Snowpocolypse 2010

Dec 28, 2010

I was back at work yesterday after an unplanned stay in a New Jersey hotel due to being snowed off the road on the way home from western PA. (The hotel was straight out of The Shining, and I'll tell you about it later.)

I woke up at 6 AM yesterday, hit the icy highway to slip-and-slide our way into Manhattan, across Canal Street, and over the still snow-covered Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. Stranded, crashed, and burned-out cars lined the roads everywhere, with a car on Canal Street stuck right in the middle. The salted and slushy street wasn't in great condition, but it was passable, unlike the untouched side streets, which looked more like cross-country ski trails than city streets. We saw a car completely gutted in a fire and wondered what could've possibly happened to it. Bicycles, mailboxes, garbage bags, and trash cans were nothing more than snowy white lumps, and unless you were up to the challenge of slogging through the deep snow drifts on the sidewalks, you walked in the street. And not just along the curb, either. People were crisscrossing in all directions. I felt like I was driving across the ice skating pond in Central Park.

On the Brooklyn side of the Bridge, where people in my neighborhood like to walk in the street to begin with, things only got worse. But we finally made it. After unloading the truck, taking a quick look at the mail, saying hi to the cats, and taking a piss -- not necessarily in that order -- I went back outside to wait for a bus that never arrived. After waiting an hour, I decided to become one of the wandering zombies and walk the mile or so to the subway station. "At least maybe I'll get some good photos along the way." But of course, my battery had died. The F train came almost immediately, though it was crammed full of wool hats, wet boots, and overcoats. I squeezed into a car and was shuttled back to Manhattan. A mere two and a half hours after leaving my apartment, I was at work.

"Can you come in early tomorrow?" the girl at work asked when I left for the night. "Uhh....no. I mean, I can try, but um..." I left for the day and walked to the subway with my fingers crossed. Surprisingly, the L train came quickly and ran without trouble, though it was packed beyond safe capacity with sniffling bodies.

"You waitin' for the bus?" a Hasidic man asked me after I got off the L train and stood at the bus stop for my final leg home.

"Yes."

"No bus."

"No bus?"

"That's what they tell me in the pizza place."

Another snow hike. As I walked the mile home from the bus stop (a different route than my commute in -- I like to change things up) it wasn't hard to see why there was no bus. The streets were still a toboggan route. As I began walking, I stuck to the bus route at first, hoping for a post-Christmas miracle, but when I finally resigned myself to the fact that a bus was never coming and I'd be walking the entire way home, I veered off the route and turned down a side street. The Hasidic neighborhood in South Williamsburg was completely ignored by snow plows, but the residents did a good job of clearing the sidewalks, and it was relatively easy going for a while. Neighborhood kids were building a giant snow pyramid, at least six feet high, in the middle of the street. It wasn't going to make clearing the streets any easier, but since it obviously wasn’t a priority for anyone anyway, at least it kept the kids busy.

Turning away from South Williamsburg, things quickly became more dreary. With little incentive for anyone to clear the sidewalks in the industrial area at the north end of the Navy Yard, it was hard to decide where to walk. Despite the slippery slushy road conditions, cars were whizzing along at a dangerous clip, and I couldn't help seeing myself being squashed by a careening minivan if I walked in the street in the dark of night, so I stuck to the sidewalks -- if you could call them that. Williamsburg Street near the BQE onramp was a wet gully of dirty, icy water nearly a foot deep. I didn't see anyone else walking, but there were plenty of footprints, so I wasn't the only idiot. Until that point, I had been impressed with how dry my feet had stayed.

After dinner, I went straight to bed, and now it's time to do it again. Hopefully, my boots are dry.