"Take a good look around. In a few days, everything will be different."
The words chilled me to the bone. I knew that my boyfriend was right. My gaze scanned the streets that I have known all my life and I felt blinded by familiarity. What should I bid farewell to? We mostly take things for granted until they're gone. By things I mean people, or the comforts of home, or any semblance of perceived normalcy. Until that point, I had been skeptical of the weatherman's claims. You know how it is. Just because Lonnie Quinn is tearing his eyeballs out in disbelief doesn't mean that I have to go buy out the canned goods aisle and chime in on the countdown to the End. Naturally, my Mom and I elected to ignore the mandatory evacuation of Monmouth Beach.
The water started to rise from the back corner of the yard. It crept up in the darkness. It crept into the porch where I have my studio. It poured in through the holes between the wall panels. It kept rising. It seeped into the family room carpet. My Mom and I gathered all the beach towels we could find and made a makeshift barrier to hinder the flow. No use, the water was coming up from below. I raced up and down the stairs hauling artwork and photographs that I had put in the family room to be safe when the porch inevitably flooded. The water kept rising. We ran around the rest of the first floor rolling up carpets, putting up drapes, and stacking furniture. The tide came in fast and soon every house on my block was an island. A powerful current was driving the river up the street.
Time oozed like molasses. Every minute felt like five. The acoustics of the house were like those of an underground cavern; strange echoes reverberated between the floor-turned-lake and the ceiling. Every so often I heard what sounded like strained lines on a docked boat-most likely the crawlspace vents creaking back and forth with the current. Water rushed into the floor vents in the family room. The river was lapping at the front door. I felt like a passenger on the Titanic every time I descended the staircase. I started to get nervous when I could no longer tell how high the water was outside the front door, and I feared that any minute I would find out just how much pressure it takes to blow a door off its hinges.
Animal instinct seemed to move me because somewhere in the back of my head I knew that sentimentality would be paralyzing. I didn't understand why I couldn't feel emotions for the two weeks after the storm. I didn't know why I couldn't cry when I saw Ocean Avenue the next day.
I didn't know that I was in shock until the post-adrenaline thaw came and all of the feelings that I couldn't put words to finally broke through the exoskeleton of survival mode. One day my cousin told me very matter-of-factly that my Mom and I would be going to an Extended Stay near Exit 105 the next day. That did it. I melted to the floor and bawled my eyes out. It's not always easy to come to terms with the fact that we are human-no more, no less.
In my resumé I credit myself with the quality of adaptability. The truth is that we are all adaptable. When life mercilessly pummels you with lemons, you might as well wipe the pulp from your eyes and share a round of that lemonade with friends, family, and neighbors. The (at times) incessant barrage would be unbearable if it weren't for good humor and the kindness of others-especially strangers. On the night of October 29, 2012-after everything was moved that could be saved, after the cats were retrieved from their island sanctuary on the kitchen counter, after my rain-booted feet sloshed one last time into the kitchen to grab the Cornflakes-my Mom and I laid in her bed and listened to the Monmouth Beach O.E.M. radio station. This is what played on a loop all night:
We laughed like jackals. Some lullaby. At two-something in the morning I heard my Uncle Roger shuffling around in the hallway. He announced that the tide had gone out. Not a snowman's chance in hell, I thought. Uncle Roger's optimistic estimations of our situation had been wildly inaccurate all night. He stated three times that "the worst was over" before the high tide even peaked. I was watching the river rush down my street when he said it for the third time. It was all I could do to keep my cool, and through gritted teeth I calmly explained that, in fact, the worst was most certainly yet to come. With a calmness that far surpassed my own, he turned to my Mom and said, "Well, maybe it's time you and the girls got a nice condo."
I leapt out of bed to see if the water really had gone out. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw dry floors. My Mom, also in disbelief, added that she thought we would be water people for the rest of our lives. I too had also expected to find canals in the place of streets when the morning that seemed like it would never come finally broke. Some houses were still flooded for days.
It has been about three months since Hurricane Sandy. Last night the beach was illuminated by a moon so full and so bright that when it came out from behind the clouds it was like cold silver daylight. I stood on the jetty and watched the waves roll in one after another, smooth as glass, closer, closer, higher. I was all alone as far as I could tell. Each rising wall of water sent a shock of adrenaline through me. My feet were planted firmly though instinct told me to run every time. A louder, clearer voice than primal fear came into my head and said..
you don't have to be afraid.
I spun around in circles and stopped abruptly to watch the world spin faster, stumbling in the sand like a drunk, eyes skyward. We build houses and houses fall. We call a town home even when it's underwater. We do everything we can to resist change but it's always happening. There was one point during the demolition phase when I felt like Alice in Wonderland in the dark woods when she can't find her way home. Familiar things vanished one by one before I even had the chance to miss them. First the furniture, then the carpets, the walls, the floors, the cabinets, my Dad's workbench, the counters, the refrigerator, the sink, the toilet, the wallpaper. Everything that evaded the junkpile was boxed. I would go to the garage in search of a blender and be met instead by the impenetrable walls of a cardboard metropolis fortified by shiny metal ductwork. No smoothie today, I guess.
So we adapt. Just when I think I know the score, life goes and changes the game. It's a strange dream we're living down here on the coast. You can see the skeletal silhouettes of naked studs through the windows of practically every other house. Some houses haven't been touched. Some houses withstood the fury of a hurricane, only to be chewed up by the unsympathetic metal jaws of a backhoe when the land they stand on is deemed uninhabitable. Some houses were swept right off their foundations, and some houses were reduced to charred rubble just when we thought it couldn't get any worse. All the property damages added up could never equal the inestimable damage inflicted by untimely death (when is it timely, anyway?). A life that goes out with the tide won't roll in come morning.
The best thing we can do is be kind to each other. It's almost offensively simple. We get back what we give, not what we lose. We rise to the occasion and we can be either victims or survivors, but we can't say we didn't have the choice. I never knew how much I loved New Jersey until I left it, but I guess there really is no place like home.
