strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Aug 15 03: in the dark
So NYC is lurching back to life after the Big Blackout. There are still parts of Manhattan that haven’t got power. Thankfully we are not in any of those parts.
At 7:50 AM we had our electricity back. At about 10 AM the telephones all over Hell’s Kitchen all died at once. Nobody has yet explained why. We have Internet connectivity—thank god—but the cable that delivers that connectivity seems to lack its usual complement of television data. I have no idea what’s going on, but at least we can be confused in air-conditioned comfort. It is bloody hot out there. Infrastructure Man, save us!
In case you wondered: yeah, it was fairly neat while it lasted. NYC became a string of block parties: people gathered on stoops, on sidewalks, on rooftops. The bodegas began selling off their ice-cream products at suicidal discounts, just to avoid having to mop them up later. People found high points to stand on to memorize the sight of the spires of Times Square, eerily dark. The Indigo Girls found some generators and played their concert in Central Park anyway. The bars generally made a killing, overflow crowds spilling brazenly out into the streets with drinks in hand. Lots of laughter. When the just-past-full moon rose from somewhere over Queens, people howled.
It wasn’t all ale and Chunky Monkey, of course. From our roof, we counted at least four different helicopters—media? police?—hovering over the neighborhood. We aren’t far from the Lincoln Tunnel, which was a bad way to try to leave town, and the ferry terminal, wich was a better way to leave town. Assuming you didn’t mind queuing up with thousands of other people, and that you knew what you were going to do once you reached the other side of the river. I was grateful not to be among the hundreds-to-thousands sleeping on the streets/in parks/on benches last night, as commuter trains went dark and hotels lost the ability to secure the neato magnetic locks on their doors. A neighbor was walking his dog this morning and saw a homeless man come up to a family of tourists who were forced to sleep rough: “Now you know what it’s like,” he said. Indeed. I hope that there’s a homeless-advocacy organization that’s prepared to use this experience for leverage.
The best thing? For just one night, we could see the stars. Not all of them, not even most of them. But there they were. By ones and twos and tens, the whole city looked up.