2 There were party lights strung between the FEMA trailers. They cast this magnifique little glow over the tiny town that had been built up in the North Meadow. It was really just a bunch of trailers, and of course people wouldn’t stay in them for very long, but it was Friday night and people had just come for the weekend, and there was this electricity. Generators, powered by the solar sand murals, and happy people on stationary bicycles, hummed and kept the food cold, the ice cold, the stoves hot, the people warm. We were all outside the trailers in our winter coats, drinks in our hands. I had come alone, but everywhere I turned, people wanted to talk to me.

“My insurance money came in the other day,” a woman in a dark, heavy pea coat was telling me. “They say it will still be a while before the disaster assistance money from the government gets here, but who wouldn’t have private insurance, the way things have been? It’s not what my apartment was worth, but it’s enough for a new place somewhere inland.”

She lifted her plastic cup full of clinking ice cubes and amber liquid, and I raised my own, full of vodka and soda.

“To new beginnings,” she said.

My father had been right—there was a real feeling of community, one like I don’t know if I’ve ever known before. People may have been neighbors in their old lives, but they may have just been overflowing with post-disaster goodwill, I don’t know. Everyone seemed to care about everyone else.

After chatting with a few more people, I met a man maybe a few years older than me. He had diamond studs over the arch of one eyebrow, and said he was in acquisitions.

“Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “What sort of things do you like to acquire?”

“Small towns, mostly,” he said. “The ones that were abandoned in droughts, after hurricanes.”

“What do you do with them?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. Most of them are still too empty, too run down. But when the coasts crumble, people will want them and they’ll come back. Good investments, I think.”

We talked for a while, drinking more, then ended up in his trailer. It was so chou and rustic, just a little bed in one corner with a sleeping bag, and a cooler and camp stove.

“It reminds me of back when there were still big forests, when I was a kid,” he said. His eyes were filled with nostalgia. “It’s like camping out.”