seven-year-old neighbor, August, whose dilapidated little house sat on the other side of a thick wall of trees and shrubs to the east. His place was invisible from our porch but connected by a short, neat path that I had helped August clear to facilitate easy movement back and forth. I had met August on the first day of our arrival, when he walked through our open front door and began peppering us with questions. He seemed desperate for friends and bubbling with curiosity. Since then, I’d seen him almost every day. He’d come over to kick a soccer ball back and forth or invite me to check out the new fort he’d built in the woods behind our homes. Pia thought August was sweet, but it was I who spent so much time with him. I wondered sometimes about the adults in his life who had left him so hungry for attention, but I didn’t ask many questions, mainly because I didn’t know what exactly to ask, but also because I enjoyed our time together and wanted to just be with him. And August was helpful. He’d spent his entire short life in those woods and he knew more about self-reliance and country living than Pia and me combined.

“What’s up, buddy?” I said, reaching a hand out for a sticky high five.

As usual, August was barefoot, filthy and smiling. The burdock lodged in his curly auburn hair appeared to have taken hold days before.

August wanted to play Frisbee, so we hoisted our bodies out of the hammock and met him on the lawn. The mood had shifted and we were happy to play. That was the way things changed with Pia: she could be crying and sad, but the minute it was over, it was really over. Most of the time, this was a relief, though there were times when I knew we probably should have actually worked things through instead of just riding them out. But it was so much easier to just wait for storms to pass, and the highs were so high that we didn’t want to look back at the lows once we had escaped them. We just drove forward, secure in the knowledge that we were in love and nothing was worth dwelling on. This unspoken arrangement required a willingness on my part to indulge every emotional whim that Pia wanted to follow. In return, she kept things uncomplicated and asked very few questions. Abiding by the rules of this dynamic felt intimate. It worked for us.

Pia dived theatrically as the Frisbee left August’s hands, which made him double over in laughter every time. I laughed along with them but let my eyes wander to the group of flycatchers above. They were migrating south, no doubt, but they were several weeks late. They should have been in Central America by then. These were the details of nature that I never got wrong. I was as passionate about nature as Pia was about art, and I knew bird migratory patterns like the moles on my left arm. I assumed they were just as immovable. But the birds were confused and their travels had changed.

Our backyard was magnificent that day. The enormous sugar maples along the lawn’s perimeter swayed cheerfully as the low sun illuminated their drying leaves. It would have been a perfect July day, were it not for the fact that it was late September and there was no shaking the feeling that everything was off. The leaves seemed to be skipping past their most brilliant orange-yellow-red phase and going straight to the browning at the end. We were playing Frisbee in shorts, for Christ’s sake.

Weather was the primary topic of discussion in the Northeast Kingdom that summer—even more so than usual—because it was all so wrong. Everyone was nervous: the farmers, the maple sugarers, the people who relied on ski tourism, the ice fishermen and the hockey fans. Pia talked a lot about a global-warming government cover-up, but I was the one in our household who truly mourned the changing Vermont climate. I had grown up there (technically, I grew up in Rutland, a sturdier, postindustrial town in central Vermont). Every milestone of my life was tied in some way to New England weather; and every romantic vision I had for our new life relied on the weather being right. Some part of me understood this to be unrealistic, but I wasn’t ready to accept that.

When the sun finally disappeared and our toes started to chill in our flip-flops, we sent August home and Pia and I went inside to make dinner. I loved making dinner together. It was an activity that could lay the groundwork for hours of sexually charged companionship. It wasn’t just sex—though that almost always came later—but also wine and storytelling and laughter and touching. Those nights always felt to me like scenes from a movie. I envisioned someone watching us through a window, not hearing exactly what we were saying, but being impressed by the ease and tenderness of our home life. It was the shade of domesticity that I liked marriage in.

Pia browned fat chunks of bacon in a pan that would soon be joined by split brussels sprouts and a drizzle of maple syrup, an addicting recipe she had acquired from the little girl who ran the farm stand down the road. These were the details we relished but worked hard to seem cool about when we breathlessly relayed them to our friends back in Brooklyn. We buy our sprouts from a farm girl down the road! That’s where we get our eggs, too—you have never eaten eggs until you’ve had just-laid eggs. I can’t believe we ever bought our meat vacuum-sealed at the grocery store. Just-butchered and free-range is the way to go. It’s just the way life is here... The narrative we’d created about our life in Vermont was almost as important as the experience itself.

I massaged salt and pepper into a local sirloin and carried it out the back screen door to place over high flames on the grill. Pia joined me minutes later, slipping a hand around my waist and lifting her pinot noir to my lips. I took a sip before leaning down to kiss her hard. I loved that I was almost a full head taller than her. Being tall and broad was my best physical feature. Without expending much effort on appearance, I projected the illusion of general fitness, even as my stomach softened slightly and my dark, groomed beard sprouted grays. I drew most of my confidence with women from my size, which worked fine for Pia, who liked to be enveloped by someone larger than herself. On cue, she melted into my chest and then pushed me away, darting back inside to tend to her sauté pans.

* * *

“I want to change the world,” I once said to Pia during a marathon late-night session of drinking, fooling around and philosophizing early in our courtship. We were on our second bottle of wine and both feeling drunk.

“No, you don’t.” She laughed.

“I do!”

“No, people who want to change the world go on disaster relief missions in Haiti and deliver vaccines to babies in Africa. You just want to be outside and feel like less of a yuppie dick.”

I considered this correction as I studied the pattern of the blanket beneath us. We were sitting on the floor in our tiny Brooklyn living room having a sort of indoor picnic.

“It’s okay,” Pia went on. “I’m the same. I’m too selfish to do something truly good, but I think choosing to live a life that doesn’t make the world worse is okay, too.”

“Shit, you’re right,” I conceded. “So how do we not make the world worse?”

“Smaller ecological footprint, conscientious consumerism, freedom from prejudices, that sort of thing. It sounds trite, but I don’t think it is. You live a more thoughtful life than your parents did, and you teach your kids those values, and voilà: the human race evolves. That’s meaningful.”

“I’d rather actually be a good person, but I guess you’re right. Maybe that is meaningful,” I agreed. “So let’s make a pact to live that way. Somehow.”

Pia stretched a hand toward me to formalize the agreement. “I love that. It’s a deal.”

We shook on it.

“I feel like a good person already,” I said.

“Not good, just a not-bad person,” she corrected.

We set our wineglasses aside and I dived toward her. She enveloped me with her legs and fell back.

Pia was a marvel to me in those early days—as witty and esoteric as she was sexy. It was just nice being together and we never wanted to stop.

* * *

Dinner was served on the dirty porch furniture, which looked perfect in the glow of a dozen tea lights that Pia had carefully arranged. We sat across from each other, drinking wine and discussing the superior origins and experiences of the dead animals before us. There would be no mention of her ovulation cycle or my quiet resistance to the project. This was a good night. After some discussion of the strange and beautiful sky, we eventually turned to the most obvious topic.

“So, what are we going to do, love?” Pia asked, more excited than scared. “These storms are just terrifying! We need a plan.”

I nodded. “We do need a plan. I can’t imagine that our little landlocked state is in all that much danger, but I guess we should err on the side of caution and get this leaky old house sealed up. I assume that we’d stay here, even if a really big storm came, right?”