My Day with Sandy

         It was a Monday night when the water began to rise. The power had gone out, and we were left with nothing but a few headlamps and flashlights to illuminate the dark house with their shallow glow; we were not fortunate enough to own a generator. The wind howled maniacally outside. Tree branches beat against houses with a chaotic rhythm like that of tribal music. Deafening explosions—two of them—could be heard as transformers blew outside.
         My family and I ran frantically about the house, moving anything valuable up to the second floor—photo albums, electronics, anything we could grab. Once everything important was upstairs, we gathered all the towels and washcloths in the house and created a barricade of linen by the door to try to prevent the water from rushing in. Every now and then I would poke my head out the window to see how much the water had risen. By now the bay had engulfed the entirety of my street, swallowing it whole. The dark, murky, muddy water had begun to creep up the lawn in the front yard, and it had already submerged the back. Outside, one of the car's alarms screeched in protest as seawater began to lap up its sides and pour into its interior. The other car died a much quieter death, silently acquiescing, as it if knew there was nothing left to do but drown.
         The water began rushing in—not from the doorway, as we had been anticipating, but from beneath the floorboards. It rose through the cracks in the floor, it rose through the ducts, it rose through the closet and the crawlspace. It was relentless, unforgiving, and it did not spare a single room of the first floor of the house. We attempted to mop it up at first, hoping that soon the tides would turn and the flood would end, but we were not so lucky—it simply kept coming. Our efforts were futile, and soon we were forced to wave the white flag and retreat to the second floor. The water had won.
         That night, I lay in my bed listening to chaos outside. The howling of the wind, the pounding of the trees, and the screeching of the car alarm continued all through the night. Somehow, whether through sheer tiredness or need to escape my reality, I managed to fall into a restless slumber.
         When I awoke the next morning, it was dark—not the early morning kind of dark of late October, but a grey, cloudy, unnatural kind of dark. I walked groggily downstairs to find that the water had receded just as quickly as it had intruded—only a few puddles were left as evidence that it had been there. But everything—the furniture, the appliances, the walls—was soaked. The smell was rancid—it was as if half a dozen fish had died beneath the floorboards. The odor was suffocating, nauseating. Looking around, I could see tiny bits of seaweed plastered up against the wall or along the crown molding. This place, my beloved childhood home, was ruined.
         There was no electricity, no stove, no cell phone service, no cars—we were reduced to a century-ago state. My parents would frequently go outside to speak to the neighbors; sometimes I would come too. They all had similar stories to ours—no power, cherished belongings destroyed, thousands of dollars of repair to be done, no word from the flood insurance company, no word from the car insurance company, no word from the home insurance company, and no word from the power company. We were completely in the dark.
         We lived like this for weeks. Every time we needed something to eat, we would have to walk more than a mile into town in the biting pre-winter wind. We waited on a line that went on for blocks just to get coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Only a handful of stores were open, and what they had was meager at best. A line of surviving cars built up everyday by the one gas station in town that still had gasoline, since there was a shortage on the island. The supply ran out quickly, and people waited for hours upon hours for new shipments to arrive. We heard stories of people who got up at four in the morning to get on the gas line, waiting to fill up their tanks. Some days the shipments came, some they didn't.
         For a while we were poor—at least, we felt that way. We had no food, no transportation, no electricity, and a destroyed home; everything I had taken for granted for the majority of my life was lost to me. Half of our walls had been torn out because of water damage and we had more wet furniture sitting outside of the house than in it. For the first time in my life, I lived in relative poverty.
         “Growing up poor in the South Bronx was better than this,” my mother said. “At least then our couches were in the living room instead of the front yard.”
         Everyday we would walk to the local supermarket to plug our cellphones into the unused vending machine outlets in order to charge them. I would sit there, my hood over my head and my phone in my lap, huddled up, trying to keep warm. People stared—the more fortunate people, at least—the ones who lived outside of the flood zone and had electricity. Every so often someone I knew from school would walk by. It was embarrassing. I felt hopeless, homeless, as if the house I had so long cherished was no longer my house at all. It was broken, and it would never be the same.
         A neighbor of mine put it well, "It's like how we were with Hurricane Katrina—we didn't understand how bad it was because we weren't living it. Now," she said, holding up a picture of a destroyed house on the front page of the morning paper, "we're living this."
         Still, as bad as it was, we were not nearly the least fortunate. I spoke to a woman who had lost her whole first floor, her three cars, her furniture, and her home office where she ran her small business. Everything, all of her inventory, was destroyed. Her husband had been out of work for a year, so now they were without a source of income. They had nothing, and two young children to feed. My heart broke for her.
         There were others, too, who had suffered worse fates. The death toll was about fifty in each state hit. A few blocks away from me, a couple of houses had burned to the ground. In Breezy Point, one hundred homes had been incinerated after a fire broke out in one house and the wind had carried it down to all the others near it. People had been electrocuted by hanging power lines, crushed by trees, and even had heart attacks from the stress of the situation. This storm was a deadly one.
         "It could be worse," my mom would always say. "Just be thankful that we're all alive. That's all that matters."
         She was right. Although for a while our existence was miserable at best, and although it would be many months before we could rebuild, and although we would never rebuild completely, eventually things returned to a state of normalcy. Houses were repaired, power was restored, and businesses were reopened. Although reminders of Hurricane Sandy are still visible throughout the neighborhood—unpaved roads, fallen trees, plots of empty land where houses once were—life is better now, and we have overcome.