Uncouth Reflections

Paleo Retiree writes:

The Question Lady and I were in town — that’d be New York City — a year ago, when Hurricane Sandy hit. It was quite a little adventure. For one thing, the hurricane itself was sort of a dud, at least from where we sat. Aside from some wonderfully ominous lighting effects and some weirdly colored clouds, you could have been forgiven for thinking that you were enduring a bad-but-not-terrible rainstorm, nothing worse. But then the power went out.

If you weren’t following the news closely at the time: A Con Ed power station on 14th St. was flooded, shorted out and took down all of the power for the lower half of the island of Manhattan, from (if I remember right) 33rd St. on south. That’s the part of town where we live. The power stayed off for anywhere from four days to several weeks.

We weren’t in any danger, and by no means did we suffer flooding or losses the way people in some areas of the city did. (My dental hygienist, for instance, who has an apartment out in the far reaches of Queens, still hasn’t returned to it.) But we were majorly inconvenienced. No electricity meant no elevators, no lights, no heat and no water. For days! To use a toilet, we had to walk 25 blocks to visit a restaurant. (We timed our eating and snacking very carefully.) Most stores in our neighborhood were closed. Street lights and stop lights were dark.

For a day, it was a giddy, topsy-turvy disruption in the usual routine. Kind of refreshing, really: shake it up, baby. Fun, even. I could have spent hours watching cars and buses negotiate intersections without the help of stoplights, for instance. How many crashes would there be? New York City has a lot of cars and trucks, as well as a lot of very aggressive drivers … but with the application of care and consideration, damned if the traffic didn’t flow OK. Maybe there really is something to this “self-organization” thing after all.

Plus: a crisis brings out the best in New Yorkers. Although when life is going smoothly Manhattanites can be brusque and rude, when there’s a crisis a lot of big hearts go on display. In the aftermath of Sandy, people struck up friendly, concerned conversations with complete strangers; uptown restaurants welcomed what everyone called “exiles” from downtown and let them use tables — and avail themselves of restrooms and wi-fi — for hours; cabbies drove residents around the darkness of nighttime lower Manhattan with no complaints. We were touched by many generous actions and gestures. People really went out of their way for each other, and doesn’t life need more of that?

After the first day had passed, though, the adventure got more and more tedious. How many times do you really want to end the day by lugging home a backpack full of bottled water? With no lights and no TV, how to kill the hours before bed? Bathing — or at least giving the pits, feet and crotch a quick rinse — in cool water poured from plastic bottles got to be a serious drag. We were very glad when life returned to normal.

On the anniversary of Sandy, I thought I’d share some snaps that I took during the hurricane and its aftermath.

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