I
had a warm check-in email from the Super yesterday, full of details about
alarms going off in this and the other buildings he cares for, a picture of
some almost-NYC-marathoners he met, best wishes to JP for his 30th
birthday, and love and hugs. Of course, I don’t know a JP, 30 years old or
otherwise, and don’t believe that my super has even one warm feeling for me at all.
Nor is he, as he signs his note, my dad.
But
this apartment is now my home, and I have been living in it for two long months.
In my dreams I still live in Seattle, or in that funny house up a dirt road in
the country that rambles on and on and has wallpapered rooms beyond rooms
beyond rooms. Two nights ago I spoke to one of our old Seattle neighbors in my
dream, and when I woke up I was in a hotel by Lincoln Center, having fled the
cold and dark apartment with the kids for a few nights of electricity and room
service.
The
storm warnings began the week before. The media was calling it a ”Frankenstorm,”
a triple whammy of a late hurricane, merged with a Nor’easter, coinciding with
a full moon and high tide. We were supposed to get ready. We felt ready; we had
candles.
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| Water supply, 10/27/12 |
Saturday
the 27th we had a nice Italian dinner out and stopped at a
supermarket afterwards to buy some water. Already the shelves were emptied of
certain items. On the way home, we saw a
guy parking his BMW motorcycle on the street, testing its stability and analyzing
its chances of staying upright.
By
5 pm on Sunday the 28th the city had published a map showing that
Zone A was a mandatory evacuation area. I spent some time convincing myself
with maps provided by several sources that we were a few blocks from Zone A
(and were, in fact Zone C). While the wind started to blow, we went out for
sushi, thinking that we should eat the fish that would most certainly spoil if
not consumed before the storm. The red Japanese paper lanterns swung erratically
while we ate.
School was cancelled Monday the 29th, in
anticipation of the storm, so we slept in. Walking the dogs around noon, we could hear a
loud whistling sound that seemed to be coming from the construction site of the
Freedom Tower, a few blocks south. The
Hudson River was much higher than normal, and green, and angry-looking. Plenty
of other New Yorkers were out walking, too, and no one hesitated to duck under
the strips of caution tape tied across the paths leading into the park by the
river. It was obvious to everyone that if there was something interesting to
see yet, it would be behind the yellow plastic caution tape.
 |
| Lots of wind, a little rain |
As the storm arrived, it was mostly wind. One of the dogs
dug herself a den in the couch, pushing all the cushions aside and settling in,
surrounded on all sides. The cat watched with all that creepy cat excitement as
the water droplets ran down the windows. Out on our street, a large piece of
sheet metal landed on our street and thrashed around out there for hours,
finally coming to rest under the bumper of a minivan. Our power went out around
8:30 pm, and we went to bed pretty early. The dog had a nightmare and woofed
and growled in her sleep.
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| Broadway near Worth, facing north, 10/30/12 |
Tuesday the 30th we still had no power, little
mobile phone reception, and I invested a bunch of time and phone battery into
trying to see if Con Edison had an estimate for restoring power. The answer was
that they didn’t know. Our unreliably delivered daily New York Times arrived
(along with Monday’s paper), and though we would see no mail all week (until
Saturday), that newspaper came every morning. We recharged our phones off of my weird
Japanese model Panasonic Toughbook, which has a long battery life, is supposed
to be able to survive a bad fall, and even has a tiny drain hole under the
keyboard so liquids spilled on it won’t ruin it. Everyone complains about my
machine because it has a wacky Japanese keyboard, but it still had juice
Thursday when we gave up and headed for a hotel uptown.
Tuesday we enjoyed the novelty of life in an apartment with
no power. We played board games, burned candles, and ate things we could cook
on the stove. We walked the dogs, getting in and out of the building via the
emergency exit stairs, which are dark, steep and spooky. Everything was a big deal. The BMW motorcycle
lay on its side, leaking oil. The traffic lights were dark, and the buildings
were dark, and mostly there was the sound of generators and sometimes sirens. Businesses
were beginning to clean up their broken windows, pump out the water, throw out the
spoiled food. Every few minutes the police came silently up the middle of Church
Street with their disco party lights bubbling.
On Wednesday we woke up and it was colder and not as much
fun. The Bacon Provider started scrambling for a hotel room, but in the end he
and I took a cab uptown and went grocery shopping instead. The cab ride made me
very car-sick, and had I not been on the verge of barfing, I might have gasped
at the hustle and bustle of perfectly normal-looking midtown Manhattan. People
were on their way to the gym, sight-seeing, and shopping for fancy shoes. Though
I did not care very much about it when I saw it, we got to see the brokenconstruction crane at 57th street which we had heard caused many
buildings to be evacuated, and we got some new food to carry back downtown.
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| Dangling crane at 57th 10/31/12 |
Schlepping several blocks to escape the gridlock, we snagged
a cab around 44th Street. The taxi driver took us back to TriBeCa, passing
the threshold of civilization at 34th street (where the stoplights
stopped); at this point he simply drove down the West Side Highway as fast as
he possibly could, through multiple intersections. That night we made grilled sausages and
artichokes and the Bacon Provider stood, stirring his risotto by candlelight,
and it was perfect as always. After dinner we played Loaded Questions again,
and laughed our heads off.
By Thursday the iPads were dead, everyone badly needed a
shower, and we packed overnight bags and took a cab uptown again. Once in a
hotel room, we took turns in the shower, charged our stack of devices, and had
a decent dinner across the street. The Bacon Provider went back to the
apartment to feed the cat and walk and feed the dogs. It had dropped into the
50s (F) in the apartment so he slept in a big pile with all the pets on the
bed.
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| Frog skeletons at AMNH |
Friday the boys and I went for a walk, thinking we could go
to Central Park, but the combination of New York City Marathon preparations and
the damage from the storm meant the Parks Department had erected barricades to
keep everyone out. As we made our way up Central Park West, a long line of
media trucks was assembling, firing up their generators for a weekend’s
coverage of the marathon (which was not yet cancelled at this point). Knowing that pretty much everyone below 34thstreet was still without power (not to mention the flooding and homes destroyed
in New Jersey, Staten Island and Long Island), it seemed to us that the resources
being poured into the marathon set-up alone could be much better utilized
lighting a dark hospital or pumping out a flooded subway. In search of a
distraction, we ended up at the American Museum of Natural History, where we
looked at an Ivory Ornamental tarantula and some hominid skulls and a giant crystal and a turtle skeleton
and some taxidermied tigers and marveled at how most of this museum is like a time
machine that takes you on a science filed trip to the 1950s. On our way back up
the elevator to our room, some enormous and fit Dutch people lectured us about
American politics and the decision to cancel the marathon.
Saturday we packed up, checked out of the hotel, bought
groceries, and got picked up by the Bacon Provider in our own car, because the
power was on at home and at our garage. Now
we are back in the apartment, which was 4 1/2 days without power and yet the milk never spoiled. Halloween never happened. As glad as I was to get here and see the lights on, it
still feels like part of a long, bad, weird vacation.
