As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn’t ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia’s desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn’t know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?
WE WOKE UP early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom naked for a few minutes, checking her phone, tying her hair up and then taking it down again in front of the mirror. The warm mood of the previous evening still lingered, though daylight had brought a new urgency to our self-assigned task of storm shopping.
I walked downstairs and turned the radio on even before making coffee, hoping for the latest from NPR on the new weather predictions. No one seemed to have any more information, but overnight, countless opinions had been hatched and opposing teams established. A conservative commentator suggested that this was part of a wider liberal scheme to divert public funds to global-warming-research and climate-change “slush funds.” Someone from a think tank feared that the president was withholding information and called for a congressional investigation into what the Department of the Environment and NOAA knew. Pia and I drank coffee with sweet local cream while we watched old men on network TV discuss how this might influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. The Storms dominated everything, but they were still only an idea. It was just a Saturday project for us.
We took showers and climbed into the Volvo, bound for the closest family-owned hardware store, twenty-five minutes away. That morning felt like what I thought our Vermont experience would always feel like. We were close, she was smiling and the landscape unfolded before us like a picture painted by a child in crayon: all blue skies and red barns. The windows were down and we talked about how the smell of manure made us feel. Pia said she hated it but couldn’t resist taking a few deep breaths. I took a native’s pride in sharing that I loved that farm stink. It evoked for me a million childhood experiences, most real and some fabricated in the haze of nostalgia. She leaned across the front seat to kiss my neck and call me a hick as I pulled into Dewey’s Hardware.
* * *
“You’re so country.” That was what Pia had said to me when we met nine years earlier. We were at a raucous costume party in Williamsburg and I was fighting my way through a wall of bare male torsos, trying not to touch the smooth, sweaty shoulders standing between me and the keg. The host, a mutual friend, was a professional party thrower and an amateur drug dealer. His events were always predominantly gay and half-naked, but this one was exceptional even by his standards. My chances of talking to a pretty girl seemed better than average, given the demographics, so I took a risk and smiled at Pia, who was still unknown to me then. She immediately grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd until we found safety in an unoccupied corner of the room.
“You’re not from here, right?” she yelled in my ear.
Her costume was composed entirely of a vine that snaked around her curvy body, with plastic leaves covering all the critical areas. It was held in place with flimsy green tape.
“No one’s from here,” I said. “This isn’t real. It’s a costume party within the costume party of Brooklyn. This is a redundant party.”
Pia seemed impressed by the profundity of this drunken observation, so I kept going. I explained that I had been living there since I graduated from Amherst, that I was working in graphic design and that I had no intention of staying in Brooklyn forever. “I miss trees,” I said, which she liked a lot. When Pia, who had attended Middlebury, learned that I was from Vermont, she touched my arm and told me that she was “madly in love with the dirt there.” I told her about a harvest festival near my hometown that she would enjoy, which was when she smiled an amazing smile and decided 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.
* * *
“I 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.
“Whoa” 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.
“Tarps 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