Monday, 18 August 2003 | The Blackout

We were walking in the traffic lane across the Williamsburg Bridge when we heard the the official name, which inspired us to think of alternatives, most of which involved the word "operation." That's when it occurred to us that there were already probably fancy graphics, a theme song, and a collection overeager reporters. We were far from watching any TV, but as we walked through the city streets, in the mass exodus of Manhattan, we could hear chunks of radio coverage, pouring out of car windows and portable devices, hosts that attracted hovering human bodies, whose ears were bent toward the crackly voices.

The chaos of traffic light-less streets drove some well-meaning citizens out into the intersections, to hold a flat palm one direction and wave a "c'mere" to the perpendicular lane. A man in a bicycle helmet at Union Square yelled at the cars for not letting a wave of pedestrians pass; much later, a man in my neighborhood spent hours directing traffic with a small Puerto Rican flag on a stick. We talked about the type of people who put themselves in that position, and noted that, somehow, none of us was that person. Mollie said she was fascinated by them.

On the other side of the bridge, at least two hours after we'd started our journey, we ran into a guy who'd been stuck on the subway, on the L between Bedford Ave and First Ave, underneath the East River. He said he and the other passengers waited in the hot dark for 30 minutes before the first announcement was made, and they waited an additional 30 before they could walk through the tunnel, the opposite way they'd originally been heading. (Eventually I would hear about tourists who were forced to sleep on the streets, people stuck on rides at Coney Island, businessmen and women propping themselves up on train station walls.)

My own story is less dramatic; I was sitting at my desk when I heard the electricity sucked out of the city. Heard, because it sounded like a giant powering-down, as if all of the electricity had been thrown over the edge of a cliff. For a moment, the buzz I normally don't notice was silent; and then the light chatter of what just happened? began.

Moments after we returned to a "simpler time," everyone in the office was gathered in the main conference room to assess the seriousness of the situation. It occurred to me almost immediately how much I genuinely like the people there, and if I am going to be stuck in a building for any length of time, I had chosen a good one to be in. We also hovered around a radio, mouths dropping as we heard first the entire city was black—then Albany—then Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit—which gave us our first understanding of the size of the invisible beast.

On the streets were lines in front of phone booths, discounted ice cream shops and ice cream trucks, and spilling fire hydrants. At my place, I cooked veggie burgers for Mollie and Lisa on my gas stove, and we drank Becks and ate and talked in the fading light of my apartment. When we left again to join the others, we needed flashlights. We could see stars. I heard two different people make the comment that suddenly it was as if we were in the middle of nowhere, as if we were in the country, as if we were camping. I thought it was funny and wrong and something only someone living in New York would say. We could see thirty stars instead of none, and we were surrounded by people everywhere we went, turning the power outage into a party, as if they'd been set free by the absence of electricity. Fires in trash cans, music, singing, sidewalk games, more radios.

We sat in bars powered by candles, and we sat on the rocks next to the East River, looking across at the humbled, darkened skyline. Helicopters buzzed over tops of the buildings as if in search of nectar; the moon was orange and big. It felt wrong to simply ignore the plans I'd made earlier, but of course there wasn't much else to do but embrace the new plans, the ones that didn't include subways or cell phones or lights or showers.

The next day, Lisa and I rode bikes around Brooklyn in search of power, which it had acquired spottily. Hot and muggy and full of rotten food, Brooklyn gave a little cheer when the power returned, not unlike the way it celebrated when the power left town.

:my Blackout photos: