And more setbacks

Gonna rock you like a hurricane...

And then Hurricane Sandy hit. We were plunged into darkness (9 days without power) and cold. Our neighborhood was devastated, trees blocked every path, water climbed up and over hills and through back streets and into basements. It pooled in the middle of streets and made lakes that rendered our town completely impassable. It devastated our state, devastated our neighborhood, but thankfully caused minimal damage to my own home. I did run the morning after the hurricane. Everything was covered in a brown-green sludge of wet leaves. Windows and sidewalks, everything surface had that sludge. It was like something out of a science fiction movie.

And two days after the storm, I still had to get to Chicago, because I was presenting a major paper and receiving an award for it at that conference. And I was taking 10 students to it also, so I had to keep them organized as our flights got cancelled, rescheduled, cancelled again, and so on. Since our cell phones were our only link to the Internet, and those phones had to be charged in our cars, and our cars couldn’t get to the gas stations even if there had been gas to put in them, we mostly camped out in church basements and tried to figure out what to do next.

Here are some pics of my neighborhood taken a day after Hurricane Sandy. In the second one you can kind of see that leaf sludge.

Even though we were still in shock, I managed to get to Chicago on time. Because I’d had no access to TV, seeing the pictures of the hurricane’s devastation on the screens in the airport and then in the hotel lobby was the first chance I had to understand the magnitude of the devastation. It was surreal. But stranger still was walking around talking to people who had been totally unaffected. There were 1,800+ people at the conference and most were from other parts of the country. They were sorry for what we’d gone through, but it was about as real to them as the Haiti earthquake was to me.

Despite the disorientation, I managed to get some very frosty runs in along the river in Chicago. Having my morning runs kept me steady. It was a routine that provided a measure of comfort amid all the chaos.

7am run in Chicago, November 2, 2013. I had the place to myself.