New Year's Observations

I.

New Year’s Day is the perfect time to walk not far from home into Central Park of Morris County, what used to be the Greystone property. There are no competitive events. There are no earthmovers working where there once were trees. Plus, it had been a while for me.

Did Sandy take down these trees or the county?

First thing I noticed, besides the wind suddenly hitting me in the face on Central Ave. because of the lack of trees, was a fence has been put around the terraced field that has been under construction for months, the kind of fence designed to keep a batted or kicked ball from rolling down the hill and into the road. So things are moving along. There is now curbing in spots, too.

I kept going west on Central Ave. and got better views of what’s behind the fence as I got closer to the old administration building. Quite a lot of ball fields are being fit into this area, and they will create quite a lot of noise and traffic when finally completed.

But on the other side of the street was something that surprised me - more cut-down trees. What could this be? Perhaps this is the county’s dumping ground for many of the trees blown over by Sandy. So many trees lost, they had to go somewhere.

I’d rather that was the reason for the destruction than plans for an auxiliary parking lot.

I also noticed Sandy had blown out several of the upper windows in the administration building. This is sad to see. Those open windows will let in more of the elements - such as birds looking to get out of the cold - and will hasten the decay and destruction of this huge stone hulk. It is on state land, but the state has proved by its inaction that it has other things on its mind besides the building’s preservation.

More blown out windows, more decay for the old Greystone
administration building.

II.

I have no doubt that as I was spending New Year’s Day walking on Central Ave. many birders were racing around tallying their “first of year” birds. Yet another list that means nothing in the general scheme of the world but means a lot when you are a birder and want to announce something - anything - to other birders via the various lists.

FOY cardinal. Whoo-hoo!

I was not expecting a lot of bird activity at Greystone. Cutting down trees isn’t the best way of drawing birds and in winter there‘s not a lot to feed them. Yet, some birds were around.

The huge population of turkey and black vultures were roosting in a copse of trees or flying to these trees as I walked. Vultures will fly in the wind - a bird’s got to eat - but they don’t usually do a lot on a cold, cloudy day since they have to work harder to stay aloft in the absence of warm air currents from the ground.

As I've written before, there is something majestic about a flock of 70 or so of these large, dark birds (with their bare, ugly heads) in several trees - unless it’s your trees. Then it becomes a big mess.

A few years ago I was driving back at dusk from hiking not far from home, in Morris Township. I was stopped at a red light. Ahead of me it seemed a lot of turkey vultures were flying in low. I crossed the intersection and stopped across from a house and was startled to count at least 75 turkey vultures in the backyard spruces. Weeks later I brought my husband to the same area at dusk and there they were - if not more of them.

Late last year I was in the same area and stopped at the house, curious. All the spruces had been cut down. That’s one way of dealing with vulture overpopulation.

Some of Greystone's vulture population, Jan. 1, 2013

As I watch on Central Ave., most people walk or ride under the vulture-laden trees and ignore what’s above them.

The county is also leaving the Greystone population alone, at least for now. Despite the mess they leave on the roofs of the few standing structures the birds have plenty of space (again, for now). Also, they don’t attack living things. They have a useful function most of us would consider pretty disgusting: They are nature’s sanitation crew. Dead deer, bear or fox in the road and you can‘t get a human crew out to dispose of it? No problem.

They are lucky enough to be among the few birds in an increasingly overdeveloped area that not only have a continuous source of road kill but have found enough habitat - in this case Greystone - to support them.

III.

Death was not far from my mind the last week of 2012. First, we found out about the death of an old friend from whom we’d been estranged for five years. He took to the grave whatever it was that had so upset him he refused to speak to us.

Then my husband and I came down with flu. Was the deep, continual coughing the worst or the onset of fever chills? Hard to say, but there comes a time when you start wishing the whole thing was OVER.

But we survived.

The last day of 2012 was the first time I was able to take a morning walk and, coming after the first significant snow we’d had in over a year, the walk gave me much to think about.

I don’t know where I’ve seen more of man’s inhumanity to man - the 13 months I spent driving Interstate 80 to and from work every morning and evening, or the previous 18 years spent walking the streets of my little town to and from the commuter train.

In the car I faced death from drivers who are distracted by the phone, the need for speed, an argument with a passenger, a GPS that says TAKE THIS EXIT (so the driver must then cut across three lanes of traffic).

They cut me off when they don‘t signal a lane change, wouldn’t let me in when I was trying to enter the highway, or used a lane that’s about to end to pass me on the right in order to cut ahead. They think everyone on the road is out to get them and they are the only sane driver present. They believe the commercials for their ultimate driving machines.

But while walking in rain, wind, ice and snow I faced people who got every last bit of snow from their driveways but barely touched their sidewalks. People who used snowblowers on the sidewalks but couldn’t be bothered to do a point where I could step into the street (forcing me over slippery hills of piled-up snow).

I would be walking home in the dark, lit flashlight in hand, past a huge pile of leaves the homeowner had put in the street, with a car going much faster than the 25-mile-per-hour speed limit giving me the barest of clearances as he or she rushed by. Sometimes the car would be coming at me as I was in the middle of what became a one-lane street because of huge leaf piles on both sides.

And in summer were the people who set their sprinklers so high (and ran them so long during the day) the sidewalks would get as wet as their lawns, forcing me into the street. Once, in the middle of a downpour, I got a shot of water in my face UNDER my umbrella from one of these sprinklers. Not pleasant.

Again, I lived. Now, the dark street I no longer have to walk every night has a sidewalk on one side, put in last year. It has been a blessing. If only I had had this luxury when I was walking home in the dark all those autumns!

But on the last day of 2012 I was destined to be disappointed by some of my neighbors yet again. You’d think I’d have learned. While many took their responsibilities seriously, a few homeowners either didn’t bother to clear their new sidewalk of snow or had taken one pass with a small shovel to do the bare minimum. Either way, the result was a slippery mess.

In the Brooklyn of my youth the police would fine you for not clearing the sidewalk, so people did it. But that was Brooklyn, part of nitty-gritty New York City. Out here fining someone for being selfish, lazy or stupid is just not done.

RIP, Old Friend

I found out today that an old friend died last week.

No, that’s a double misnomer.

He was not old. He only turned 56 at the beginning of December, eight weeks before I reach that age.

And while we knew him for well over 30 years, in the last five we’d become estranged. Not as much a friend. He blamed us for something but we don’t know what. “They should know what they did,” he told a well-meaning mutual friend when she asked why he’d gone silent.

So with the distance the shock was muted. A heart attack, very sudden.

We found out in a roundabout way because of the rupture. Not even his longtime girlfriend - a friend we’d introduced to him and so we lost both - contacted us. She contacted someone who contacted someone who contacted us. These other people, who knew our old friend through Facebook, were very shocked by the suddenness.

My husband, in turn, contacted other people and told them via Facebook. In the old days we would have taken turns on the phone.

As to the death itself, MH and I, however, were not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised. Our friend was a heavy smoker and had been for most of his life. The birth of his only child during his short marriage didn’t end the smoking, and neither did the woman with him when he died.

You never know what will happen, do you? My uncle is in his 90s but is silent with dementia. My father died at 73 with a sharp mind but a body incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease. MH’s parents are active in mind and body while almost at 80. My mother died at 60 of cancer. MH is a former smoker but heavier than he should be. He is the age now our old friend was when he died.



Tufted titmice - or titmouses, as our
late friend called them.


He was a complicated man who took his resentments to the grave. But there are a lot of funny stories we remember, many memories, many good times. Maybe it was some of those times our friend didn’t want to remember and he held it against us that we continued to laugh at some of his exploits.

Those memories became tinged with sadness when our friend stopped talking to us. Now that sadness has deepened.

What horrified me more than our friend dying was the thought of my finding MH on the kitchen floor one ordinary morning. Or him finding me. As the shootings in Newtown, Conn. - ironically, the news came out the day our old friend died - showed us, life is very precious and very easy to end.

You try to exercise and eat right, drink in moderation and not smoke and hope you are doing the right thing, that there isn’t a time bomb in you that will kill you. Our friend smoked and we heard something about heart problems earlier in the year, maybe a malfunctioning valve.

I doubt that stopped him smoking either. Smoking is one of our legal drugs. (So is alcohol. Cigarette ads are no longer broadcast on television but you can still see plenty of ads for liquor and beer.) We know it can kill. But our old friend did not want to stop. We have other friends who refuse to stop, too. They knew our late friend and MH notified them of his passing. Will it inspire them to perhaps cut back? I don’t know. That’s out of our control.

So is finding out what caused the rupture in the first place. We used our mutual friend as a go-between to send our condolences and she passed along our friend’s girlfriend’s thanks. Maybe there will be future communications. I hope so. But if there are I won’t ask her because at this point it really doesn’t matter.

The last time we saw the two of them we were in their house on Cape Cod for a few days. She had him smoke outside - did he resent that? - and we sat with him at one point. He pointed out the tufted titmice he insisted on calling titmouses. He was getting interested in the birds around him and was looking forward to the hummingbirds coming to the flowers of some vines his girlfriend had planted.

I hope he got to see them.


Rest in peace, Steven Mark Perry.

Our Children, Our Guns

It could’ve been your child.

You take his hand and go outside to the morning cold and wait in front of your house together for the bus. Or you take her down the street where other mothers and fathers are waiting for the bus with their children.

The bus rolls up and the door opens. You hug your child. “See you later,” you call. The bus drives off.

Your child never returns.

That didn’t happen. Not this time. But it did happen, in a town not that much bigger than Morris Plains. Newtown, Conn., has been described as “quaint” and a “typical New England town.”

It happened when a 20-year-old man in that town shot his mother, took her legally registered guns - including an assault rifle, the kind used in warfare - and went to an elementary school where he killed the principal, a school psychologist and then shot at close range children, 20 of whom died.

Why does someone need to have pistols, a rifle and an assault rifle in the house? Why does her son, described as having a “history of mental illness,” have access to that arsenal?

Imagine if this had happened in Morris Plains, at the Mountain Way school? Or at the Borough school? Or at Morristown high school? Colombine was a high school shooting, the Virginia Tech slaying a college campus.

What makes this killing horrific is it took place in a supposedly “safe” town,  involved very young children and the way the killer smashed his way into the school, walked into a classroom and start shooting.

It was deliberate, cold-blooded murder for a reason we can’t fathom.

We love our children, passionately. We are ready to lynch anyone accused of being a sex offender and sput their names on a list to protect our kids when they move to our towns. We fight to “choose life” and make sure there's “no child left behind.” We only want them to have the best, a better life than we had.

No matter how bad it gets, the sun rises each day, giving us new hope.

But there are times where we seem to love our guns more. We quote the second amendment of the Constitution in explaining why we have the “right” to have them. We don’t just need them for hunting. We need them for “protection.” We need them to look tough or to have the upper hand in a confrontation with “criminals.”

You watch enough violence on television or in movies or videogames and it makes stories of real murder seem almost routine. You watch the news and almost nightly hear about a young man or woman shot on a Newark street, or a child caught in the crossfire of a gang battle.

Then you hear about a young man walking into a school to blow away a room of first-graders after killing his mother in a “quaint” and “typical” New England town right out of Norman Rockwell.

That is when you realize this isn’t a gang problem or a Newark problem. It’s YOUR problem. It CAN happen here.

The dead mother was a “gun enthusiast” who felt she needed protection in this “quaint New England town” by having two handguns, a rifle and an assault weapon in the house. Did she consider she might someday need protection from her son?

When my husband and I were children in our respective schools we would settle arguments with fights or with an adult interceding and reasoning with us. Not guns. Now it seems we spend more face time with our computers than with each other, including our precious children (watch how many mothers push a baby carriage with one hand and talk on the other, or how many kids try to get their father’s attention while he’s on the phone).

When we get angry at strangers we rant online. When we get really angry with spouses, children or parents we use the gun in our house.

There should be limits on guns, but it’s unrealistic to just ban guns. These guns used in the massacre were legally bought, after all. Even President Obama, in his address to the nation last Saturday after the shooting, didn’t mention gun control. It’s a touchy subject.

But we also can’t put up metal detectors in front of every building. This is not Orwell‘s “1984.” Since 9/11 we have cameras everywhere and people making a living coming up with encrypted security and others paid to hack into emails and other supposedly private communications. We must now use “keycards” to go into the office, maybe even the bathroom.

And don’t get me started on airport security.

Do you want to go through a metal detector every time you go to the supermarket (remember Gabrielle Giffords?) or movie theater (remember Aurora, Colo.?) or a mall (remember Portland, Ore.?)?

Still, how many more shootings do we have to endure? How many more children have to die?

I don’t know the answers. Consider this post my frustrated screaming in the wilderness.

My older niece is a teacher in a private school in a “quaint” Connecticut town not far from Newtown, and she told MH that when she heard the details of the shootings in her car after school she drove home crying. She later called her mother, an art teacher of young children in New Hampshire, talking about “her kids” and how saying goodbye to them for the weekend seemed so inadequate. She wanted to hug them all extra hard.

Her kids. Our kids. We proclaim that life is precious, but every gun reminds us it is also very easy to cut short.

I am sure every parent in Morris Plains hugged their children of all ages in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting. Your children did come home. The school bus did arrive in the afternoon and your son or daughter hopped off and into your arms.

This time, they came home.

This time.

Hurricane Sandy and the Birds

When Hurricane Sandy struck just days before Halloween it flooded the coast and took down hundreds, if not thousands, of trees with extraordinary strong winds inland, putting buildings and people in the dark.

NJ Audubon's Scherman Hoffman center, NJ Audubon's main office and the nearby Great Swamp were hit particularly hard by the felling or shredding of trees (such as this one on Pleasant Plains Rd. in the Swamp). A friend of mine who lives not far from Scherman Hoffman had no power for nine days and refused to leave her increasingly chilly home without her animals. Luckily, they all survived.

In open areas, the devastation from Sandy doesn't look like much. But
in the forests and suburban yards, it's worse.

During this time -- once I got my power back -- I sent a lot of emails to friends and family affected by the hurricane including relatives in eastern Canada, where the storm was headed next. As it turned out, my relatives were not affected.

One of them, a budding birder, asked me in his response what happens to birds, particularly migrating birds, in a hurricane. He was not the only one who asked me that question. I guessed that, presuming the birds weren’t slammed into a building or tree, those stopped by the wind either hunkered down at the closest safe forest or pond until it was safe to proceed or traveled west to fly around the storm.

As it happened, New Jersey Audubon soon put out a press release on that very subject.

It says, in part:

The good news is that there is little evidence that the storm had a serious, direct impact on breeding or wintering bird populations. Late October falls right between that time when summer residents have migrated and most winter residents arrive.

(Well, that’s a relief.)

But it is almost certain that the flooding tides caused mortality among rodent populations, thus reducing the prey base for wintering birds of prey. New Jersey’s Atlantic and Delaware Bay marshes rank among the planet’s greatest winter raptor strongholds. This year, many Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Harrier, Short-eared and Long-eared Owls will be forced to move on and hope to find less affected areas to meet their food needs.

(So much for seeing Roughies or SEOs at the usual places this year.)

The storm also stripped much fruit and seed In woodlands, high winds stripped trees of fruit and seeds sending such wild bird staples as acorns, wild grape, poison ivy berries to for forest floor where snow or ice may put them out of reach. There may be an issue for cavity nesting species, like woodpeckers, if many of the dead standing trees went down in the storm. Importantly, if natural disasters become more frequent or are of greater magnitude, it may be beyond certain species ability to compensate and eventually recover.

I sent this press release to my relative, but I don’t know if it will comfort him all that much.

Sandy has upended everything. Weeks of leaves came down in a day. The irruption of winter finches from Canada that came over the border in search of food a month ago are now elsewhere in NJ, certainly not at my feeder, where the trees weren't felled and the seeds not destroyed. (Alot seem to be in center Jersey and points south, according to the reports.) Despite the NJ Audubon press release, I've had no problem finding raptors including redtails, harriers and accipiters, such as this Cooper's hawk that has been scaring birds away from my feeders.

This immature Cooper's hawk likes to scare the birds away
from the feeders but I've yet to see it catch anything.

The New York and New Jersey beaches where piping plovers, least terns and other endangered shorebirds nest are gone or vastly depleted. Like a shuffled deck of cards, birds normally found out at sea – scoters and pelagic birds, for instance – found temporary shelter in inland lakes and reservoirs – a delight for birders but a cause of concern for those of us who are noticing these “100-year storms” are becoming much more regular.

What is happening to the birds is dwarfed by what is happening to the people who live in New Jersey’s coastal communities, some of them for generations. I feel very sorry for these people (although not for those “summer people” who built their “cottages” on the dunes – an abomination in itself – and refused to allow protective dunes to block their view of the ocean. These towns, such as Holgate, were hit hardest.).

But as any sailor knows, the ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away. Towns are wondering how to rebuild in areas where no home should’ve been built in the first place. (There’s a reason they are called barrier islands.)

Will New Jersey heed Sandy’s warning? Will those who think they’ve “made it” by building a house with an ocean view understand that man is no match for Mother Nature? Will homes and roads on the overpopulated barrier islands be built to withstand the next Sandy?

Or will they be rebuilt the same as before in the name of expediency and getting things back to “normal”?

There’s always the option of not rebuilding and allowing nature to take its course. (That sound you just heard was the collective scream of every public official from Governor Christie on down.)

Won’t happen. Too much tourism and property tax money at stake.

But it will be a shame that the opportunity to rebuild smarter – or not at all – will likely be squandered. Until the next storm.

The birds don’t care. They never do. They will just go elsewhere to survive. New Jersey will be the poorer for it.

Seven-Woodpecker Day

During what was literally the darkest hours after Hurricane Sandy blacked out my neighborhood, my husband and I wondered if we would be traveling on our planned vacation to North Carolina.

Sandy was only about a month ago but it seems like yesterday. We had power in two days. Our neighbors just a block away were out over a week. The power grid works in mysterious ways.

Even after the power came back on, MH and I were paranoid. We feared losing power again after the nor’easter blew through. We bought few groceries that week because, we hoped, we’d be traveling and didn’t want to stock a freezer only to lose the goods in the next storm. Even though my neighbors without power were running generators (I don’t have one - yet) I was afraid someone would plug into my outside outlet. People without power could be capable of anything, we thought.

We would look hard at people walking along our quiet side street if we didn't recognize them, wondering if they were looking for an uninhabited house to rob. Even tho’ we could put our alarm on, I am ashamed to admit we were ready to cancel our vacation - the only week I could afford to take off this year - if the rest of the area was still in the dark. We would stay and protect our home.

Luckily, it never came to that. The neighbors got their power back, the noisy generators were shut off, the mowers and blowers and chainsaws did their jobs and we went off to a barrier island of North Carolina that, unlike the barrier islands of the Jersey Shore, was not damaged a bit by Sandy.

We’d never been in Atlantic Beach before. We wanted to try a different place than the Outer Banks, where we’ve been twice. Besides the ocean and the sound, what made me choose this area were the natural areas close to where we’d be staying.

The barrier island Atlantic Beach is on is very much built up. A Sandy hitting it would do the same damage seen in Holgate, N.J. But unlike New Jersey there was plenty of public beach access areas where we could walk (and, more important, use the bathroom) unimpeded and without paying a fee.

Each time we stopped at one we saw something different and surprising. Surfers. Surf casters. On the bird end we had pelicans, willets, sanderlings and ruddy turnstones plus terns, different gulls and skeins of black scoters and cormorants.

We went to a road near the aquarium to find the Theodore Roosevelt natural area but while we found parking there were no trails. It was literally a “wildlife viewing area." What you viewed was from the road. We saw a grand variety of birds including the brown thrasher pictured here that didn’t care we had parked next to it.

We were also told by our waitress at a diner one morning about a little trail she’d seen next to the Food Lion supermarket. It turned out to be a trail running next to a creek on which the Union Army traveled down to lay siege to nearby Fort Macon. We’d never have known had we not told her we were there to bird, not fish and she had seen the sign when she parked to get groceries.

But the best part of the four days we spent there was hiking Croatan National Forest. It is a huge chunk of land, many big pieces of which are given over to hunting. (There was a lot of hunting going on. We could hear the rifle shots at many of the places we stopped in our travels). Thanks to the Internet I had found a trail that was on a part of the mainland not far from us that was said to be good for birding.

I almost lost MH when he saw a sign at the entrance warning people to wear orange if they were going in.

I was not going to be stopped from going into this forest because I heard this was prime habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker.

This is a bird found only in the south. It builds nests in living pine trees, particularly mature long-leaf pine trees. You will not find this bird in suburban housing developments. In our two visits to the Outer Banks I had sought this bird in every pine forest. The red on this woodpecker, despite its name, is quite small (if it is there at all) but the bird has a large white cheek patch that distinguishes it from its more common cousin, the downy. I always admonished MH to “look for the white cheek!” if he saw a woodpecker in those North Carolina woods. We found none.

Now I was on the doorstep and I was going in, orange or no orange. He reluctantly followed.

It helped we were on a trail that led to several loop trails and we took the inner one, figuring any hunting would be in the forest at large and thus affect the outer loop. As it turned out, we heard no shots at all. In fact, two guys and their small hound came bounding onto the trail and walked on the outer loop without a care or an orange vest.

On our loop trail we saw a lot that we expected - brown-headed nuthatch (a southern cousin of the white-breasted nuthatch seen in NJ) and many myrtle warblers - and that we did not, including a solitary vireo, a pine warbler (pictured) and an osprey, all of which left my part of NJ long ago.

But at one point I heard a rattling that sounded vaguely familiar, and that is when I looked up and found a redheaded woodpecker.

This is a very striking bird, and I have seen it in New Jersey, in Great Swamp and, one spectacular February day after a heavy snow had melted, along the linear county park near me known as Patriots Path. But MH had never seen one and each time one was sighted in NJ or NY I would rush him out on a wild bird chase. We never found it. He didn’t care but I very much wanted him to see one.

Now he had, and he understood why I had bothered.

As you can see it has a deep red head and a body of solid black and white. I had forgotten this is a southern bird, only rarely sighted in the north, usually a juvenile and usually in winter. MH must’ve shot over 100 pictures of this adult bird from various angles while I took my own pictures, including this one. We later found others.

In the meantime, we had found a pileated woodpecker, flickers, redbelly, several yellow-bellied sapsuckers and a downy. So that’s a six-woodpecker day, something I hadn’t had since last December.

But it got better. Something caught my eye and I looked to my right and there, climbing a tree, was a little black and white woodpecker with a bright white cheek.

Somehow I managed to get MH’s attention without startling the bird. I think I just called out its name. MH came running and we started snapping pictures, one of which is this one.

A seven-woodpecker day. Our 335th new bird. By the time we’d finished the loop trail we’d seen four or five more of these woodpeckers.

Most people travel to refresh themselves. If they are smart they keep their eyes and ears open and their mouths shut and learn something about the area where they are traveling instead of trying to recreate or impose on it the culture of where they’ve come from. If you’re a birder, you also go to different areas where you can see new (to you) birds.

On this trip MH and I saw a lot that was good and lot of not so good. Too many people, too many chain restaurants you can find anywhere, little respect for wildlife beyond what you could kill, not as much regional flavor (in food and behavior) as we’d hoped. But we did see a new bird in a new (to us) area.

More important, besides spending time together away from work, MH and I were able to rid ourselves of our post-Sandy paranoia. We came back to a neighborhood that was back to “normal” (with both the good and the bad that implies). While saddened that many devastated areas of coastal New Jersey continue to suffer, we were glad to be back to normal, too.

Thankful

Today is Thanksgiving. For the first time in six years my husband and I are not traveling to New Hampshire to visit his family. We will be visiting our friend in Bernardsville, NJ, instead.

There are many things for which we are thankful.

We are thankful our friend got power and heat back after Hurricane Sandy, albeit after nine days. We got ours back after two days but she refused to come to us or other friends and leave her animals behind. The day she thought she'd have to give in and go elsewhere the power came back.

We are thankful all our friends in the New York/New Jersey area who lost power for so long and had their lives disrupted are fine, and our hearts go out to those who still have no homes and/or no power nearly a month later.

MH's picure from North Carolina, November 2012. We are thankful we could get here.

We are thankful for today's sunshine, the lack of wind, the relatively warm temperature. We've had far colder Thanksgivings. We are thankful for the music of Teddy Wilson played over WKCR today. We are thankful to have a job, even if it is far from perfect, to pay the bills at a time when so many do not.

On a purely personal level, I am thankful to have MH, who among other things is a wonderful traveling companion. After a long marriage we know when to talk and when to stay silent, most of the time anyway. We make a good team in the field - he prefers his camera to the binoculars and I am the opposite, so I sight birds, call them out and he snaps pictures. Between the two of us we have lots of memories.

We are thankful we got to see many "good" birds on a week-long vacation in North Carolina we thought we'd have to cancel if the lack of power and the north Jersey gas lines continued for much longer. We are thankful we got away because in our darkest moment, literally, we weren't so sure.

On this trip MH finally saw a redheaded woodpecker, we both saw the rare red-cocaded woodpecker (I'll write more on this another time) and, most important, we had time together away from New Jersey and the trauma of the hurricane. We needed the break.

I have had a good life with a lot of good luck in it and I thank God for that. I hope it can continue for a long time.

I am also thankful I can put words together in a way that people enjoy reading, so thank you Readers.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Aftermath

I admit to feeling survivor’s guilt right now.

I’m lucky. Sandy’s damage to my house was one shutter that blew off, struck my office window (while I was working!) without breaking it and flew to the other side of my property.

Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012

No major tree damage. No holes in the roof, water in the basement or electric wires on the driveway. My husband (MH) even found the shutter in one piece. I put out my feeders and the birds returned, hungry as ever. Maybe hungrier.

My street lost power for about 44 hours. I don‘t play videogames or watch a lot of TV but I found it increasingly impossible during these cloudy, chilly days to function in continual darkness. Even when the power came back, thanks to the complexities of the grid system the corner house next door still has no power; nor does the next street.

But we got off easy. Compare that with Moonachie, where a levee broke and water deluged areas that have never had water after nor’easters and other hurricanes.

Or the Jersey shore. MH is very upset to see areas where his family summered now almost completely destroyed. Long Beach Island. Island Beach.

Or Breezy Point, Queens, just across the channel from where I grew up in Brooklyn. Breezy Point, a fine place to enjoy the beach and the birds, not only was submerged, 100 homes were destroyed by fire - fire in the middle of all that water - because fire fighters couldn’t get in to put the fire out.

Or lower Manhattan, where I worked for so many years, without power from 42nd Street south. A friend who lives in the East 20s says besides the loss of power she has no water and groceries are in short supply. The stock exchange is open and running on generators but it’s only a symbol since nothing else is open. Even the subways shut down for days.

I have read about the gas lines and the fights breaking out. It is why our filled car has not been used in this crisis except to act as my power source for my laptop and cellphone. There is no train service. It was a triumph when Quik-Chek reopened and we could buy a newspaper but there is no milk or sandwich meat to replenish our storm provisions.

If we’re lucky there will be deliveries of food and gasoline to area markets this weekend, which is around the time lower Manhattan and my friends there should - Con Ed willing - get their power back. They have no car. I offer them shelter but without trains running they can‘t easily get across the Hudson.

Another friend, in Bernardsville, is staying in her dark, cold house because she won’t leave without her many pets.

At times like these, what do you say? What do you do to cope? Yes, I am relieved to get the power back because I was able to turn the heat on in an increasingly cold house. I don’t have to sit in my car to work tonight. When things calm down I will do as many of my neighbors did after the freak Halloween 2011 snowstorm and buy a generator.

These “freak” storms are happening far too frequently, if you ask me.

How did Sandy become such a monster? Why didn’t it go out to sea as hurricanes usually do? What made it turn left and hit the Jersey shore?

These storms remind us that when everyone wants to live on the water they get the bad as well as the good. You get the view, you get the floods. I’ve complained before about building where no home should be, particularly on unprotected barrier islands.

Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012


But then you realize the devastation was as bad inland as it was at the shore. As you can see in MH’s photo, even towns like mine that are far from major waterways weren’t immune. 

Sandy was an equal opportunity destroyer.

When the only hope people have is to rebuild, I can only hope their next homes withstand the next monster storm.

Better yet, I hope there is no next monster storm.