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The news comes obliquely, unvoiced, a flicker of words across the bottom of the screen: World Health Organization raises concern about reports of deaths from avian flu outbreak in Xinjiang Province. Beijing officials deny access to WHO inspectors, calling the outbreak “a local matter.” Moments later, the item is upgraded to a breaking news bulletin. The newscaster, an attractive young woman with practiced authority in her voice, tells her morning audience: “This just in: The World Health Organization has designated an avian flu outbreak in a remote province of western China to be at Phase 5 of the pandemic alert level. A Phase 5 designation involves human-to-human transmission, affecting larger clusters, or communities, of people. At this point, there is a much higher risk of a pandemic although not a certainty. We'll keep you updated as more information becomes available.”
In his farmhouse in the hill country of western Massachusetts, Cyrus Arkwright watches the news about the outbreak and feels his own alarm level ratchet up. It is a foreboding mingled with a sense of vindication that he resists. Will this be it? There have been several flare-ups of lethal flu in China in the recent past. But in those instances, the Chinese government cooperated with international health agencies as to the specifics of the pathogen involved. Now it is clamping down. Why? What are they hiding? In his early seventies, of medium height and slightly stooped, Cyrus has a full head of white hair and an Amish beard of darker hue, a suitable frame for his slow-smiling patrician face. He notes the name of the province. He muses. Phase 5.
He tuned in CNN this warm spring morning to follow a forest fire flaring along the Grand Canyon. That footage showed a blackened expanse east of Canyon Village where junipers, pinion and ponderosa pines once mantled the South Rim. Also news about floods along the Mississippi for the second year in a row. Signs, he thinks, that global warming is looming faster than predicted. Or is Grace, his wife of forty years, right? Is he becoming a connoisseur of disaster? Or what their daughter-in-law Allegra smilingly called a “Malthusiast,” a literary allusion no doubt. Not that Grace hesitated to join him in transforming Sugar Mountain, the old family farm, from a weekend retreat into a self-sustaining refuge for their extended family. Should the need arise.
It took some doing. It began five years before when he retired, in stages, from his architectural practice in Cambridge. They sold their roomy house on Francis Avenue with more than a few regrets and moved back. It was as much a move in time as geographically, at least where Cyrus was concerned. For he grew up on this farm in the northern Berkshires named for its grove of sugar maples where in early spring the sap rises with its sweet bounty. He knows like a farmer the three hundred or so acres, some of it good for pasture and hay, a lot of it ledgy, rising forest that extends nearly to the Vermont border.
His interest in disasters is more than academic. Cyrus is a prepper, a homesteader, a survivalist. Along with millions of others in America and overseas, he calculates the probability of catastrophe as too high to be ignored. A general awareness of possibilities came into sharp focus in 2009 when a bird flu scare made the Centers for Disease Control urge people to take precautions. That blew over, but left Cyrus wondering when avian influenza or some other highly mutagenic virus would turn into a mass killer.
He didn't have to wait for nature to take its course to make the nightmare scenario more than theoretical. In November of 2011, news broke that a virologist working in the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands had tinkered with the genome of the H5N1 virus and come up with a lethal, contagious variant. The research was part of an international effort to understand the virus so that antivirals could be developed to fight it. The new strain caused immediate concern about its possible use as a bioterrorism agent.
Little more than a year later, researchers at China's Harbin Veterinary Research Institute combined a deadly avian flu virus with an infectious strain of human flu. Western critics pointed out that the record of containment at such labs was not reassuring. That news soon dropped from the national consciousness. But not from that of Cyrus Arkwright. He spent time studying what was happening. He concluded that, given the proclivity of people to kill people and the ingenuity involved therein, someone, somewhere would develop and deploy the pathogen as a weapon. Or it might mutate on its own into a monster of death. The human species could survive in relatively large numbers a planet parched by droughts and drowned in floods. A pandemic caused by a weaponized variant of H5N1 would be another matter altogether. The roomy alcove in his studio in which he sits contains an array of electronic equipment. There's a citizens band radio; a wide wall-mounted screen to which Cyrus' laptop can be connected; an aging desktop tower; a mike for the intercom wired into the rooms of the house and those in the outbuildings; and two laptops to be dedicated to surveillance cameras. Jack, their oldest son, an ex-Army Ranger, had dubbed the alcove “comcen,” giving it a military ring that Cyrus, a pacifist, found objectionable. They discussed it, settled on the more neutral if not exactly accurate “recon room.” War and peace, fight or flight, violence, nonviolence figured in the planning from the start. Cyrus conceded, very reluctantly and after much soul searching, that Jack, now living at Sugar Mountain with wife Nicole and their two children, could acquire the means with which to defend themselves. Meaning weapons. But only to be used as a last resort. Grace comes in and sits next to him. He unbends from his laptop and turns to her, his slow smile one of fondness. “Come and have a cup of tea in the real world,” she says, touching his arm and returning his smile, their smile.
In her late sixties and womanly in slacks and cotton blouse, Grace has kept her dark-eyed blond looks. Like Cyrus, her face remains remarkably smooth and animated without the benefit of lifts or transplants. He follows her into the large farmhouse kitchen where she has tea steeping in a pot under a cozy. They add milk and sugar and take their mugs onto the colonnaded side porch where Grace has the mail ready to open. It is something of a morning ritual during which they catch up with each other and any news about the rest of the family.
Settled into the comfortable wicker armchairs, she hands him a letter with an impressive looking letterhead. “The McFeralls have hired another lawyer. He wants to meet with us and our legal counsel to review the case.” Cyrus grimaces, distracted. He can't get the term “larger clusters” out of his head. He says, “There is no case. God, will they never give up?”
They are talking about a claim by the McFerall brothers, Duncan and Bruce, to the effect that Sugar Mountain belongs to their branch of the family. The brothers base their claim on a maze of documents and non-documents stretching back more than a century. Grace shrugs. “It gives them bragging rights. We all need those.” “It runs deeper than that,” Cyrus says, thinking how his distant kin have pursued the matter with a dogged and at time ugly animosity. He is also thinking, the news out of Xinjiang fretting his mind, that the brothers could be a problem if the worst happened. “Should I send it on to Frank?” “I suppose.”
Frank is their second son and a New York attorney. He dismissed the case several years before as “utterly without merit” while providing minimal lawyerly responses on a pro familia basis. “Speaking of Frank,” she says, showing him an opened envelope, “he's sent us a check for five thousand dollars and a note saying he can't make the rehearsal but is with us in spirit.” Cyrus is looking south where new leafage colors the Berkshire hills with a tinge of chartreuse. A large raptor circles in a thermal. An eagle? More like a vulture. He is not unaffected by what might be omens.
The rehearsal Grace refers to is a periodic gathering of the extended family in which they inhabit the farm for a long weekend to test the feasibility of a longer stay. Cyrus, sipping tea and watching the bird, doesn't repeat what he has said before: Frank might like the idea of a refuge for himself, his wife Allegra, and three-year-old Lily, but being a busy and successful lawyer, he doesn't want to spend the time the others put into it. He sends money instead. Unlike Jack, their eldest, who moved to Sugar Mountain with Nicole and nine-year-old Mary and seven-year-old Cy at the end of a long stint in the Army. More than two years now. In that time, Jack and Cyrus, with the help of a contractor, have created living quarters for as many as twenty people. Thad, their youngest son, comes out regularly from Boston with his partner Duvall Jackson. At the farm, Thad works on wiring, the electronics, the power systems. Duvall carpenters with the skill of a cabinet maker. “You make us look good,” Cyrus told Duvall more than once. “Don't let it bother you,” Grace says, referring to Frank's letter. “He really is busy...” “It's not Frank,” Cyrus says. “He'll be here when it counts.” “Then what is it?” “There's been a flu outbreak in a remote part of China.” “Doesn't that happen all the time?” “Right. But this time the Chinese authorities don't want any outsiders poking around. The WHO has designated it as Phase 5.” “That's serious, isn't it?” “Could be very serious. I was wondering if Jack...” “Jack's gone with Nicole and the kids to Greenfield. It's Cy's birthday tomorrow and he wants a Count of Monte Christo outfit. With a real sword.” Little Cy might share a name with his grandfather, but not his antipathy for the appurtenances of war. “What do you need him for?” “I was wondering if his friend in intelligence might know something.” She reaches out and takes his hand. “Dear man, you are obsessing again.” “I know, but this time... I don't know, it's at Phase 5 and there's something about it...” He trails off. They don't have to voice what is going through their minds. Are we crazy? Perhaps, but... But there has been the pleasure of building, rebuilding, remodeling, reviving. Not to mention Nicole's plans for a B&B. Then the rightness, nay the righteousness, of working toward self-sustainability — what with the garden, the orchard, the goats, the chickens and the huge old sow. Even if they still buy a lot of their groceries and cheat by having the Neills, who live on the other side of the old Fallgren place, help with the chores from time to time. So that, in the end, it could be taken as a kind of hobby, a serious hobby.
Cyrus lives the conundrum of the prepper: He strives to prepare for what he dreads might happen. Dreads — at least by his better self, that upright, principled, Quaker meeting persona he presents to the world and, most of the time, to himself. But there are darker levels in the character of Cyrus Arkwright. Doesn't the teeming, ravening human world need a corrective? Would it really be a great tragedy if about half of the seven billion or so human beings ceased to exist? Well, yes, it would. “Are Thad and Duvall going to make it?” he asks. “They say they're on board. Which is good. Nicole needs Duvall's help with the garden.” “He does have a green thumb.” It is a standing family joke of sorts, Duvall being black, at least on paper.
