We Are Unprepared Read Online Free PDF Page A

that I was “very country.”
    We slept together that night. There was no courtship or pretense. She just took me back to her messy apartment and, without a hint of modesty, pushed my head between her legs as if she was giving me a gift I had been waiting for. For the briefest moment, I considered fainting in the humid, earthy cave of her body, but I didn’t. I came alive. Pia didn’t exude the soapy perfume of the girls I’d been with before; she was all salt and musk. She was the most animate being I had ever encountered and a switch was flipped inside me. I wanted to consume her and she wanted to be wanted by me, so our frenzied union felt like a perfect fit. I knew from the start that with her passion came a moody and mercurial element, but that was fine with me. Life was so much more fun with her in it. So we built a relationship there, on a lumpy mattress, beneath glittery, draped tapestries, surrounded by stacks of books in unreal Brooklyn.
    My confidence in those initial days with Pia can be largely attributed to the recent realization that my specific brand of geekiness was in high demand in that particular corner of the universe at that moment in American culture. I had always been a tall, slightly awkward dork who would rather be reading nature journals or distance running in the woods than mingling at a party. In Brooklyn, this was misinterpreted as sensitive, progressive and cool. Even my accidental wardrobe (workman pants, flannel shirts, hiking boots) seemed to impress. I would have resented the objectification if it didn’t work so well with hot hipster girls.
    * * *
    â€œI knew we should have left earlier,” Pia said from the passenger seat as we approached the hardware store.
    The parking lot was surprisingly crowded for nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, but we found a spot in the farthest corner, next to a pickup truck with giant, muddy wheels. Two rows down, a woman hurried small children into the backseat of a car filled with shopping bags.
    â€œWhoa” was all I could say when we entered the store. The normally orderly establishment was roaring with people pushing squeaky shopping carts, many holding lists of their own.
    A young man wearing a navy Dewey’s Hardware polo shirt nodded at us from the entryway. “It’s the latest storm report,” he said. “Everyone’s getting prepared.”
    I wanted to talk further with this teenager, who probably could have been helpful to us then, but Pia had already claimed a cart and joined the melee. We moved quickly up and down the aisles, most of which had been picked so bare that it was impossible to know which essential items were no longer available to us.
    â€œTarps have been sold out since seven this morning,” one man reported, “and don’t even bother trying to find sandbags.”
    Neither was on our list, but they sounded important all of a sudden.
    As whole sections of the store were emptied, shoppers veered to other areas looking for creative uses for seemingly useless items. One man bought all the remaining plastic sleds from the previous winter. I watched him jog to the register with his purchase, satisfied with whatever discovery he thought he’d just made.
    It wasn’t the bare shelves or the full parking lot that unnerved me that morning; it was the behavior of the patrons. We were in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom with people who had lived through dozens of epic weather events. They had seen ice storms kill harvests, barn roofs collapse under wet snow and heavy winds bring trees down over livestock. They adapted to bad weather with whatever was in the shed or could be borrowed from a neighbor and they never, ever panicked. This wasn’t full-blown panic, but it was something close. (We would learn later what real panic looks like.)
    Pia crumpled up the list in her hand and stuffed it in the pocket of her jean shorts. We wouldn’t find anything on that