The Great Storm in North Jersey:Fri. through Monday

Friday, November 2. I had left towels soaking in the washing machine when the power went out. I had to go down the basement in the dark and wring them out. I left them to dry some outside for a couple of hours. I washed the front of my hair in cold water, and rolled my hair onto curlers.

Jim comes to tell me it is too cold in the house and he’s going to work in Newark, where there is plenty of power. (The Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker had apparently insisted to the utilities that his city be restored to power immediately or there would be widespread looting.)  Maeve is going back to the Dominiques’ house, where there is light, heat, TV, electric for her laptop and hot water for showers.

I feel rather abandoned, which is one of my go-to life themes, since I am adopted. I remind myself I can too easily revert to feeling this way, and it’s not productive.

 I head out to the Laundromat by the A&P to throw the towels into the dryer.

Sitting in my car waiting for the towels to dry, I call my sister Margaret Opatrny, who lives blocks from the Long Island Sound in Guilford, CT. They had been evacuated, and are staying with her in-laws. My nephew Spencer has had school all week.

I call my brother-in-law John, who reminds me it is my nephew Nick’s birthday.

“I sent him a card on Monday, before the power went out,” I say. “But I also Facebooked him today.”

I call my sister Marian, who is at work stuffing envelopes with election materials. She is yawning and still jet-lagged, but apparently energized by returning to the 80-degree weather of Arizona.

I make chili in my black cast-iron pan on the grill, using more of the hamburger meat Jim bought Saturday. My refrigerators are smelling ripe.

Mike has gotten the news he passed the New York State Bar, and he goes to the Edison Ale House in Newark after work to celebrate with friends. Jim waits and drives him home to Mahwah, where they eat by candlelight around 8 pm.

 

Saturday, November 3. Our friend the NYC news director comes to have an early breakfast with Jim at the diner, gas up her car, and have her laundry done at the Laundromat in the A&P complex.

Around 11 am, I drive Mike to the so-called “warming center” located at Ramapo College, where Mahwah residents can get warm, recharge their electronic devices and take a shower. Mike takes a shower with toiletries I’ve pulled together.

Then I drive him down to the Newark Courthouse where he works and where he has left his car.

On McCarter Highway we see a storefront in a strip mall that advertises in huge green metal letters “DIVORCE $399.” In only slightly smaller letters below, it says, “Spouse’s signature not required.” Mike says to me, “You can stop here on your way home.”

Everybody is out in downtown Newark on Market Street. We pass stores titled “Pretty Girl” and “Urban Denim.” “Urban Denim” seems not so much denim as the glittery, barely-there outfits you might see on girls writhing around poles. Mike tells me the old courthouse was designed by the same architect who designed the US Supreme Court building. (The architect was Cass Gilbert.)

On the way home, I drop off donations at Goodwill in Paramus, and also shop there. (I get a mink fur collar and a copper casserole pot.) Inside the resale shop, it is as though the storm never happened.

I stop at A&P for chicken. I am making barbecued chicken and beans tonight on the grill. A&P seems to be running low on meats.

After dinner we watch the first episode of “Downton Abbey” on my iPad. Jim falls asleep a few minutes into Episode Two around 7:30. When I tell Tom the next day that we go to sleep very early without power, he says, “It’s just the same as Carleton Island.” Our summer house on Carleton Island has no cable TV. When the sun goes down, you go to bed…or you make a bonfire on the beach.

 

Sunday, November 4. Sunday "Blue Laws" are suspended in Mahwah by the Mayor and in the whole of Bergen County by the Governor. Governor Christie has a reputation as a bully, but in this crisis, he is winning kudos as an able and peripatetic leader. Storm-battered citizens are literally throwing themselves into his arms.

Jim has already breakfasted and gone to Mass when I wake up. He tells me the town needs volunteers at the police station down the block at 11:30 am  to distribute sandwiches, soup and crumb cake provided by local restaurants. I sing, as usual, at 10:30 Mass, and the choir lingers to talk about our respective power situations. Even at this point, six days into the outage, about 4,500 of the 9,000 Mahwah residents who initially lost power, are still without power. (Statewide, 62 percent of New Jersey lost power as a result of Superstorm Sandy.)

When I get back home, Jim calls to say they have more than 100 volunteers and don’t need me. I walk down to the police station anyway to see the scene. People are wedged into five or six rows of long tables eating and talking. It’s like a lively Irish wake without the body. Instead of table centerpieces, there are multi-outlet surge protectors.  I plug in my dying cell phone, and procure a peanut butter-and jelly sandwich. I chat with an EMT worker named Janet who recognizes me from church. Janet is from the Fardale section and has been staying with her mother in Suffern. No sign of Jim or my daughter Maeve.

My son Tom calls from Bard College as I walk home back up Miller Road. Tom is always a good audience and he is SHOCKED that we are still without power and SHOCKED that we have gone to gas rationing (only odd-numbered license plates allowed to get gas on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered license plates on even-numbered days.) He is SHOCKED that Governor Christie has wisely canceled Halloween. (Mahwah’s Mayor has organized a “trunk-and-treat” in the municipal complex parking lot on Monday that will allow kids in costumes to trick-or-treat from car to car.)

I pass my neighbors Gary and his son Michael Corrado and my other neighbor Paul Gioni walking down to the Police Station and wave to them. I have never seen so many neighbors out walking without dogs.

When Jim comes home, I tell him I am going to the warming center at Ramapo College to get warm and charge up my devices.

As I drive down Lawrence Road under the draping downed wire, I see a solitary figure sitting in a small Orange and Rockland utility truck. I saw him there yesterday too. He doesn’t seem to have any capacity to fix the wire. He is just keeping vigil.

He reminds me of a story I read in the book “Life in the Old Dutch Homesteads:Saddle River, NJ,” about when native Americans living in Bergen County decided to move west  in 1756. One solitary American Indian named Mashier was left behind to watch and care for the dead in their burial ground.

This seems to be Rockland Electric’s Mashier.

Sunday night, we have decided to go for dinner to “Priya,’ our favorite Indian restaurant in Suffern.

Once we get settled at the restaurant, Jim picks up a call from his friend, the Mayor. Jim is most alive in a crisis. It is no accident he has made his fortune as a spin doctor for companies in crisis. I can hear the Mayor is equally excited and engaged. The Mayor has apparently talked to a cadre of Southern utility workers parked in their trucks at the Pilot fuel depot on Route 17. The utility workers say they have been given no directions from Rockland Electric.

But Maeve thinks it is rude for her father to talk on his cell phone once food arrives. And she won’t put a spoonful on her plate until he ends the call. She also says she can’t enjoy her meal because she is sitting opposite me.

Maeve had thought she would be going back to her high school Monday after a week of forced absence because of the power outages. But the school left a second message Sunday evening, saying there wasn’t enough bus transportation to get students to school.

When we get home from the restaurant, we watch an episode of “30 Rock” on my iPad. Then I head to bed around 8:15 pm. Sleeping under the down comforters is the easy part. Within 15 minutes, you’re warm as toast. Before I go up to bed, I bring the dogs into the family room, where it is somewhat warmer than their usual lair, the kitchen. I lift Duke onto the sofa and I tuck blankets around both dogs.

I wonder if Mashier is still out there in the dark, guarding the ghost of a power line.

Monday, November 5. I go to Mass at 8 am, drop off recycling, and get coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. I get gas at the Citgo on Franklin Turnpike in case Mike needs to take my energy-efficient Prius to handle electioneering complaints with his judge in Newark early tomorrow on Election Day. The van behind me beeps at me to move up on the short line despite the fact that  I am honoring a sign that asks us not to block the driveway to the diner. It takes only 5 minutes or so to fill up with gas.

I hear from Maeve after I’ve gotten coffee. She is already at the Dominiques. I suggest we go to the warming center at Ramapo College to submit 3 more college applications: William and Mary, Wheaton (early action due November 15), and American. She says she will work on those applications at the Dominiques.

I talk by cell phone to my oldest Matt, who is heading into work in Newark in his energy-efficient Prius. Matt and his wife Mel got power back in their Sparta home on Saturday. But, before they left Grandma Bette’s home in Little Falls, Melany took her mom Susan to get her car fully gassed.

The weather-generated crisis was particularly wearing on Susan’s nerves. She apparently hinted that Matt and Mel should secure a generator for their home. But Matt ignored any such hints and kept watching sports on Bette’s big-screen TV.  The middle of a crisis was no time to get into a scrum for generators, he said, and they were safe and warm at Grandma Bette’s house.

Matt says he and Melany have driven past Susan’s house and her whole neighborhood among the tall pines by a lake in Andover looks gutted and vacant. Matt thinks it could be weeks before Susan gets back into her house.

Matt also says a lot of the panic behavior we’ve seen all over the place stems from workaholics who suddenly can’t go anywhere or do what they’re used to doing. So they channel all their manic energy into driving around and waiting on gas lines.  Matt said he is sure things will normalize when people can go back to work and discharge their mania where they are used to discharging it.

Shortly thereafter, I am sitting in the family room drinking coffee and eating breakfast before the gas fire when suddenly the lights come on. 10:22 a.m. I  shout “Woo-hoo” and go down the basement to make sure the furnaces are operating. They are roaring. The temperature on the indoor thermometer in the dining room reads 52 degrees.

I call Jim, who is in South Jersey, to let him know the power has returned.

He says, “They can all thank me later.” I think he is referring to the fact that he and our neighbor Gary Corrado on Sunday found the utility pole that seemed to be the source of the outage in our neighborhood. Jim got the pole number and told his friend, the Mayor.

Jim has a bit of a savior complex and he thinks all good things happen because of him. When a bad thing happens, he looks to assign blame elsewhere. This has created many interesting dynamics on our marriage.

The Great Storm in North Jersey:Sat. through Thurs.

Saturday, October 27, 2012: The week of the Great Storm starts with a bang. My son Matt and daughter-in-law Melany throw me a surprise birthday party. The surprise is that I didn’t know my sisters Margaret Blackwell from Maryland and Marian from Tucson would be there. I didn’t know my bio-siblings from Rhode Island and Connecticut would be there: Terry, Libbie, Pat and Margaret O and their families.

Jim told me a couple of months ago that Matt was planning a surprise party. Jim had thrown me a surprise party when I was pregnant with Matt, and I had reacted poorly, so he was very afraid to repeat the surprise 30 years later. I told Matt I would be too distressed to have a surprise party. So Matt and Melany went ahead with the party, but didn’t tell me my family was coming. I knew only that my much-loved new family—Matt’s in-laws Susan (Melany’s mother), Grandma Bette, Aunt Jayme, Cousin Jay-Jay and her husband Judge John—would be at the party.

The out-of-towners stayed overnight at a nearby hotel and we got to spend some time together. I knew my brother Patrick and Cousin Jay-Jay and Judge John were staunch Republicans, but I hadn’t realized my sister Margaret Blackwell from Maryland was a rabid Romneyite until we sat talking in the hotel bar .

Sunday morning at breakfast, everyone was checking iPhones for news of the storm. My Rhode Island and Connecticut family were anxious to head North. My sister Margaret Blackwell decided to cut short her visit and get home before the storm as she headed South.

We stopped at Market Basket in Franklin Lakes with my sister Marian to pick up tandoori chicken and salad. But I was anxious to get home and take my 19-year-old son Tom to UrgiCare before it closed at 2. He was so sick and feverish at the party the night before, deathly pale and with dark circles under his eyes, I told him he looked like “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

We got to the Urgicare at 1:30. Tom had strep throat. We got a prescription for antibiotics that we filled at the A&P.

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Monday, Oct. 29.   It is my sister Marian’s habit to ask every day at about 3 o’clock, “So what are you thinking about for dinner?” Marian really likes to eat, and she likes to plan what she will eat.

I consider dinner extremely proprietary information for some reason. When Jim routinely calls me on his way home in late afternoon to ask about dinner, I often won’t tell him what I’m making. I will just say, “There’s food.”

But I tell Marian that today I am planning on pasta, pre-made turkey meatballs and sausage. I got the sausage today at the A&P because Tom, sick with strep throat upstairs in his bed, likes sausage.

Marian suggests we set the pasta water to boil at 3:30, since Hurricane Sandy is expected. So I fill the pot, and set it on the electric stove.

At 5 minutes before 4, at the time exactly a year ago that my sister Nora opened her eyes,  fluttered her hands, closed her eyes, breathed four loud breaths, stopped breathing, breathed two more breaths, and stopped breathing forever, our power goes out.

I dump the pasta into the hot water, and replace the cover.

By the time we eat about 6 pm, the pasta is extremely mushy. The meatballs and sausage are nicely browned from the outdoor grill. I heated the tomato sauce in a pot on the grill.

Tom’s throat is so sore, he can’t swallow the sausage or the meatballs. He has two helpings of mushy pasta…for him, this is preferable to al dente. We sit around in the candle-light, and it is really nice to be together.

We go to bed early. All night, the wind howls, shrieks, hoots. Marian, having a cigarette outside, comes in to advise me to move my car, since branches are coming down. At one point during the night, the sky turns bright as day, with extended flashes of what looks like lightning. It is undoubtedly a substation flaring out of commission.

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Tuesday, Oct. 30. I wake up around 5:30 am. Everything is very dark. I get into my car and go in search of coffee. The Dunkin Donuts where I usually get coffee is not open, and the tall cardboard display shelves are set against the glass doors as some sort of propitiatory wind block. I drive to the other Dunkin Donuts near Don Bosco. It isn’t open either. With some trepidation I get onto the ramp for Route 17 South. I am an explorer, in the dark, alone, and my family doesn’t know I’m gone.

Most of the stores on either side of the road are dark.  By Lake Street in Ramsey, a car is idling on the side of the road. But when he sees my lights, he starts moving slowly into my lane. It is an older gentleman, and he seems ambivalent about being on Route 17. I move over one lane to avoid him.

My son Matt  will use this adjective several times when I talk to him. But, indeed, it does seem apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic. There are clusters of light here and there, but mostly this commercial behemoth of a highway is dark and still.

A couple of the Quickie-Mart gas station places are lit and open, but that’s about it. I go all the way down to Midland Avenue and back north again. I get coffee at the 7-11 on Franklin Turnpike just south of the Suffern border.

By the time I pass my usual Dunkin’ Donuts around 7 am, it is open and there are maybe 40 people on line. The whole complex of stores around the A&P still has power, a bulwark in the disorder after the storm.

Tom heads back to college, where there is power.

For dinner Tuesday, I made tortillas stuffed with chicken, cheese and beans, wrapped in foil and baked on the grill. Mike came later, and brought pizza from Pizza Master for his dinner.

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Wednesday, October 31. I told Maeve we HAD to submit three college applications online. Bard and Villanova had November 1 deadlines for early action. Vassar’s early decision deadline was November 15, but I wanted to make sure that Maeve’s most critical application was submitted.

I suggested we go to Lydia and Myrna Dominique’s house, because they had power and Internet. But Maeve felt Marian and I had bullied our way into the Dominique household like home invaders the day before when we brought over our devices to be charged. “Mom, Mrs. Dominique didn’t even have her bra on when you showed up at the house,” Maeve said. I hadn’t noticed.

“Well, Maeve, if we go back to the Dominiques, I’ll take my bra off so we are even,” I said.

Maeve didn’t think that was funny.

Mahwah Library was closed for lack of power. Maeve discovered that Westwood Library was open. My son Mike and Aunt Marian piled in his car, and Maeve and I in mine, and we headed south.

The library was loaded with patrons huddled around electric outlets (I joked to Mike, “This is the electronic equivalent of breaking bread together.”)  We couldn’t find a free plug, and commandeered the reference librarian’s empty desk. Maeve slipped a multi-outlet surge protector out of her bag and plugged into the outlet. I plugged in my laptop, she plugged in hers, and Mike plugged in his phone and his laptop. I got onto the Common Application website, but couldn’t reload Maeve’s main essay onto her application. (She had been interviewed on Sunday by two high-powered sisters involved with Vassar – one a nun--- and then had declared to me, “Your edited version was absolutely riddled with errors.”)

I was looking at her versions of supplemental essays that she had sent to me, and realizing that the edited essays would have to be sent back to her, since her laptop was better able to load documents onto the Common App website. At one point early on, Westwood Library lost WiFi and I thought we would have to leave and hunt down another venue. But perhaps 20 patrons left, and the WiFi came back up in about 15 minutes.

People kept coming up to the desk and asking us questions, thinking we were librarians. We answered questions as best as we could, or referred people to the check-out desk up front.

The fine-tuning of Maeve’s supplemental essays was a painful process. She kept saying to me, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch my laptop.”

I would say, “I have to touch your laptop to do the edits.”

And then the reference librarian said, “I need to move you. I really have to get my desk back.”

Mike said he was almost fully charged, and he left for his apartment in Edgewater. Marian had gone out into Westwood to get lunch.

We took our surge protector and went hunting for another outlet. We found a college-age girl behind the stacks with her phone in one outlet, and her laptop in the other. We asked whether we could plug in our surge protector and re-plug her phone into our surge protector.

Finally, we were ready to download the supplemental essays, to submit the main applications and the supplements and to pay each college’s application fee online.

I then made Maeve respond to an e-mail from an American University representative, to set in motion an appointment for an interview.  And finally we were done, for now. This had been a most painful three hours. I would really rather not be involved in Maeve’s college application process. But I guess I feel it is my responsibility to shepherd things along.

Both heading down to Westwood and returning home to Mahwah, we were amazed at the lines of cars, especially on Route 17, waiting for gas. “It’s just like the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973,” I said.

For dinner, we had hamburgers made from the huge quantities of ground beef Jim had bought at the A&P on Saturday, and potato pancakes from Market Basket.

I ran to church at 7:20, and sang at the sparsely-attended vigil Mass for All Saints’ Day.

Thursday, November 1. Marian hands me a card and wishes me a Happy Birthday as she gets ready to go to the airport with Jim for her return trip to Tucson.

I see birthday greetings to me on Facebook when I get on the Internet through my iPad. My son Mike adds on Facebook…. “though I know you can’t see this because you have no power.”

I wish my sister Libbie, born on the same day six years later, a Happy Birthday.

Maeve has been going to the nearby home of her friends with power, Myrna and Lydia Dominique, and she brings them into the main hall of our home, where I have been sitting. I think they walked up the drive because the Ramsey Oil Truck was blocking the driveway, making a fuel delivery. There is no heat, though, because of the power outage.

“I’ll bring Myrna and Lydia back at 5:30, and we’ll go to dinner for your birthday,” Maeve says.

Jim had taken a shirt and a blanket with him on his way to work in Newark this morning, saying he planned to sleep in the office overnight.

Tom calls from Bard College to wish me a Happy Birthday.,

“How are you able to talk on the house phone if you’ve lost power?” he asks.

“Ah,” I say. “That is the miracle of the dump.”  At the town recycling center months ago, I had retrieved a phone with caller ID that worked on battery power, so it was still functional. The phone quality was poor, but at least I could make and receive calls.

In the afternoon, I went to town hall to pay my quarterly property taxes and water bill. I had to skirt Franklin Turnpike on the way home. It was backed up for maybe a mile with cars waiting to get gas.

Once I got home, I realized I would have to go back to the bank to deposit money to pay mortgages and household bills for November.  I met a woman in the bank parking lot who said she had waited three hours on line to get gas. She was watching gas station attendants walk through the line on Route 17, telling motorists the gas had run out.

I feel strangely de-energized myself. I didn’t feel like myself, and I had few daily goals other than organizing dinner. My son Mike said that the unexpected loss of his daily routines left him feeling ragged.

Light and power are normalcy;  electric light and power are somehow part of our personal and cultural identity.

It seems I am who I am because I can write and email on my laptop. I can print on my printer. I can pick up my phone and call and text without thinking of conserving the battery. I can make a cup of tea at will. I can laugh with David Letterman or Conan or Jon Stewart deep into the night on my television. Who am I if I do not have these sources of media and daily living routines at my disposal?

And, even when I am alone, I feel I am having social interactions when I can watch folks (friends?) on TV, and read the news and blogs on my laptop.

 When I got home from the bank, I found Jim’s car in the upper drive. I told him Maeve was taking me out to dinner with the Dominiques for my birthday. Jim said that was why he had come home, to take me out to dinner.

We went to Pasta Cucina in outer Suffern. Maeve and the girls ordered fried calamari for an appetizer. We giggled all through dinner. I called Marian before we ordered. She was eating a salad in Chicago.