We Are Unprepared Read Online Free PDF Page B

to bring more. Makeshift barricades of chairs and garbage pails were set up on either side of the block to keep cars out, and someone filled a kiddie pool with fresh water. Within twenty minutes, there were close to a hundred people in the street, shaking off the sweaty cabin fever of the preceding days. It felt organic and spontaneous—the big bang of block parties—and no one remembered later how it began. But it wasn’t organic; Pia created it out of nothing. She saw the world for its potential and made interesting things happen. Life with someone like that is limitless.
    â€œShe’s rad,” my sister said later. “Fucking nuts, but rad.” That was Pia’s effect on people.
    * * *
    We drove along in silence, thinking about that party and the complicated pleasure of doom.
    â€œI saw the birds,” Pia said quietly. The sun had reappeared. “The dead ones. It’s spooky—the hot weather and the sudden hail. Everything is a little wrong.”
    I nodded and put a hand on her bare knee. There wasn’t much more to say, so I kept driving silently. It was eighty degrees when we woke up, and now the dashboard said sixty. The hail, the birds, the panicked shoppers. It was spooky, but I was grateful for the simple, shared task before us.
    Forty-five minutes later, we were making our way up and down the aisles of Home Depot, joking about the impending apocalypse and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.
    â€œOf course, the dollar will crash after The Storms come, and we will have to turn to primitive forms of currency,” I said with a wide sweep of my arm as we passed the lawn mowers.
    â€œLike spices and fermented cider and stuff?” Pia played along.
    â€œNo, much more primitive than that. Blow jobs primarily. Hand jobs also, though they aren’t worth nearly as much.”
    She shrieked with laughter, turning several heads around us. Pia never cared who saw her laugh (or cry). I felt proud to be responsible for delighting this beautiful woman.
    We bought a snow shovel and two pairs of work gloves, caulking and sheets of insulation. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it felt proactive. The hurried shoppers around us made small talk about which items were essential in which types of weather events and I studied them closely, eager to pass as an experienced local. We bought what they bought and hoped they were right.
    Several hours and hundreds of dollars later, Pia and I were drinking wine on our back porch again, surrounded by bags of items that promised to keep us safe from whatever was coming. The back porch was the best part of that house, looking out on our unkempt backyard that dissolved into dark woods. It was home.
    I don’t remember the indoors of my childhood. I grew up in a pretty Victorian house, bigger than most of my classmates’ homes and lovingly cared for, but I didn’t spend much time inside it. My parents were strong believers in the character-building properties of outdoor play, so they hurried us into the woods behind our house as soon as the sun was up each morning. We played until we were shivering, hungry or injured and then slept as if we were dead each night. My siblings eventually resisted this parenting technique, which would undoubtedly classify as some form of neglect today, but I embraced it until high school. The woods were freedom to me: undeveloped; unregulated by grown-ups and infinite in their potential for discovery. There was an order to the woods, but it wasn’t dictated by man. I wanted to understand that order, to have dual citizenship in both the natural and human worlds. Passing freely between them seemed the ultimate power. So I became a voracious consumer of science and nature writing. I wanted to know every species of wildlife and the subtle languages with which they spoke to one another. I wanted to be a part of that organism and welcomed by its inhabitants.
    With puberty and the new