The last ten days have been such an emotional rollercoaster! I spent the last few days in Florida, but today was the first time in ten days that I came home to an apartment with electricity, heat, water, hot water, cable, and internet. It was about eleven days ago that Hurricane Sandy hit New York; with it, my apartment, my office, and the rest of lower Manhattan, lost power. With the loss of electricity came the failure of pumps to send water to higher floors like mine and the loss of steam to provide heat to the building. The elevators didn't function and the stairwells had no emergency lighting, so I used a flashlight to illuminate the eighteen flights I learned to skip down and trudge up.
On the first day, my concerns were light: we packed up our fridge, filling three bags with things like frozen wild-caught salmon and the autumn stew I'd cooked the day before (preparing to huddle at home but without thinking through the implications of power-loss), and brought them to a friend's restaurant in midtown. We had a car, we drove uptown, spent the day with friends, found a hot shower and watched tv; returned home to our dark - yet romantic - apartment. The next day was similar, only we spent it in Brooklyn instead of uptown. The day began well; we enjoyed brunch in Fort Greene (on a Wednesday!), but by evening I was in a state of culture shock. Williamsburg was celebrating Halloween while I worried where to sleep that night. My husband was leaving that night for a business trip, and we were worried about my safety in our very dark apartment building in our very dark neighborhood. Would I be safe walking up eighteen flights of a pitch-black stairwell to a pitch-black hallway with many of my neighbors gone? We decided I'd be safe enough to sleep at home and went for a quick dinner in the closest neighborhood with power, just over the Williamsburg Bridge. In W'burg, people were dressed in halloween costumes and laughing drunkenly. They felt very far away.
On the third day of no power, I headed uptown by myself. My husband had successfully flown out, from a surprisingly-functioning JFK airport, and I braved the city on my own. Driving uptown was like passing from third-world to first-world country; the analogy that comes to mind - though I can't vouch for its accuracy - is travelling from East Berlin to West Berlin. Except here, we didn't need passports and there were no border guards; I was freely let into this other part of town that felt a world apart. Downtown had no traffic lights, and at each intersection I slowed and amicably negotiated with the pedestrians, bikers, and other cars for the right of way, happy to stop and let the pedestrians cross where I saw them. Our system worked smoothly and I grew comfortable with the opportunities to do favors for others, and felt cooperative with the other cars on the road, and made good time getting uptown. And then, I passed 39th street and suddenly, there were traffic lights and horns honking and pedestrians carrying shopping bags still in the crosswalk after the light had changed. The city was back to normal here, but I didn't feel normal and I didn't feel ready to be aggressive and fast and confident. But here I was, exiled to this place because I couldn't stay in my world. I hadn't felt this kind of culture-shock since returning home from a semester abroad in Mexico in 1997. But I spent the day with a good friend and her adorable kids, and though disorienting, it was nice to spend so much time with them.
It was getting colder, and with my husband gone, I was getting lonelier, so I spent the night with friends in Brooklyn. They'd had to return to work at their offices in midtown, so I picked them up at their offices and then picked up my food I'd left in my friend's walk-in cooler, and happily went to their apartment and had a home-cooked (my home! my cooking!) meal and wine and I felt warm and happy. I realized that there's something nice - always, but especially after you are married - about needing to rely on people, and about the opportunity to spend time with friends relaxed in their homes. I've always been a little too independent and self-reliant, and now that I am married, I seem to only rely on my husband and rarely have occasion to seek help and comfort from others.
The next day I drove them to work, because they needed transportation and I needed to have two other people in my car to be allowed back into Manhattan, thanks to the Mayor's new HOV requirements. But really I had also discovered how comforting it was to be able to help my friends, especially when they were helping me and we could be there for each other. That next day, I finally felt settled enough to look outward and try to figure out how to help others who were really suffering in the storm. I'd been disoriented and unsettled for a few days, but I knew I was incredibly blessed to have a car, and money to eat in restaurants, and friends who had opened their homes to me (and who had homes that they could share), and an apartment that had survived the storm intact, and the strength and health to go up and down 18 flights of stairs. How absurdly privileged I was that my chief concern on the first day was for my salmon and gourmet ice cream. So I decided to try to help my neighbors.
There are lots of elderly people here, most of whom bought apartments here back when the building was limited-equity, affordable housing. I was prepared to get involved in food distribution efforts by climbing the stairs that they were unable to climb. My volunteer work took a different turn, however. I began inquiring about how to help, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a group of National Guardsmen distributing FEMA food (which is apparently the same as military food and looked pretty disgusting) to the hungry and devastated and low-income people in my neighborhood. When I arrived, there were ten long empty tables set up, a line of people stretching down a long block, and a tape dividing the people from the tables. Within the tape, next to the tables, were about ten civilian volunteers, about twenty-five National Guardsmen in fatigues, and one Salvation Army Captain in full regalia. They were waiting for a military truck to arrive with the food, and once it did, the Guardsmen got to work unloading boxes and stacking them on, under, and next to the table. We made quick work of organizing the boxes on the table and opening them, and then a policeman cut the tape and my neighbors began arriving to eagerly pick up their food.
In all of this, I somehow discovered a sort of leadership role for myself, not in a "bossy" way (which I always fear), but in a doing-what-needs-to-be-done sort of way. When I learned that each person would receive three food packets, I helped communicate to the other volunteers down the long tables. When I learned that each person would get 3 packets for each family members they were picking up for, I communicated that information. When I saw that many volunteers and Guardsmen hadn't understood this and didn't realize people could take food for more than just themselves (and were refusing to give them food for their family members), I tried to explain to them and then sought out the Salvation Army Captain to suggest that he clarify to everyone. When the National Guardsmen (they were so young and hard-working and earnest!) had trouble doing the math on how many packets of food per household, I helped them: a whole box! a box plus these three! remove three then give them the rest of the box! One guy, apparently stressed by this kind of math, said so genuinely, "Boy, I'm so glad you're here!" It wasn't a volunteer-task anyone would ever dare to predict ahead of time, but I'm sure that I helped make the procees run more efficiently. New volunteers arrived and approached me - me! - to ask how to get involved. When we were done, I brought one of these new volunteers to the food distribution in my building, and got involved there, similarly helping the process run smoothly. My involvement never required me to go up and down stairs, as it turned out. I felt satisfied when it was done; I had found a way to use my skills to be useful to these projects.
The next day, I flew to Florida, away from the cold and strangeness of storm-hit New York City, to warmth and to the other reality of being just a few days away from the 2012 Presidential election. I offered my services at the local Obama campaign office, and wondered how that experience would compare to my day of post-Sandy food distribution. As it turned out, in Florida there was no organizational, leadership role that I needed to search out: the campaign was well-organized, and I was one of the soldiers pounding the pavement. I got to work canvassing, knocking on doors to people identified by the campaign as Obama supporters but sporadic voters, to "get out the vote" as they say. I haven't done a lot of canvassing in my life, and learned that it is pain-staking, laborious work. This was very different than the hour I'd spent handing out FEMA food to hundreds of people. Here, I could count a handful of apparent, small victories after hours on the road: an older man who intended to vote but didn't know where his polling place was; a few people who seemed to want that additional encouragement to go vote; and going off-list to a house full of Obama yard-signs and stickers to successfully recruit another volunteer. I felt what they mean when they talk about Obama's ground-game and army of volunteers, because this kind of work requires an army to reach everyone on the extensively-analyzed lists. Each day I walked with a partner and learned more about these other Obama-supporters - two middle-aged blue-collar women. I learned more about Central Florida communities (one with mid-size homes and large trees, another with mobile homes and tiny yards) and who the Obama-supporters are in those places: nearly all white, and among the folks who were home when I knocked, many were middle-aged or senior citizens. My work and time in Florida was spent in counties that voted almost 60% for Romney, and I felt like part of a small club that looked out for its few members. As I learned, when you wear an Obama button in public in Central Florida, people approach you in restaurants to thank you for supporting the President. And when the results came in and Obama was re-elected, I felt so gratified to have been a small part of that victory, among the many, many people who put in a few hours or more to help make this happen.
The next day, this morning, I got on a plane to come back home to my apartment, now with heat and hot water. I bought a New York Times because it seemed that I ought to have a souvenir of the election results, and an airport employee approached me about it. In the end, I gave him the special Election section, which he said was excited to read on his lunch break, since I only really wanted the front page. New York still wasn't back to normal: the A train wasn't running to Manhattan, and another airport employee helped me figure out which subways I could take back to the City. (In thirteen years, I haven't admitted to needing any help navigating the subways - I can read the map! - so receiving some advice felt both unusual and comforting.)
And then, my journey nearly over, I stepped off the subway into my neighborhood and collided with the cold rain and wind of today's Nor'easter. Fortunately, this time I am comfortably secluded in a home with power, heat, and all the comforts of my home back again. And tomorrow, I'll go back to work for the first time in eleven days, and the President will still be our president, and yet I feel like so much has changed, or happened, or transformed in this time. In some ways, those changes are out there in the world, and in other ways, it is me who has been changed. I want to make sure that I remember what this topsy-turvy week felt like, even when New York, and the country, and my life seems to go back to normal.
