We Are Unprepared. Meg Reilly Little
twenty more years. “And when hell breaks loose, it will be the preppers who survive.”
Preppers. I’d read a New Yorker piece about them several months before. These weren’t concerned locals who needed advice on how to water-seal their windows. These were deranged weirdos fixated on the apocalypse. As I understood it, they were people like Crow whose minds hadn’t recovered from the damage of earlier wars, and antigovernment recluses who trusted no one, and angry bigots who relished the idea of a race war and religious fanatics who thought God was coming to punish the unsaved urban intellectuals. I wasn’t one of these people and neither was my wife.
A ten-minute discussion about superior brands of rechargeable batteries ensued (a “no-brainer”), and then we broke for coffee in small disposable cups. I was annoyed and itching to leave.
“Polystyrene cups,” I sneered to Pia. “It’s almost quaint in its inappropriateness.”
She didn’t laugh but sighed instead. “I should have known you wouldn’t get this. You’re too conventional for this kind of thing. I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”
She was disappointed by my reaction, which I felt bad about, but her disappointment was mean, too. It was a new tone. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to accommodate her.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “This is pretty extreme. Can’t we just buy a how-to book or something?”
She shook her head in apparent exasperation with my naïveté.
“Let’s reconvene, people!” Crow shouted with a few claps.
I felt myself being shuffled back to my chair between Pia and the note taker.
“Before we move on to the next topic,” Crow started, “I’d like to say a few things about our little group and...society.”
He leaned into the last word and looked around, as if he was using a code that everyone in the room would recognize.
Crow went on, “At times like these—when we’re lookin’ straight into the eye of disaster—authoritarians will try to wrestle control from the people. Governments and power keepers will do their best to make the public frightened and submissive. They will take away the people’s will and make them think they gave it up freely. What we’re doing here isn’t just helping each other prepare for a life of self-reliance—we’re thinking for ourselves and protecting our free will. Let’s all just keep that in mind.”
Several people nodded their heads, and I noticed the oldest man purse his lips together, angry at the sheer mention of our authoritarian government.
“This isn’t my scene,” I whispered to Pia. “You can stay as long as you want, but I gotta get out of here.”
Wishing that I had made my exit before everyone sat back down, I took a few moments to plan a graceful departure. Finally, I forced a fake cough and walked out quickly to tend to my phony problem. I knew it was a bratty move and that Pia would be angry, but it seemed too late to avoid that now. We didn’t fight often, but once a disagreement was sparked, its natural life cycle involved several childish acts by each of us, followed by a passionate recovery. It seemed a worthwhile price for leaving the prepper meeting.
I walked up a flight of stairs and through the front doors of the old building. A blast of cool, dark air hit my face as I peered down Isole’s Main Street, relieved to be outside and alone. I was a five-minute walk from the cluster of downtown establishments that comprised most of our local commerce. The Blue Frog. That was where I would go, I decided. The Blue Frog was a newish bar that catered to people just like me. It had a sophisticated microbrew list, locally sourced chili, and, on most nights of the week, you could find someone singing folk or bluegrass in the corner.
As I walked down the dark street, the only other person I encountered was a shopkeeper locking his bookstore for the night. We exchanged a nod and I noticed that he was roughly my age. Seeing anyone from my own demographic living and working in Isole always puzzled me. How does a thirtysomething guy come to own a bookstore in a small mountain town? This stranger was a reminder that paths other than the one I had taken after college existed. It would never have occurred to me as a younger man to live in my home state and pursue something as parochial as running a small business there. But seeing it now, I wondered if there was any more perfect life than this guy’s.
As I approached the door of the Blue Frog, I saw a large group of people five years younger than me laughing around a rustic wood table, and I became suddenly aware of my aloneness. Normally, I wouldn’t mind having a beer on my own, but I wasn’t up for it at that moment, so I kept walking. When I got to Polly’s, the darker, sadder townie bar several doors down, I opened the door.
Polly’s smelled like old cigarettes and my feet felt sticky on the worn carpet as I stepped to the bar. There was one other patron in the room—a large, red-faced man at the far end of the bar who was busy circling things in the classified newspaper pages before him.
“What can I getcha?” a petite, female bartender asked me as I took a stool. “We have draft Bud. Everything else is cans and bottles.”
She wore a tiny cropped shirt that appeared to be constructed of macramé over a denim miniskirt. It was distracting how much of her body I could see and I was grateful for the curtain of dark hair that hung behind her. How old could she have possibly been—twenty-two, maybe? I couldn’t tell.
“Budweiser is fine, thanks,” I said. “Are you guys always this quiet on Tuesdays?” I couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say than that.
“Yep, until the preppers let out. Then we get another wave.”
I tried to look casual in my curiosity. “Oh right, the preppers. So what’s the deal with them anyway?”
She handed me my beer and started drying glass mugs, one hip gently leaning against the sink in front of her.
“They’re freaks,” she said matter-of-factly. “I get some weirdos in here, you know? But these guys are, like, totally paranoid. And they never shut up about it. They come in here all fired up after their meetings and lecture me about how I need some kind of bunker for when the end of the world comes. I tell them, if the apocalypse comes, I’m not sticking around this shitty world anyhow.”
“Yeah, they sound really weird.” I nodded into my beer.
She stopped drying mugs for a moment and looked up at me. “So what’s your deal? You’re not our usual type. You hiding from a girlfriend or something?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“That’s what I figured. Not like it’s such a genius guess—most guys are doing that. But you’re more of a Frog type,” she said, referring to my original destination. “I bet you guys live up the hill in an old house, and you’ve got a little organic garden and some nice wine in your basement. What’s wrong with your life that you gotta hide? Sounds nice to me. Did you cheat?”
It was embarrassing and somehow emasculating to be summed up so neatly by this tough little girl.
“No, I didn’t cheat. And we hardly have any nice wine at all!”
I smiled and she tossed her head back to laugh. This was the first time I had spoken with anyone other than Pia in days and the conversation was refreshing.
“I just needed some air, I guess,” I said, sipping my beer.
“That’s what everyone says when things are going bad.”
“Oh, no, things aren’t bad. I wouldn’t say that. Just not good tonight.”
“Sounds like the same thing to me, but what the hell do I know?” she said. “I’ve been living in this town my whole life.”
“I love it here.”
“Sure, because you don’t have to be here,” the bartender said as she dried one mug after another with great efficiency. “I wouldn’t even care if I was in another shitty town, you know?