The Storm

I stuffed plastic bags and duct tape into the cracks of my window frames, turned the fridge down as cold as it would go, packed my little blue suitcase, and left my apartment on Sunday afternoon at the same time as my upstairs neighbor S and her cat. It all felt very familiar. Didn't we just evacuate for a hurricane last year? S said that she was taking her cat to her sister's place in Brooklyn Heights, but that she might come back herself and weather the storm in our building because Irene hadn't been that bad. On the one hand, that is specious reasoning and I did not agree with her with her logic--on the other hand, I left my laptop computer and all my jewelry in my own apartment, so I guess the specious was going around. 

I stood at the bus stop and watched the restaurant put tarps and sandbags down over their cellar doors. Two bulldozers were parked on top of the giant pile of salt across the street. The East River is right on the other side of that pile. Clearly the dock workers thought that shit was about to get real.

Won't the salt just dissolve in a flood?

A guy with a thick beard and horn-rimmed glasses came up next to me evacuating with nothing except a Scrabble box under his arm. He didn't even bother to pack a change of underoos. Hipsters and hurricanes, I thought. He's either the smartest or the dumbest person at this bus stop right now, but there's no way to tell until the storm actually hits. The bus pulled up and away we all went, leaving Flood Zone A and heading for the hills.

In hurricane preparedness, you learn that the most important aspect of surviving a hurricane (after you get to high ground, of course) is to keep yourself occupied. Panic is your biggest enemy. So for all of Sunday and Monday, while the BF and I were crammed into his little uptown studio, I read my books, did yoga, took baths, and groomed like a nervous cat until I'd shed my long hair in every corner of the apartment. And then it was time for a walk.

This was before the storm had made landfall. No one really knew what was coming, so attitudes ranged from the blase to the barely-sane. Vans full of police officers cruised the streets, looking very official and prepared. A crowd of them (what do you call a group of police officers? A pod? A pack? A pride?) came into a pizza place and the BF looked at me with his I-didn't-do-nuttin' face, but they were just getting their lunches. As if they'd be coming for him. They're coming for me if they're coming for anybody. I come from interesting stock. Parents have been warning their children not to play with my family for generations.

After lunch, we went to a grocery store thinking we might pick up a sack of clementines, but the lines were crazy-long and the shelves were almost cleaned out. Almost. Apparently when the end is nigh and civilization totters to the brink, people look at turnips, pineapples and cranberries and say, "Fuck that noise, leave it for the looters."

We got our first hint that this whole storm thing was serious business when the crane blew over backwards in midtown and the BF's family had to evacuate their building.

Witchcraft!

That was Monday afternoon. On Monday night, the tide came in, the hurricane hit, and our troubles began. We didn't know it at the time, though. The BF closed the curtains, turned on the white noise machine, and we had a quiet evening at home ignoring each other while we read our respective books. The lights flickered once or twice and he filled up the bathtub just in case, but we woke the next morning to heat, power, and Internet as if nothing had happened. Our biggest concern was if we'd get the day off or not.

Then we turned on the television.

Breezy Point, Queens. Anyone who makes a Call of Duty or a Mad Max joke is going to hell.

And checked the New York Times online.

Subway station in the Financial District.

 And Googled images of my area of Brooklyn.

Red Hook, the neighborhood just south of my own.

I tried to adhere to my Girl Scout training. We turned off the news and read our books some more. We watched Golden Girls and a re-run of Beetlejuice on television. We even went outside for a walk. Damage was minimal on the Upper West Side, a few downed trees and a lot of untidy leaves in the gutters. But the air pressure was still all weird from the storm and it felt like someone was jamming chopsticks into my eardrums. We went back inside and tried to stay busy, but I was starting to worry about what had happened to my building.

I live in a funny little neighborhood that no one really knows about. Google searches for my street just kept pulling up images of flooded Red Hook, the neighborhood immediately south of my own, and with all public transit shut down and all the bridges and tunnels closed, there was no way for me to get home and check my apartment. Important lessons were learned that day about getting my neighbor's phone numbers and not being so anti-social.

Wednesday was worse. My office was open, but there was no way I could get off the island of Manhattan. The BF got to go back to his normal life because he can walk to his school, but I was stuck in his apartment watching re-runs of X-Files and another round of Beetlejuice when I wasn't watching the news. It was Halloween and I had my costume with me, but I knew there was no way I was going to celebrate. My heart wasn't in it. I couldn't read, do yoga, or even groom. I just sat on the bed and wailed to no one in particular that I wanted to go home.

Fortunately, that was when R called me. "Are you coming over?" Fuck and yes, I was coming over. She lives across the park from the BF, and buses were running again, so I peeled myself off the mattress and hit the road. Traffic was Independence Day gridlock. I hopped a crosstown to the east side, but around Frederick Douglass Blvd my patience ran out and I just decided to walk. I got as far as 96th and 5th Ave. before my patience for walking ran out and I decided to get back on a bus. And it was the exact same bus I'd gotten off of half an hour before. (I recognized the driver and the Halloween costumes.)

When R heard my wailing about not knowing what was happening at my building, she stuffed me full of cookies and tea and we played Scrabble for a few hours. I think that hipster at the bus stop was on to something, because I felt a lot better afterwards. The BF joined us, we ordered take-out, and watched Spirited Away with her neighbor's cats, which is almost like Halloween.

He's dressed as Charlie Chaplin!

Thursday. My fourth day of evacuation. I was determined to make it my last. The night before I'd called the restaurant in my building and asked them what had happened on my street, and the hostess said they were dry, powered, and open for business. That was as much information as I was going to get without being there in person, and public transit was slowly coming back to life, so I put my books and teddy bear back in my little blue suitcase, kissed my BF good-bye, and started off across Manhattan.

I figured I could take the subway south, take a cross-town bus east, another bus south again, and catch one of the shuttle buses that was taking people between Brooklyn and the blacked-out parts of Manhattan. Even in daylight, it was eerie to go below 34th Street and see block after block of dark traffic lights and shuttered stores. It felt like a movie set before the director yells "Action!"

A city divided.

The bus spit me out at Jay Street and I began my walk home because I have never been able to find the start of my bus route in Downtown Brooklyn and the aftermath of a hurricane was a bad time to fight that battle again. Atlantic Avenue looked all right, streets clear, no windows broken or awnings down. I decided to be optimistic and stopped at the grocery store, and then I got pessimistic and stopped at the liquor store.

The bulldozers were still parked on the giant pile of salt, just where I'd left them on Sunday. The bookstore and the restaurant were both open for business, and the super of my building had put away the sandbags. The front door pushed away drifts of leaves when I opened it, but I didn't smell any sewage or mold and there was no mud on the floor. Apparently--impossibly, miraculously--my neighborhood hadn't flooded at all.

My own apartment was toasty as a hippie at Burning Man and everything in my fridge was frozen solid. The bonsai had shed some leaves but was otherwise fine. Every light turned on and the Internet fired right up when I plugged my router back in. I can't be certain, but I think that the heat and power and water was on the whole time I was gone. Would you believe I had more clean-up to do after Irene than I did after Sandy? I had nothing worse to deal with on Thursday than a carton of half-and-half that froze while I was gone and got all grainy when it thawed.

Considering the devastation in other parts of the city--and the lack of power, water, and heat to tens of thousands of people across the state--and the billions of dollars of damage we'll need to repair the damage--and considering that I live a block away from the East River and less than a mile away from a neighborhood that was under 6 feet of water on Monday night--I am one absurdly lucky Big Island Rachel. 

I made my triumphant return to work on Friday and immediately got in a fight with a customer over the phone. It felt good to be back to normal.

Another Hurricane

Oh, now this is just getting ridiculous:

Hurricane Sandy may reach the northeast early next week, making this the second hurricane I've endured since moving to New York.

Excuse me, is this where you keep your fragile constructs of misguided human superiority?

Hurricane Irene barely scrapped by us last August as a downgraded tropical storm. A quick refresh: Girl Scout badge in Hurricane Preparedness, living in the flood zone, had to evacuate, Daddio told me not to do that thing everyone in our family always does by refusing to get out of the way--it's all a rich tapestry of funny observations and drunken street dancing, you should read it again.

Maybe Sandy will hit us, maybe it won't. I don't know because I'm only psychic with cats and the living dead. But even though Irene spared New York City from anything much worse than snarky Village Voice articles on how to get laid during the storm, parts of Jersey and Vermont were hit pretty hard. So I won't lie, I'm a little nervous.

At least I still have the pint of leftover corn liquor in my cupboard from the last time this happened. It's totally un-drinkable, but I'm set if I need to disinfect any wounds or make Molotovs for the looting that inevitably accompanies the complete breakdown of civilization. 

Hurricane in Brooklyn

Tornado, earthquake, a tsunami if you count the one that came from Japan to my relatives on the Big Island, and now a hurricane. This is shaping up to be a really weird year for Big Island Rachel. No wonder church attendance was so good at the Catholic church on Court Street today.

Being from Hawaii, I have a Girl Scout badge in Hurricane Preparedness--Survival Camp at Kilohana, 1997--and good thing, too, because my little perfectly-Rachel-sized apartment on the East River ended up being in the evacuation zone. My Daddio left me a voicemail AND sent an email telling me to head for the hills and "don't do that family thing where we say, 'What is this strom you speak of, I can handle it!'" It was sound advice from the parental unit to the latest generation of that family the other kids were warned never to play with. I confess that I did have a passing fancy to stay in my apartment just to see if I could handle it, but when Daddio tells me to get out, I know it's serious.

Fortunately, me Mum was in town and staying a few blocks inland out of the flood zone, so I spent the night with her after hurricane proofing my apartment. Here is my "go-bag." Sure, it has all the usual stuff: passport, computer, three books, two graphic novels, five comic books (my worst nightmare is being stuck on a deserted island with nothing to read), blankets, clothes. I also brought Spam, couscous, my teddy bear (seen squashed up against the plastic bag) a chocolate donut that has been in my cupboard for so long it qualifies as a scientific experiment, and candles, except the only candles I had were tiny little Chanukah candles, so I ended up having to bring my menorah, too, since it was the only candle holder that would fit them. And of course, you can see my blue rubber boots there. A girl on the street yelled, "A shout-out to all my sisters rocking the boots and shorts!" I was the height of fashion that day, even without a bra.

I hung up my heavy winter curtains and covered the body--I mean, all of my clothes with my winter down comforter. If I'd been more clever about it, I would have simply lifted the closet rod off the wall with all the clothes still on it, but as you can see by the bare rod resting on the heap, that eminently practical idea didn't occur to me until it was too late. I figured that if the worst did happen and my windows burst apart in the gale like deadly flowers of glass and mayhem, all my expensive and fancy clothes (not always correlated, my fanciest gown was only $10 at the Hilo second-hand store) would have a modicum of protection.

I also filled up the bathtub. I got to impress a lot of people at work on Friday by informing them that the bathtub full of water, a standard preventative measure when a hurricane is bearing down on you, was not really for drinking, but rather for flushing the toilet in the event that the electricity went out and the toilet couldn't pump water into the tank. For reasons unknown to me, New York City water is a gentle shade of teal. I'm not sure if this picture really captures that soothing, sea-like hue, but trust me, that shit is teal.Saturday night was spent on the stoop of Mum's sublet, drinking wine and singing all the songs we used to sing when she drove me to high school in the morning. I think I slept through the actual hurricane, which didn't pass over us until 2 or 3 in the morning. It passed quickly and had downgraded to a mere tropical storm by that time anyway, but Mum said the winds still sounded like a freight train as they roared through.This morning, we went to inspect the apartment. The windows are all unbroken, but two of the three windows had leaked and there were a few puddles on the floor. The curtains in the bedroom were so heavy with water they'd pulled the curtain rod down. But underneath the down comforter, the body--I mean, my fancy clothes were bone dry. Everything is coming up Milhouse. Thanks, Girl Scouts of America!

And the bathtub? Totally empty. I always suspected that my bathtub plug was slightly defective. Oh, well. If there had been serious enough flooding that the power had gone out (all New York City power lines are buried in the ground), my riverside apartment would have had sewage and river water backing up into the pipes, and flushing the toilet would have been an exercise in futility. Rank, rotting futility.

Here are some tree branches that fell over. Fellow curious Brooklynites for scale. So long, Irene. Don't let the doorknob hit ya where the door should've bit ya.