After Irene

Everyone expected to be hunkered down, lashed by winds and rain today. Instead, Irene weakened from hurricane to tropical storm and seemed to pick up speed as it passed over New York early this morning. By noon, but for gusts of wind and spare drops of rain, it was over, leaving less damage than widely feared and leaving us here in the city with a different Sunday. Walkers emerged to sidestep the fallen small branches and to figure out what to do with their suddenly uncooped up day. With the threatening forecast Saturday, most restaurants posted closed signs on their doors and -- apparently -- told employees not to come in. No place, for the most part, to brunch, no Starbucks either yesterday or today, little traffic, no public transportation. People wandered, the city that never sleeps looking to wake up; I wandered, down to the West Harlem Pier thinking I'd see if Fairway might be open for we'd told the kids that Sunday dinner was back on. In the Hudson, as choppy and white-capped today as it was flat and placid yesterday in the hours before Irene arrived, a blue Recycle receptacle floated amidst the flotsam and plastic bottles. Fairway was closed; the West Side Highway was closed at the 125st southbound entrance. I decided to check Westside Market on Broadway and 110th and to go there along the Hudson to see if there was a reason for the closure. The river had clearly breached its usual bank some time earlier; debris -- more damned plastics mostly -- littered the west side of the pathway from about the level 110th south for four or five blocks toward 106th, and it was in that stretch that city workers were siphoning water off the highway, looked to be six or eight inches deep. I went through the underpass into Riverside Park a little further on, a trench of standing water a couple blocks long pretty much right above where the railroad tunnel cuts through the park. A few dogs in the dog run. And then up on to Riverside Drive, where I studied the statue of Shinran Shonin (that now has survived Irene as well as Hiroshima) at the Buddhist Center at 331 RSD. For the first time, I noticed that RSD from 104th to 106th is a short historical district, based on the Beaux Arts townhouses there built in the last years on the 19th and early 20th centuries. 331, it turns out, once housed William Randolph Hearst's main squeeze, the perennial starlet Marian Davies. Finally over to Broadway where Absolute Bagels was closed and Westside officially was too, except they were letting people in four or five at a time because some staff had reported for work. And so dinner supplies were laid in. Chili and corn bread.