There Were Houses There

From the Mantoloking Bridge, facing East.  You could always just see
the horizon from this vantage point; forever, there had been three layers
of houses between the beach and the bayside.  This is an image I find
very hard to come to terms with.  It's like a vision of my childhood
has been erased.   Unimaginable.

We kept ourselves busy today by cleaning up all the leaves tracked in

the house by our wet shoes and bare feet from going back and forth 

to the garage and generator, and we spent a good deal of the 

afternoon picking up twigs, branches, and roof shingles that had 

been blown about our yard last night.  We also agreed that it was 

time for all of the patio furniture to be put away, and the snow-

blower to be positioned facing 'out' in the garage.  It was a good 

distraction from sitting inside all day watching the unfolding 

devastation on local news channels. Several times I caught my wife 

going for the tissues, having been overcome with emotion after 

watching piece after piece on one shore town after another, 

brutally dismantled by Hurricane Sandy. 

I walked around as usual today, snapping photos of my yard and

composing witty captions in my mind for each, hoping that when 

I got inside, I'd not forget them.  These would form another

 'aftermath' post, showing what the Jersey folks endured the night 

before.  No image that I got today came close to the above photograph.

We escaped unscathed, compared to the people living on the coast.

We lost power for less than twelve hours, and it never rained hard

enough to worry about the sump pumps, although I was ready to

hook them up.  In a way I feel like we should have had a tougher

go of it, seeing what the shore-dwellers will be dealing with for 

weeks and months to come.  I still don't quite realize the scope of it.