Storm victims trade devastation for democracy
N.Y. heads out to vote
BREEZY POINT, N. Y. The survivors of a biblical battery of sea-surge, flames and gale descended from highrise darkness and rose from the literal ashes of a fiery super-storm Tuesday to elect a president, a senator and a half-dozen judges, and to ratify their own faith in a ravaged New York City.
For the voters of Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula — the once-sublime oceanfront outport where firefighters advanced futilely early last week in neck-deep water and in tempest-tossed rowboats to battle an inferno that incinerated 100 homes — the moment was especially portentous.
“This is important,” the dawn’s first voter told me. “This is what we DO.”
This was Cathy Purpura, just after 6 a.m. Tuesday, at the parish hall of St. Genevieve’s Roman Catholic Church, a mile outside the square of Breezy Point that had been left a pit of ashes, cinders and memories by hurricane Sandy. Singly, in stalwart couples, and in school buses provided by the borough of Queens to residents whose own vehicles had been washed away in the tempest, voters made their way to the church as an icy dawn shone over the devastation.
The Freedom Tower rising at Ground Zero in Manhattan was a glowing, glass-walled beacon on the northern horizon, a reminder of the resilience of the self-described Greatest City on Earth.
Purpura and her husband Pete, 76 — Breezy Point vacationers since childhood and residents here since the 1970s — were so punctual that they got to St. Genevieve’s from their temporary refuge in Brooklyn before poll workers had finished setting up their equipment under klieg lights powered by a portable generator. With hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers still without heat and electricity — and with another gale-force rainstorm and possibly even snow due to slash the metropolis on Wednesday — election day was a blessed hiatus in a vengeful week. Outside the polling place, emergency workers had erected a mountain range of bottled water, boxed bananas, military rations and sanitary supplies — a compelling tableau of devastation, democracy and defiance.
Across the bay in Coney Island, where a wall of water had roared down Surf Avenue at the height of the hurricane, pushing Saharan dunes three blocks inland and scourging the hotdog stands and penny arcades of the famous plebeian strand, tens of thousands of apartment dwellers descended darkened, urine-stained stairways to exercise their franchise in sand-filled common rooms and senior centres.
“We are very solid, ultraconservative Republicans,” Mrs. Purpura, a nursing supervisor, said after voting for Mitt Romney in Breezy Point.
“After four years of living with what we have been living with, there has to be change,” her husband agreed. “We knew even before the LAST election.”
The Purpuras’ own house on an idyllic lane called Tioga Walk had been spared total destruction; though the tsunami had eviscerated the ground floor, the little white house had remained standing and may be habitable again by summer, should the foundation prove to be intact. (The couple had ridden out the storm across the channel on the New York mainland, watching the flames fill the furious sky.) But Mrs. Purpura said that the house of one of her sons “is totally done,” that another son’s home had been tilted over on its side, and that her sister’s bungalow had been swallowed by fire.