The madness has subsided. We’re safe and comfortable, which I realize is more than I can say for a lot of people in New Jersey, Queens, and elsewhere. We were far from the worst of it, I know. But I figured I might as well set everything down now before it washes away like so many trees and debris.
I would hope that those of my friends who thought it was ‘all a bunch of hype, just like Irene’ are now sufficiently chastened. But I don’t think even those of us who took it seriously expected something on this scale. As of Monday evening I was envisioning something like the following: staying in while drinking wine and eating all the snacks we’d stocked up on and playing Settlers of Catan by candlelight until the power went back on in a day or so, at which point we’d switch to watching movies until the subways came back in another day or so and I no longer had an excuse to stay home from work.
The first night went by pretty much as expected. We met our next door neighbors and sat around eating chips and playing with the dog. The older residents were walking around reminding everyone to fill up their tubs with water while we still had it. A bunch of us went outside for a bit to watch the storm and stared in excitement as the trees toppled and the cars were swallowed up by water. It felt thrilling and communal.
But by Tuesday morning, the thrill was gone, and the feeling of ‘now what?’ began to set in. Walking around the neighborhood that morning was surreal – the city that never sleeps looked not just asleep, but dead. The only things open were some delis and 99 cent stores, most of which had long run out of batteries and candles. ATMs were all down, so the cash you had before the storm was all you had. It was during all this that I realized the mood was a little tense. People were on edge, crowding into the few open stores, complaining about the prices, and angry that they couldn’t find what they were looking for.
At this point none of us had had any information from the outside world since the previous night. My neighbors who still had service had only managed to receive a few garbled calls and texts overnight (one of which was a cryptic “Did you guys see the explosion?”) before their phones went dead, while my fully charged smartphone had been reduced to a shiny and expensive paperweight. We had no idea how much of the city had lost power or how long it would last. It was at this point that I suggested we swing by the ConEd building on the waterfront to see what was going on. We saw an army of workers and trucks around what we now realized was the aftermath of the aforementioned explosion. Flagging one of them down, we were told to our great disbelief that the power was out all across lower Manhattan and wouldn’t be back on for a week. He did tell us, however, that the power was on above 39th street, and it was “like a whole different city”.
Getting back to StuyTown, the communal feeling was gone. The whole place seemed deserted. The few people we saw were rushing about their own business – all the neighborly feeling from the previous night had completely evaporated. The front doors had been propped open because no one was sure how long the electric locks/card scanners would keep working, but along with the darkened stairwells and hallways (the backup lights had failed a few hours after the rest of the power) this left us feeling somewhat vulnerable.
Realizing we would not be able to last a week without electricity, water, heat, or electronic communication, everyone began weighing evacuation plans while two of us decided to walk the 20 blocks north to civilized territory with a bag full of electronics to check in with the outside world while sucking up all the juice we could. We found a Hilton and set up camp in the lobby. Walking further down 42nd Street I saw people who had not been as fortunate squatting on the sidewalk, plugged into every tree and streetlight, and camped out in the lobbies of closed banks.
It was at this point that phrases like ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced persons’ began to occur to me, however exaggerated the sentiment was. Despite there being power in this area, the chaos was palpable. Traffic was slowed to a standstill by hordes of emergency vehicles. Most non-essential businesses were still closed and the two pizza shops that were open were swarmed with lines and barely had the basic ingredients.
I should note at this point that the feeling of being a refugee could not have been anything more than a temporary experience rather than an actual state, the key difference (among others) being that I knew even before reconnecting my phone that we would have more comfortable places to go and that it was only a matter of choosing the most convenient one and finding a way to get there. Nevertheless, this turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated.
We had loaded up clothes and supplies to last a few days, our two animals, and bags of food from the freezer, thinking that we could find a cab to take us all the way across town and up 30 blocks, where a fully furnished and operational apartment was waiting for us. This was not the case. Every cab that passed was marked off duty, and we soon realized that having a dog with us was not working in our favor. Realizing that we were going to have to walk at least part of the way until we managed to catch a bus, we were forced to jettison most of the frozen meat that I had been stockpiling in times of plenty. It was never easy having to dump your inventory in Diablo, but it proved even harder in real life. All in all I managed to save only four steaks and four yogurts.
The NYCT bus system had gone overnight from being a last resort mainly used by the elderly to the only transit option for the entire city. After seeing five overfilled M15 buses go by, we gave up and walked further to try and catch the M23. Once we were on, a kindly old man asked where we were going and suggested that instead of taking the bus up 8th ave, we take the M11 up 10th, as it would be less crowded and there would be less traffic. This really was shaping up to be like an RPG, but a lot less fun.
Approximately 90 minutes later we got off the bus in Midtown West. None of us had showered for at least three days, and with overflowing backpacks and pets in tow I realized that we now looked like those godawful crust punk squatter kids. I wondered if the uptown residents and business owners who had not been affected were annoyed at the influx of filth-encrusted and haggard downtown refugees.
As I sit here catching up on emails and Facebook posts many things occur to me. Of course I’ve already seen the discussions about how this will affect the upcoming election, both logistically and ideologically, and whether the antipathy towards government and civil institutions that has been so fashionable of late should not be re-evaluated in light of such events.
But I’m not yet ready to jump back into the fray. I am sure that this post and others from the last few days will provide many #firstworldproblems fodder for those of you who are still amused by such things. I’m also aware of how much worse other people in other parts have been hit (though I only became fully aware of this a couple of hours ago when we finally got in front of a working TV). But that’s not the point. What has struck me throughout all this and what now still sticks in my head is a new-found appreciation of just how fragile this thing we call civilization is. All of those shows, books, and video games that we can’t get enough of – Fallout, Walking Dead, World War Z, Revolution (which we’d just watched the first episode of a few days ago) are never quite as safely far away as we think. And if you happen to think, as I do, that there are good scientific reasons to believe that this sort of thing will happen with increasing frequency in the future…well, let’s not get into that now.
Images via Wikipedia.
