like a hurricane
remembering a superstorm
[this week marks the 11th anniversary of superstorm sandy. this is my dispatch from the days that ensued]
November, 2012. We were post Sandy and on day seven of our power outage. I had been camped out at my mother’s house — where there was light and warmth — a few blocks away and I was driving home to where we lived at the time to pick up some clothes. I made the quarter mile drive with my fingers crossed. I was hoping against hope I’d get there and see my house lit up like the Fourth of July, but instead I was greeted by darkness and the unwelcome smell of things rotting in the refrigerator. “Tomorrow,” I tell myself. “Tomorrow I’ll get some big garbage bags and clean this fridge out.” I stopped. Let the thought run around my head for a minute. Then I burst into tears. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Are we really going to have to do this again tomorrow?
I was standing in my dark, smelly kitchen, an unholy mess of empty water bottles, half finished cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and piles of unopened mail scattered around me. Living in the dark and cold, you let go of any idea of order and cleanliness. By day three you find yourself spilling a container of dried cranberries on the kitchen floor and you leave it there. Out of despair, spite, anger, you don’t know. You just know this is not your beautiful house, this is not your beautiful life. I kicked a Poland Springs bottle across the room and then in a half-hearted attempt to bring some order to my life, picked it up, took it outside and dumped it in the recycling bin. I put the recycling out at the curb as if this was a normal day.
I walked back to my car, dejected and just a little pissed off. Dusk had arrived and the lights in the houses across the street were starting to flicker to life. Those homes never lost power. How can that be, I ask myself too many times. I know how it can be. I know — after several occurrences like this — that we are on a different grid. But their warmly lit homes only serve as a reminder of what I didn’t have and I found myself irrationally angry at them, especially the ones who had their Thanksgiving lawn decorations blown up and lit up, Charlie Brown and a giant turkey taunting us as they tilted in the wind. Have some respect, I thought. Don’t flaunt your electricity when you neighbors have none. I kept my misplaced anger in check when it came to the widow directly across the street. For five nights in a row, she let us run an extension cord into her garage so we could at least have a lamp and charged phones. She got a pass. The other ones? They could kiss my ass.
Friday was the sixth night and given that the night before we woke up at 3am feeling frostbitten, we decided to camp out at my parents’ electrified house for the duration, even though it was already crowded with my two children, my nephew and my daughter’s friend who had the great misfortune of visiting from Arizona the week of a hurricane. We packed up the dog and some clothes Saturday morning and traversed to mom’s house, making several “We’ll die of dysentery” jokes along the way.
And so day seven found me sitting in the kitchen I grew up in, my mother cooking dinner for an army, a pervasive sense of “Who is going to break down first and kill everyone?” hanging thick in the air.
We had started preparing for Sandy on Sunday because we liked to wait until the last minute to do things. We battened the hatches (still not sure what hatches are), took in our Halloween decorations to cut down on possible projectiles, made sure we had plenty of food, bottled water and dog food.
You sit and wait at that point. It’s all you can do. You look outside once in a while, maybe you take some photos for posterity, maybe you post those photos to instagram like a million other people. You watch. You wait. You listen to the wind that howls like a wounded ghost. You watch the trees bend and shake with the wind, a bizarre dance of destruction as leaves fly and branches break off to form their own little dance party in the street.
At 4:30 pm, just as dinner finished cooking, the lights flickered, the cable went out, and then the dreaded whirring sound as everything electronic powered down.
“Dinner is served,” I said, trying to keep a smile on.
We sat in the living room in near darkness, eating pasta, listening to the rain batter the windows and the wind batter our rain gutters.
“Heat,” my daughter said.
That was something I really didn’t think about. We had enough flashlights and candles to light up a city block. We had enough ready-to-eat food to feed a small army. We had charged up laptops and phones and iPads, enough to keep us occupied for at least a two day outage.
But we wouldn’t have heat.
That was going to be a problem.
“Maybe it won’t be that bad. Maybe the power will come back on quick. Maybe…”
“Mom…”
“Right.”
The summer before we had Hurricane Irene and lost power for six days. Surely that wouldn’t happen this time. I think the local power authority learned a hard lesson with that hurricane.
Well, being that I am writing about day seven, you see how that lesson played out.
By 9:00 pm we had eaten all the junk food, wore down the battery on all our devices and annoyed the hell out of each other. The glow of candles and the patter of the rain — things I earlier thought would feel cozy and warm — were no match for the moods setting in. The wind was blowing harder than we thought it would. And while the rain did not hit our area with the force with which it hit others, it was still coming down hard and each drop seemed to unnerve us more.
It was the sound of the storm more than anything that made me realize this was not going to be an easy one to ride out.
At 8:30 I tried to call my mother. I knew she was alone — my father was at the firehouse cooking for all the firefighters on standby — and I wanted to make sure she was okay. Cell service was out. So my daughter Natalie and I decided to drive over there, check on mom and charge our devices while we were there.
No, I didn’t go there just to charge my phone and Macbook. I really wanted to check on her. I swear.
The ride over there is about five blocks long. Not city blocks. Suburb blocks. Walking distance, if you’re not feeling lazy. It was the longest drive of my life. The winds were gusting at about 70 mph at that point and you could see ancient, thick trees bending in the wind. The roads were dusted with branches in some parts and completely inaccessible, blocked by downed trees, in others. Sidewalks were uprooted along with trees. Power lines were down. It was surreal and eerie and frightening. Every time I drove past a swaying tree I sped up, visions of it falling down on us dancing in my head.
Headline:
LOCAL WOMAN JUST HAD TO GO OUT IN THE STORM TO CHARGE HER PHONE, KILLING DAUGHTER IN PROCESS.
Nobody wants to be a part of that.
We made it to my mother’s house, plugged everything in and enjoyed the bright lights and cold refrigerator in my parents’ home.
That’s when I started to read the news. East Village flooded. Breezy Point on fire. Atlantic City Boardwalk gone. People trapped in homes. Facades torn off buildings.
We drove back home and a feeling of doom took over. I felt like every bad thing that could happen was going to happen that night.
We made it back home and there was nothing left to do but go to bed.
And that’s pretty much the way it plays out every night when you have no power. Soon after the sun sets, you go through the motions of playing board games by candlelight but all you really want to do is go to bed and have tomorrow and a chance at restored power arrive.
Tuesday brought sunlight and the scope of destruction. A drive through the neighborhood was all I needed to realize the winds that battered my house the night before made a game of swatting trees into houses, of flinging trampolines into fences and fences into cars. It wasn’t until later, when I went to my parents’ house to watch the news, that I saw the damage Sandy inflicted on the tri-state area.
Wednesday brought police in bullet proof vests to Walmart and local supermarkets.
Thursday brought a gas shortage and with that, long gas lines reminiscent of the 1970s. And with the gas lines came short tempers, raised fists and a National Guard presence.
Friday. I can see my breath in my house. Nobody should ever see their breath inside their own house. The kids were staying at my parents and that night I slept fitfully on the couch, five blankets not even enough to keep us anything near warm.
Saturday we temporarily moved into my mother’s house. We could not spend another night nearly freezing to death in the darkness. I was fortunate to have somewhere to go, somewhere warm, somewhere with hot food and a hot shower and perhaps way too many games of Scattegories.
I can’t tell you how many rounds of that game we played. I lost count at 26. I’m pretty sure my mind was gone at that point.
We started out so well. Everyone played nice, no one cheated, no one questioned anyone else’s answers, we laughed and had a great time.
It might have been around day two where the game devolved into a surreal commentary on life by eight delirious individuals suffering some sort of post-traumatic power outage disorder.
By the time we noticed all our answer were hurricane related, it was too late to turn back to normalcy.
[WEATHER RELATED THINGS beginning with the letter S.]
Sandy
Stupid Sandy (double points!)
Then we started fighting. My son was putting down the same word for every category. THINGS IN A RESTAURANT. Lemons. THINGS IN A REFRIGERATOR. Lemons. GIRL’S NAME. Lemon. My nephew followed suit, but with more commentary attached. COUNTRIES. Bored. DINNER ITEMS. Bored. THINGS IN A CLOSET. Bored.
We became a divided family. There were those who wanted to keep playing and those who thought a third day of Scattergories was not only unnecessary but posed a danger to the mental well being of everyone in the house. Because the idea of watching yet another episode of Supernatural with my mother was out of the question for all of us, we kept playing.
It played out like some ridiculous Twilight Zone episode, one where participants are forced to play a quiz game that never ends and where the answers are all meant to antagonize.
“Taco Bell is NOT an ethnic food.”
“Why did you put my name under THINGS YOU SHOUT”?
“I don’t think that’s what they mean by 4 Letter Words, mom.”
“Your mother is not an ITEM IN THE KITCHEN.”
And thus Scattegories became a game of Last Man Standing. One by one, people got aggravated, upset and insulted. They threw cards on the floor, flung pencils across room and said things like “I am NEVER spending a post-hurricane week with you again!”
Then we were suddenly at day seven. What do you get someone for the week anniversary of their power outage?
A return of power, I would hope. A return to normalcy, to routine.
Not to be. Day eight, day nine came and went. The days started to blend into each other, the nights feeling like days as we rarely slept. A pre-winter storm arrived, snow and sleet adding insult to injury and as if that wasn’t enough to throw into the mix, my parents’ power went out an hour after the blizzard hit.
Powerless.
I felt that word in so many ways. Without power in our home, without power in our temporary home. Without the power to do something for those hit harder than we were. Powerless.
It was on day 13, as I stood in a baggage check line a JFK, getting ready to leave for a vacation we planned a year ago — a vacation I felt guilty for embarking on while my family was still powerless — we got a call from my daughter.
“We have power,” she shouted. “We have power!”
In a way, I wish I was there for the moment when the lights switched back on, when all the machines clunked and whirred back to life. But I was in my ways glad to be getting out of Dodge, escaping what had been a nerve-wracking two weeks.
I’m left with a lingering anxiety about losing power. Every time we have a storm and the lights even flicker, I panic. I remember the cold, the darkness, the sleepless nights. I remember ten people crowded into a small house. I remember Scattegories.