A Time I felt "Alive"
Times of struggle can bring about great union among those most affected. No one in a community is an exception to feeling the pain that such times of struggle cause, even if you are not directly affected. I couldn’t tell you what it is, but there is something about struggle that brings people together. When Hurricane Sandy rocked the East Coast is when I experienced this feeling of community and union among my friends and neighbors. I expected an aura of ubiquitous sorrow, deep pain, and irreversible damage to last for months, maybe years, as everyone grinded through these tough, tough times. What I found was the opposite.
Living in a beach town in New Jersey, I can tell you that Sandy did not treat us well. After a night of watching trees sway like never before and leaves fly by and listening to the sound of the wind against your house and everything that was outside, we awoke and drove around to find that many were not fortunate. A few houses were completely crushed by trees, some flooded, and others both on and near the beachfront, which was not opened to the public for a few days afterwards, were buried and permeated with sand. It looked so surreal, as if it had come from a videogame, movie, or a documentary. I could not believe that it was in my own town that this happened, but sadly it was. We hadn’t been hit the worst, but that wouldn’t have made the situation any less ugly.
You’d think that this would tear people apart, but everyone was brought together. When I first woke up, I saw outside of my window neighbors both unfamiliar and friendly, working together to clean up our street of what we could clean, which included leaves, branches large and small, broken fences, and even a few fallen trees, both small and medium sized. I quickly got ready to join in on the action. Going around the town, you could see that everyone around town was doing the same: taking turns helping everyone, sharing generators, and bonding.
Joining this great community in a shore-wide cleanup made me feel alive. Never before had I felt like I contributed so much to the place I called home. With no power nor school for two weeks, I had essentially little responsibility. We had a lengthy amount of time to spend time with our neighbors, friends, and families while bonding with and serving one another. I felt closer to everyone around me than I had ever before, and those connections really helped me to realize the magnitude of the contributions I was making, seeing it make a direct difference in their lives. I have not yet experienced that feeling of closeness or familiarity with anything else. On the surface, you might believe that having no power for two weeks with a devastated town and many ruined homes would be a terrible two weeks for all of us. To my good fortune, they were the two most meaningfully spent weeks of my life.
I can’t say I didn’t spend any time upset; I know some people whose houses were flooded and lives changed completely. But no one ever lost hope that we could rebound from this, stronger than we were before. During these times of adversity, our community grew stronger and the growing was done together. It was originally estimated that we’d spend such a long time rebuilding that we’d miss multiple summers of opening our beaches because of the necessary rebuilding, yet we got things done quickly and were ready for the first tourism season after Sandy. We picked each other up as well as we’d been knocked down. Sure, it took a longer time for us to rebuild than it took Sandy to destroy--in fact, we are still doing some rebuilding on the beachfront--but the important part is that we did it willingly, empathetically, and, most importantly, together. Restore The Shore, the local Sandy-relief effort, wasn’t just a project; it was a movement. I consider myself lucky to have been a part of it.