Thirty two days ago a tremendous cyclone churned up the east coast of the U.S. and hung a sharp left. i.e. westwardly toward and into the coast of central New Jersey. It collided with a powerful cold front from the west and horrifically peaked just as high tides did the same making for hideous storm surges. In my neighborhood of n.w. Queens, N.Y.C., the damage was moderate to severe, but in no way devastatingly destructive as was suffered by hundreds of thousands on the south shore of Long Island, Queens' Rockaway peninsula, Brooklyn's Sea Gate, Coney Island, Manhattan Beach, as well as Staten Island, lower Manhattan and nearly the entire (New) Jersey shore.
My story was one of nuisances and inconvenience, nothing more, except for the initial anxiety during the waning hours of the storm's power on its night of mayhem, Monday, October 29th. The unnerving events began with telephone wires in front of our house that have been suspended from wooden poles longer than our home has stood (before 1949). The wind and rain, relentless in their pummeling, caused short circuits in the wiring that caused incandescent bursts of sparkler-like events. The chief and traditional fear for the little attached brick house that my parents purchased in 1951 and that I have lived in largely continuously since then, is that of flooding. Not a particularly low lying area, still, the minimally adequate drainage capacities of the sewer pipes, leaders and gutters situated in or near our elevated backyard, has made for, through the years, a problematic situation whenever a sustained cloudburst passes over our flat roof. Fact is, it's infrequent that a year passes without water entering our little kitchenette/dining room at least once after a torrential drenching. Thus, the big concern for "Sandy's" power was focused on keeping this room dry. Yes, we heard about the forecast for demonically high winds and consequently, lawn furniture and other potential projectiles were carefully secured. When it did begin to blow mightily we were hardly aware of its puissance as we cautiously savored instead, the very modest rainfall that the northeast side of the hybrid hurricane/nor'easter's rotation produced. No trees or heavy large objects were within our ken or field of vision and we prepared to breathe a sigh of relief. Then nature and the laws of physics began to teach us that we needed to pay undivided attention to them immediately. The imitation of a fireworks display by the aforementioned telephone wires, intermittent and infrequent, began to increase in brightness and repetitiveness. Soft popping sounds grew louder and after several minutes started to become continuous. The black insulation material of these wires commenced melting and dripping down upon the ground as well as upon my semi-new car parked in our driveway. The "sparklers" started to wane and small fires replaced them at various intervals along the length of our block.
I dialed 911 but it rang interminably. Tried it again and again. More flames began lapping sections of the overhead wires and I wondered whether or not my phone was actually functioning. I didn't want to frighten my mother even more (she had already seen some of the "sparklers", the bursts contrasting with the night sky so spectacularly that even with her condition of macular degeneration she could see them) so I feigned a casual air while I called the local police precinct. No answer again: all personnel no doubt were swamped with requests for help. Decided to call a neighboring precinct. A voice answered and I again tried to sound calm. "I'm unable to get through to 911 and I need a fire truck now, please!" A seemingly endless explanation boiled down to "we're too busy" but the policeman at the other end was reluctant to state the obvious. When I abandoned any politeness and made my own interpretation of the situation as accusatory as my dramatic skills could muster, I proclaimed sarcastically: "So, in other words, nobody's coming to stop these fires, right?" Some admixture of professional pride and maybe a minute sliver of conscience caused the officer to reply: "No, no, we'll try our best to get a hold of the firemen, pal. Don't worry." My confidence was not great. Just then, my telephone began to ring and my mind raced to "Hey, somebody cares and they're calling to confirm the exact location of the fires." As I went to pick up the receiver, the ring tone strangely continued. There was no intermittence. One long continuous "Riiiiinggggg" was telling me, I was very quickly to learn: the telephone system was in its death throes.
Still trying to convey a quiet mastery of the situation, but probably not fooling Mom, I went to the garden hose in our backyard and carried it to the front with a poorly conceived notion of dousing the flames once hooked up to our spigot near the front garden. I was Barney Fife fumbling with the single bullet in his shirt pocket as the bad guys fast approached Mayberry. That is, I strained to thread the end of my hose onto the end of the spigot, but they just wouldn't couple. Just then, two fire trucks turned the corner into our block and relief seemed assured. The trucks stopped some distance away from the fires and a solitary fireman approached our houses and shouted: "get back inside your houses and stay there!" We all obeyed (several other neighbors were also eager to see the boys with the red trucks "do their stuff") but we needed reminding of the dangers of live wires, telephone or otherwise. Still, I couldn't resist, while standing between my front and screen doors, a plaintive: "Well, do something!" They stayed for about twenty minutes and seemed to just be monitoring the situation. Foam, whether they had it or not, was the weapon of choice for an electrical fire, but then the fires died down considerably and the explosions decreased too along with the "fireworks." Minutes after they left, tongues of flames began lapping again against the already charred wires and other metal parts of the system of wires and poles. Anxiety waxed and waned, but the storm had clearly passed and very undramatically, one knew, like a battered boxer, that the match was at least over, and the cessation of abuse had at last arrived.
When I awakened the next morning, our cable "box" was still sending a perfectly good signal to our set and except for the phone, all seemed in good working order. Over the next several days I strolled through the neighborhood to see how others had fared and learned surprisingly, what such a "storm of the century" had wrought. Trees had been uprooted in nearby blocks, some incredibly ancient and huge, their roots obscenely exposed with the adjacent slabs of sidewalk squares upraised like a stuck drawbridge. One tree had taken telephone and power wires with it as it mightily fell, the resulting fire having burned up several cars that were just rusted and charred hulks by the time I espied them. That wind that I never even heard ominously whistling, displayed its handiwork when I ambled down towards Northern boulevard where commercial properties were more numerous. Two establishments: one a used car lot with a big metal sign above the sidewalk proclaiming the business's name and phone number and the other with a similar but longer lintel also of sheet metal, were stunned and halted from doing business with the twisting and mangling of these objects crashed down onto the sidewalk. Shingles were ripped off the sides of houses directly in the line of fire of Sandy's fury and fires continued to menacingly flare up here and there along isolated portions of the battered strands of telephone wires. The morning of Novemeber 1st, All Saints Day, found me walking to mass at our close-by parish church and encountering yet another small fire in wires just yards from one of the house of worship's entrance. Somehow, it was an appropriate reminder of how this force of nature, evil in its indifference to the safety of humankind and its comforts of civilization, snickered with its hellish little blaze: a cocky rebuke and warning to God's seemingly inviolate turf.
Six days later I awakened to essentially the same landscape. The grayness of everything and now the fact that we were becoming inured to the absence of telephone service, the internet and cable television as well (this outage began on the 30th), all dovetailed all too well with the realization of the obliteration in many cases of the landscape along the coast, folks' ensuing homelessness and the very discouraging news of the presidential election results of the night before. The distinct flavor and odor of a Third World country with our crippled or flattened homes, places of commerce and utilities, was now intensified, knowing that the nation had selected a failure and a fraudster to return to power and to pillage our wealth by enticing more than 50% of us into believing there is such a thing as a "free lunch" (by bribing us with our own money). I was now not only disheartened but for the first time in my life afraid for the land of my birth and sadly, becoming bitterly estranged from a majority of my fellow citizens. I had always been convinced that there was a bedrock of common sense, fundamental intelligence and fairness that would always choose what is in the best interests of our beloved America (or at least not make the same mistake twice). Now, again for the first time, I sensed that hatred and envy, vengefulness and disruptiveness (not ardent, righteous revolutionary fervor, like our forefathers expressed) were at the root of this re-election. Not since Andrew Jackson's populism had been blunted at the start of his second term, had a president been reinstalled with a smaller percentage of the electorate choosing him than the first time around. But that fact was small comfort: a smaller majority of fools can license more damage especially if the poisonous policies of profligate spending are encouraged to become more entrenched. With the state of our economy, as sluggish as it is and further hobbled by decisions that, whether deliberately or not, are punishing to businesses and the private sector, it was incomprehensible that puerile lies, character assassination, and utterly trivial matters such as "binders", grade school taunts about "Big Bird", Gov. Romney's supposed amnesia and the complete smokescreen of the abomination in Benghazi: were all deemed acceptable points and issues of supposed substance in choosing the leader of the Free World. The intellectual bankruptcy, the flippancy, the routine dissembling and the cynicism of the Democrats are stomach turning and may, more importantly, mark a turning point. If the state of utter mediocrity in which we of these United States found ourselves on November 5th is what we aspire to, then, we shall get what we deserve. Pain, unlike any this nation has ever known, will reach new levels that may not awaken slumbering fools until even higher degrees of the misery, whether by design or not, are brought upon us by the diabolical, craven and power craving current administration. Things were not settled by the election. It was but a lull in the continuing storm that describes our divided nation. Depression anyone? Meteorological, psychic or economic: they're all conceivably available in the waning days of 2012.
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