Eight Minutes
We live an eight-minute drive from thriving, eclectic Red Hook, Brooklyn. A place with funky restaurants, cute shops and Baked, a bakery with some of the best brownies in the City. Red Hook has industrial loft apartments and an offbeat mix of new and old Brooklyn. It’s a place, were I younger and much cooler, I’d want to live.
But on Monday night, the mere eight-minute drive between our apartment and Red Hook might as well have been eight hours.
Red Hook was within the evacuation zone and was completely flooded by Hurricane Sandy. Residents were displaced, businesses ruined. Lives upended. Our favorite, fantastically suburban-sized Fairway—the one with an amazing view of the New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty where my daughters and I have eaten French toast many weekend mornings—is now closed. By one account, it was flooded by over seven feet of water. There is no word yet on when, or if, it will re-open.
We also live a mere 4.5 miles from lower Manhattan. 4.5 miles through the Battery Park Tunnel that looked like the raging Colorado River by late Monday night. The tunnel that remains, five days later, filled with water.
With no traffic, we are a 15-minute drive to Staten Island, a place that has faced some of the most devastating destruction. A place where some poor mother lost her two babies when they were ripped from her arms as she tried to save them from floodwaters.
And yet, our neighborhood, only a stone’s throw away, escaped the storm largely unscathed. We had many downed trees in Prospect Park and a few more on side streets, some crushed cars and broken glass. But that was really it. And all because, we were lucky enough to be perched high on a hill, far above the storm surge.
Our community is collecting supplies and making meals and trying to do our part, as we move on in a surreal bubble of relative normalcy. We are running out of gas and we have no subways and often no way to work apart from hours long waits for packed shuttle buses. But these are tiny things. They are nothing.
Our hearts break for the very many of you who are not lucky enough to have such minor inconveniences to complain about. For those of you who have lost loved ones and homes and businesses and memories. Those of you who must somehow find the strength to be brave for your children, to give them some stability amid the chaos as you begin to rebuild.
And so as you beg for FEMA and the Red Cross to arrive, as you plead for electricity, or for your heat to be turned back on as temperatures plummet, know that you have not and will not be forgotten. Not by those of us who are eight minutes away. Not by those who are eight hundred.
