We Are Unprepared

by Meg Little Reilly

EIGHT

  BY THE LAST week in November, everyone was a weather expert. Strangers in the checkout line exchanged pleasantries about tropical storm masses and air density. We watched the White House Weather Briefing every Saturday morning—a recent invention intended to tamp down panic and convey the impression of control—and we searched new terms as they were introduced. Were the chilly temperatures part of a simple cold front or an occluded front, we wondered. Was this wind just a brief disturbance or should we expect sustained gales? Having a language for this new reality made it feel manageable, mundane even. And though we had private moments of fear, The Storms were folding into our lives.

  “They used to think the crazy weather was caused by El Niño,” I heard a boy say to his younger brother at the Winter Farmers’ Market. “But now they think it’s something new that we don’t even know about.”

  I was roaming around the barn at the edge of town that hosted contra dancing on Fridays, Quaker services on Sundays and the Winter Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. I had picked out a knitted hat for August and was browsing the rest of the precious offerings—goats’ milk moisturizer, artisanal sausage, purple potatoes. When I stopped to eavesdrop on their conversation, the older boy was stacking handmade beeswax candles while his younger brother looked on, impressed.

  “Yup,” he went on, “there’s going to be a hurricane...and a blizzard...and maybe a tornado, too!”

  The little brother raised his eyebrows at this frightening and flawed information. “All at once?” he asked.

  “Yeah, they’re all going to crash into each other at the same time!”

  To emphasize this point, the boy picked up two delicate honeycomb candles and smashed them together like colliding vehicles until the candle vendor shooed them away.

  Even I knew that we should have been working harder to shield children from the incessant chatter of catastrophe, but it must have been impossible for parents. It wasn’t just the dominant topic of conversation among all the adults living east of the Mississippi River; it was also blaring from talk radio and cable news. New conspiracies and outlandish scenarios could travel across social media before anyone’s teacher had time to explain their hollow, and sometimes sinister, origins.

  August wanted to talk of nothing else, but I tried to repeat Peg’s message of safety whenever we kicked a soccer ball back and forth or tackled new home-improvement projects together. Whether he believed my false confidence, I couldn’t tell.

  When I worked at my desk, I consumed a steady stream of media chatter about the weather. I knew the distraction was impeding my productivity, but I couldn’t stop. The official government forecast was growing more specific and ominous each week, with the latest prediction calling for a series of smaller storms in December and January, followed by one very large superstorm. We didn’t know precisely what this superstorm might look like or just how super it might get, but that part of the forecast had emerged as the focus of our anxieties. The worst-case scenario had gone from a faint possibility to a likely outcome, and fear was increasing accordingly. Taking a cue from the public, news outlets began calling it “The Storm,” which sounded more terrifying for its supremacy over every storm that had come before it. It was also cinematic, which none of us could resist. We developed a detached fascination with The Storm as if we were waiting for the opening of a blockbuster movie. We didn’t know how it would end or just how gruesome the destruction would be, but we tingled with impatient anticipation of its release. When The Storm would hit was still a matter of dispute among experts, so every dip in temperature set off a new wave of public speculation, reigniting our fears and our morbid excitement.

  Even those of us who were impervious to hype and overreaction realized eventually that we would need to make preparations. Something was going to happen. On the first Friday of December, the sky turned an unfamiliar shade of pinkish gray and the town of Isole snapped into action.

  This Wednesday: all townspeople are welcome at the Isole town hall meeting. Memorial High School gymnasium at 7:00 p.m. Baked goods appreciated.

  A poster bearing this message was plastered around town, announced after church services and passed along by reliable gossips until it seemed everyone was planning on attending. It was understood that this would be the meeting in which town leaders elaborated on emergency plans and decided how to allocate finite resources. Apart from her prepper meetings, Pia and I hadn’t involved ourselves in local matters since moving to Isole, but the idea seemed pleasingly quaint to me. I was itching to meet more people in our new town and for excuses to get out of the house.

  When we entered the high school gymnasium that Wednesday night for the big meeting, it looked to Pia and me like the set of a movie—too wholesome and charming to be real. About a third of the faces in the full room looked familiar, though I could count on one hand the number of people whose names I actually knew. The man from the bookstore was standing at a table overflowing with donated baked goods and talking to an older guy in muddy work boots who I’d seen riding a tractor up and down our road. The goth girl who worked at the coffee shop was standing by herself, clearly annoyed to have been dragged there by a parent. Dozens of others were milling around, exchanging pleasantries. The range in age struck me immediately—from the newly born to the nearly dead—which was not a characteristic of my former life. Everyone in our Brooklyn neighborhood was between twenty-two and forty-five, all self-consciously cool and wearing the disinterested expression of an impertinent teenager. This room held an entirely self-contained ecosystem of humanity.

  To my relief, I saw Peg at the far end of the gym and gave a too-enthusiastic wave to get her attention.

  “Hi, neighbors,” she said warmly as we approached, putting a hand out to formally introduce herself to Pia.

  Peg wasn’t wearing her safari gear this time but flowy layers of earth tones—the New England uniform of sophisticated aging hippies. I assumed she had come from teaching at the college. Pia seemed surprised at the familiarity with which Peg greeted me and I was proud to have a secret friend to unveil before her.

  “Let’s take our seats, please,” yelled a woman in the bossy tone of an elementary school teacher. A child standing nearby clanked a cowbell to punctuate the instruction.

  “A cowbell!” Pia whispered in my ear, surely dying to tell our Brooklyn friends of this adorable detail.

  I smiled back. We had been pleasant with one another ever since the night of ferocious sex, but I was wary. Pia’s behavior had been growing more erratic with each day. Her obsession with the weather had become all-consuming, and it worried me. In response, I’d been spending most of my afternoons with August. We talked less and less.

  “Seats, please!” the woman yelled again. “Thank you.”

  The hum of Yankee mumbles and boots scuffing the gymnasium floor tapered off as attendees took their positions. There was a ring of seats around the edge of the room for the elderly and pregnant, but most of us stood in a herd in the center, facing forward. A middle-aged man with a fit build and bald head took the microphone at the front of the room. People smiled at seeing him. Two young girls chased each other through the sea of adult legs and the man waited for their parents to wrangle them before speaking.

  “Thanks, everyone, for joining us tonight. My name is John Salting—everyone knows me as Salty—and I’m the chairman of the Isole select board. I’m happy to see such a robust crowd here today. I think everyone appreciates the need for this meeting and I expect that it will be very productive. Instead of going through our usual formal select board process, we want to open discussion up to the whole room at the start. This is a bit of an experiment, but sometimes things need to be done a little differently to account for new challenges.”

  I knew of Salty from a recent story in the paper about locals working to repair the covered bridge in the west end. He was a lawyer and part-time judge from a third-gener
ation dairy-farm family. It was clear from the newspaper story that Salty was a member of Isole’s unofficial group of elder statesmen. The elder statesmen (my term, not theirs) are a critical demographic in any small New England town. They’re the civically engaged, financially successful fathers of the town. They raise money for the good causes and sit on the boards and help run the festivals. They serve as both the institutional knowledge keepers and the moral compass of each little hamlet. The elder statesmen of Isole held some of the offices in the town, but that was not where they derived their authority from; it came from a more intangible clout built on years of hometown loyalty, commitment and levelheadedness. I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, but my father was an elder statesman. On any Tuesday morning, he could be found eating an early breakfast at the diner with five other professional men, discussing hockey scores, who was going to college where and how to attract small business to our flagging Main Street. They could always be relied upon to donate their time or relative resources to any efforts of betterment. I mistakenly thought that all fathers were like mine in this way.

  “We are all here tonight to make some decisions about how to best prepare Isole for the coming superstorm,” Salty continued, hands on his trim hips. He wasn’t a big man—maybe five feet ten inches—but his presence was commanding and his pleasantly weathered face made him seem familiar. “We have a long to-do list, so I suggest we just dig in. For the first order of business, I will hand things over to my colleague on the select board, Hannah Altman. Hannah?”

  A middle-aged woman came to the podium to discuss the challenges facing the volunteer fire-and-rescue departments. They would need significantly more people on call for when The Storm hit—a grim concern I’d never thought of before that moment. Two local doctors raised their hands to donate their time and someone else said he could tune up the rescue vehicles for free. Next was a discussion of whether the lone fire truck needed chains on its tires and how much damage chains would do to the roads. Several people had detailed opinions about chained tires and the corresponding havoc they usually wreak.

  I shifted my weight back and forth, feeling bored and guilty about it. Pia gave me an eye roll that I hoped no one saw and wandered over to the table of baked goods. I watched her touch three brownies with M&M’s pressed into their tops before selecting just the right one for the occasion. No one else would have noticed, but I could tell from her body language that she was checked out. It annoyed me that she wasn’t giving the meeting a fair chance.

  “What about the plowing?” someone shouted.

  “Plowing is later on the agenda,” the woman at the podium said, nodding toward a row of other select board members seated at the front.

  I noticed that Peg was among the select board members and taking notes on a clipboard. Peg was everywhere.

  “Let’s talk about the plowing,” the same agitated voice said again. It was coming from a man standing a few feet ahead of me. As the people around him stepped back, I could see the distressed look on his face. It was an expression I recognized from before my brother got sober.

  A sweet-looking woman put her arm around the man and gently tried to direct him outside, but he shook her off. People exchanged knowing glances with one another; I got the feeling they had seen this before.

  “I want to know whose street is going to get plowed first after the big storm,” he went on, “because I’ve gotta get plowed early. I need to get out to make the deliveries early and every one of you knows it!”

  The woman trying to speak yielded the podium back to Salty, who said kindly, “Roger, we know you’ll have to get out and get to work. Everyone has to get to work. Part of our job tonight is to find the most efficient and fair way to make that happen. Will you work with us on this?”

  The angry man stared at Salty, unsure of what to do next. When he finally appeared to drop the issue, Salty took the opportunity to move on.

  “Okay, let’s talk about flood prevention,” he started. “If the ground isn’t too hard, we should start digging a few more water runoff routes around Main Street now. Better drainage could prevent a lot of damage to local businesses. As you recall, we commissioned a few studies last year that demonstrated that east-west routes are—”

  An older gentleman had raised his hand. “Actually, Salty, I would like to discuss the snowplow plan now, too. We could get a big dump any day now and it’s the reason a lot of us are here.”

  A few others in the crowd nodded in agreement. There was more tension in the room than I’d realized.

  “We know the snowplow plan is all politics!” a shrill woman’s voice yelled from behind me. She said all politics as if it was a meeting of Tammany Hall, but I didn’t laugh when I saw the anger on her face. People were scared.

  A prudish old woman at the front put her hands on her hips to scold the hecklers, “Now, let’s please remain civil and wait our turns to speak. Salty says that’s later on the agenda, so we’ll tend to it shortly.”

  From across the room, I saw Pia roll her eyes again at this call for obedience.

  Salty nodded and tried to return to his agenda when a noisy crowd began forming around the angry man who had spoken up first. The man was equidistant between the podium and me, but it was difficult to see what exactly was going on. An elderly man pushed past me and hurried to the door just as someone said, “There’s no need to get worked up, Roger.”

  I moved toward the crowd and saw between the bodies that Angry Roger was hunched, rifling frantically through a backpack. He was pulling things out at a rapid pace, obviously in a hurry to get to whatever it was he was really after. A dirty towel came out, followed by a tattered magazine about off-road vehicles.

  Salty took the opportunity to look through his notes at the podium while the disruption ensued and the row of select board members behind him whispered distractedly.

  Suddenly, a woman cried out and Roger’s arm shot up toward the ceiling holding a cocked handgun. Everyone in the room was watching now and they let out a collective gasp at the sight. Roger’s angry face was transformed by a demented smile, eyes wide at the realization of the new power he wielded. The rest of the select board sat frozen, as if the slightest movement might detonate the weapon remotely.

  “Roger, do...not...move,” Salty said, taking slow-motion steps toward the man.

  Roger waved his arm around, causing another wave of gasps. Some people dropped to the floor.

  “Don’t test me, man,” Roger said. “I’ve been saying this for a while, but no one listens. I gotta get out there to do the deliveries early. I gotta get plowed. We are unprepared for this shit, man.”

  I saw that look again, the one that reminded me of my brother when he was high.

  Salty continued to make a slow catwalk toward Roger as everyone looked on. Suddenly—Bam! Bam! The gun went off twice, sending a puff of ceiling plaster down around us. As our ears rang, there was a split second of stunned disbelief in the room and then everyone sprang on their most immediate impulse. Salty leaped at Roger, knocking him onto his stomach, but losing control of his body as soon as they hit the ground together. A large man about my age dived into the melee and sat on Roger’s backside, pinning his flailing body to the ground. That was when I burst forward, shoving several people aside to get to his arms and the hand with the gun.

  He was skinny but possessed by the superhuman strength that only drugs or madness can inspire. As soon as I had Roger’s forearm in my grasp, I dropped my knees down on top of it with enough force to make him yelp in pain and loosen his grip on the gun. I pulled the weapon from his hand like someone who actually knew how to hold a loaded gun, which I did not.

  The room was buzzing around me. From the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman with long red hair scoop two small children up and carry them into a nearby janitors’ closet. I heard later that Peg had hustled a pregnant woman into the closet right be
hind them, before pulling out her phone to call for help. As for the rest of the crowd, most pushed their way to the doors at the back of the gym (Pia was among them) or simply dropped to the floor with their hands over their heads.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds, before we had time to decide who we wanted to be in a crisis. I was most surprised by my own response; I don’t remember deciding to do anything. I was like one of those people who wake up from sleepwalking to find that they are already making a sandwich or driving a car. That was what it felt like, except that I wasn’t making a sandwich, I was wrestling a gun from a maniac.

  Someone took the gun from me—Salty, I think—because it made its way to the authorities. By the time the police arrived, Roger had stopped resisting. He knew that his powers had been revoked, and he was once again a pitiable local man, now with new legal troubles. Two police officers handcuffed him and took him away while everyone else straightened their coats and dusted off their dirty knees, which had been pressed into the cold floor moments before. I noticed that Pia was in the corner, twisting her long blond hair into a bun on top of her head, over and over as if the precision of that particular bun mattered immensely. I was relieved she was safe, but I didn’t go to her.

  At first, it seemed that we might try to just pick things up where we’d left them before the fracas began—discussing where to build the water runoff routes and which trees needed pruning in the parking lot and how much more money was available to salt the roads... But as Salty stood at the podium and readjusted the microphone volume, it became clear that too much had happened. Competing whispered conversations were taking place around the room as everyone worked to piece together what had happened. A toddler clung to her mother’s torso while the crying mother thanked the pretty redhead for acting so quickly. I saw another woman say something angrily to her husband and storm out through a back door. Something had changed. We were no longer a civilized group of locals discussing mundane municipal concerns. We had been forced to take a fleeting glimpse into each other’s souls and we didn’t like everything we’d seen.