While most New Yorkers stayed home and pulled through this thing with little or no ordeal (despite the tens of thousands who did go to evacuation centers), my sister and I left town and ended up stuck in devastation central.

She and her husband live in Rockaway and were forced to leave, so I caught a ride with them early Saturday morning. We pulled away from the high ground of Morningside Heights before dawn and made it swiftly over the George Washington Bridge. Everything was going smooth; we had a sunny day, I got some work done, we played board games, saw the Weather Channel Fail while watching the storm make landfall, checked local weather reports (30 mph winds, 2-3 inches of rain) and called our mom who was on Martha’s Vineyard.  We were more worried about her, and went to bed Saturday night wishing the best for the coast and the city, knowing we might wake up without power due to wind.  We never expected floods.

On the drive to breakfast (yes, we drove to breakfast, because we wanted coffee and didn’t think/remember/know to use the expansion tank in the basement) we saw very high water levels.  The Catskill Creek runs behind the houses on the main drag of Preston Hollow, a hamlet of Rensselaerville, where we spent the latter half of our childhood, and had had overrun its banks to a span of more than 100 feet, moving very fast.  It was flooding backyards, pulling out jungle gyms, and as we later saw, seriously wrecking a lot of homes.  The water hadn’t yet reached the road, and we weren’t planning to go very far, so for some reason we thought it would be okay to keep going [insert shouts of disbelief, exasperated hand gestures].  We crossed the creek in Potter Hollow at Route 81 and continued on 145.

Since we didn’t have a camera (just our phones), I didn’t get many pictures of what we actually saw, and will admit that before the danger caught up with us, I began to document and respond to our adventure with a bit of silliness.  Still out from breakfast, I photographed my sister investigating an area liquor store for extended weekend provisions while other hopeful customers, frustrated that the clerk wouldn’t let them in before noon, shouted things like: “These raindrops are cold!” “Do you sell shots?” “Screw you, I’m going to CVS.”  Their irreverent sense of excitement was the euphoria that kicks in for disaster witnesses, and it probably helped us continue to feel detached as we sought info on the city.  The storm’s worst effects were happening right here; places we knew well were being destroyed (we didn’t yet know the extent; it wasn’t until much later that we heard about Windham and other local towns, let alone Vermont), but we were still texting and checking Twitter for news from our friends.

What followed was the wake-up call that came a little too late.  Back out toward Preston Hollow on Route 145, the road was beginning to flood.  At 81, it was completely overrun. There was a car half-submerged and swept into the ditch.  We made several side trips in attempt to cross the creek, first into Oak Hill, then Norton Hill and Freehold, but every road was closed.  In one case, we ripped out part of a fallen tree to clear past an abandoned car that was submerged just off the road, only to turn back from worse damage and pass under the tree again.  50 miles later, after driving all the way to Coxsackie, we made it to Greenville and saw more flooding (Greenville Pond rushing over Main Street under the traffic light; the place was a total ghost town), and finally found our loophole back through the town of Medusa.

If we’d expected the situation we faced, we would not have been out driving in the first place.  We would not have been one of those intrepid, endangered vehicles that mayors, governors, and TV anchors up and down the eastern seaboard were ranting about.  We would have stayed in and found a way to make coffee.  If we’d expected the situation but saw no evidence until reaching the valley at Preston Hollow, we would have recognized the danger and turned back.  But we were caught unawares and thinking mainly of reaching a 3G network to learn about the city (radio wasn’t coming in well).  A kind of strange gauze had come over us.  On some level I still knew better.  I’d lived here long enough. But the iPhone and twelve years of city life can change a person.

Even the next day, after I walked out onto the grass and stared at the bluest sky I’d ever seen, I thought about how I could spin a photograph of my mother’s disturbed lawn chairs as the inverse of the D.C. earthquake photo.

Not until I was headed back to the city, riding along the idyllic Taconic Parkway, did it really begin to resonate. One blogger, at Artichoke Design in Catskill, wrote that she felt sickened by the jokes people made about the lack of damage in NYC amidst delayed reports of what was happening in the mountains.  That banter was certainly understandable, with millions of people inconvenienced for a hard-to-quantify reason, but her words seemed poignant after coming home and catching up with the homegrown journalism of Watershed Post and their report on Brian Lehrer, and learning of the devastation in Vermont.  It’s too much to absorb. I’ve been looking at more reports to try and grasp it further, but maybe that’s not the way to take things in.  The general picture is clear enough, but my head has been spinning from information overload, not to mention the jarring sense of being pulled between two different places.  I regretted leaving New York even before the storm hit upstate, because I wanted to be connected with my friends and aware of whatever would happen. I felt weird about leaving.  I’m less connected upstate than I am here, of course, tied only with family and love for the landscape.  Perhaps the storm damage caused me to feel that loss, and reckon with the fact that I never was so connected with where I’m from.