First Update From New York (11/2)

Summit 5 is currently staying in an undisclosed, but totally awesome, location. This location does not really have Internet service except for one place when my friend is nice, so my posting may be sporadic. I wrote this post on the night of November 2nd, so there's a bit of a time-delay, for which I apologize--there simply hasn't been internet between then and now. 

Sound good? Here we go. Summit 5 woke up at 5:30 this morning, was in the van by 6:15 and in New York state by 7:30. At 11 PM last night, my Team Leader got the call to move out tomorrow morning, so out we moved. Summit Five, Semper Nomadic. After fighting traffic, long gas lines and our own ignorance of the city—not to mention sketchy parking lot attendants—we got to our staging area in-town, got our assignment and headed out to a Red Cross shelter, which is all the location information I have. I couldn’t navigate this city with a map, a GPS and my own personal satellite.

When we finally got to the shelter, housed in Nassau Community College, our team and Bayou 2 were eventually assigned to help get people registered. The shelter was full of Red Cross employees, its back rooms full of bustling volunteers and shelter residents. We set up in teams of two to walk people through the registration process, but the problem was communication. Our AT&T Blackberries, which we were lending out so that people could call the helpline, were useless in that shelter. Ditto our government laptops, which we got out to (ideally) allow people to get on DisasterAssistance.gov; there was no Wi-Fi and our Blackberries could not act as hotspots. Despite that, Joe and I were able to help one woman (in her nineties!) get registered on her friend’s personal phone, which made the hours of Blackberry “Call Failed” messages more than worth it.

After leaving work, we wolfed down the remains of our Subway foot-longs (half for lunch, half for dinner) and got into the van. As of this writing, we have not left it, thanks to some wrong turns that left us careening around the darkened streets of Brooklyn for more time than I care to admit. We eventually made it to New Jersey, where our housing is, and even managed to pick up some gasoline on the way. (Unfortunately, I think we burned most of it rolling around New York just now!) We’re heading to what I last heard described as a “barracks” to stay the night. No idea where we’re staying tomorrow night, no idea what we’re eating tomorrow—travel funds might not extend to tomorrow, and we’re simply not in one place long enough to buy and cook groceries and haul out the cookware—and no idea where we’re working tomorrow or what we’ll be doing. Such is life in FEMA Corps, but I’m happy to say we’re taking most of this in stride.

The one thing I am more than a little mad about is my absentee ballot. After a nearly five-week struggle to get registered, then to get my village office to mail me my ballot, then convincing the lovely people at the Government Accountability Board to email me a ballot because there was simply no way for a paper ballot to catch up with me, I finally have the stupid thing. It’s printed out, filled out and shoved in an envelope with all signatures intact. The only thing I need to do is pop the sonofabitch into a larger envelope, slap the requisite postage on it and mail it back to Wisconsin on or before Election Day. 

That may be more difficult than it seems, though, given the fact that I never know where we’ll be on a given day, and that there is often no time to go into a post office because we’re working, traveling to work or traveling from work. Because of gas shortages, my TL has forbidden extraneous trips to wherever else, which could scotch my hopes of voting absentee once and for all. I’m just keeping my eyes out for post offices, UPS, whatever that I can use and hoping like crazy that I can get it there in time. I have moved heaven and earth to even get the damned thing and I’m not going to let silly things like reality or temporal constraints stand in the way of returning it. Details to follow. (UPDATE—I crammed the stupid thing into an envelope, sealed it with masking tape, put four times the required number of stamps on the letter and hand-delivered it to a postal worker in New York City. BALLOT IN. I WIN, ELECTORAL SYSTEM.)

A Thank-You and Deployment News!

Back on the blog after a few days of crazy travel and looking forward to another one tomorrow. Whoof! Even by FEMA Corps standards it's been a hectic week, but Summit 5 is rolling with the redeployments. 

Before I get into the meat of my updates for today, I'd like to--once again, sappiness is the order of the day--thank everybody for reading. Blogger gives me a handy little stats page to track pageviews with, and according to it, you gals and guys have set a record for pageviews on here three months in a row. (It's not like I was FiveThirtyEight before joining Americorps, but still, that's pretty cool.) In October, people viewed my various posts five thousand, six hundred and two times. That's nuts. Eighteen different posts of mine have 100 views or more, which is also nuts. Twice in Atlanta (and once in Anniston), FEMA employees I'd never met before came into my office to compliment me on my blog, which is really heady stuff. I know I'm still just one molecule in the gigantic blogosphere, but knowing that I'm read is one huge reason why I keep doing this, so once again, thank you.

Now, in the spirit of not boring everyone... onward we go!

As you may have heard, Hurricane Sandy happened. As you may not have heard, before the storm began, elements of FEMA Corps packed up and headed north to "pre-stage" Sandy. We weren't being officially deployed because states and counties had yet to be declared disasters, but FEMA wanted us in position to respond in case of a deployment. So Summit 5 packed its bags in about two hours, sped out of Atlanta like our hair was on fire and ended up at the Emergency Management Institute in Maryland. We stayed there until the worst of the storm had passed, then moved out to Hartford, CT*. 

In Hartford, which I'm sure is a lovely city but I have yet to see it in full daylight, we found lodging in a National Guard armory. I can't describe how awesome this place is. It was built on top of a train roundhouse, where they turned the trains around at the end of the track; the building is over a hundred years old and contains, among other things, a piece of the battleship Maine (whose sinking triggered the Spanish-American War) and a uniform worn by the second-in-command of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. There are plentiful historical exhibits scattered throughout the building's lower floors, and two-hundred-year-old flags and modern trophies and pictures line its staircases and hallways.

Even without the memorabilia, this place is insanely impressive. We're staying in the main hall, or "drill shed" as they call it here, which is big enough to park a B-52 bomber inside without coming close to touching the walls. (I checked--it's long enough, although a mere 38 feet too narrow, to fit a Boeing 747. This building is IMMENSE.) It's been a circus, a basketball court and a morgue, among what I suspect are many other ad hoc uses. 

Inside that hall, we have slept, worked and eaten for maybe the past 24 hours. Our cots are squirreled away in a corner behind a set of bleachers, in the opposite corner from the FEMA makeshift offices in the same enormous room (to give you some idea of the size, a pass thrown from my cot to the opposite wall of the gym would more than qualify as a Hail Mary). I did media monitoring work for most of today, earning plaudits from my immediate supervisors. It was fun; Summit 4's Kyle and I set up a table and cruised the Internet, stopping to note down stories (Connecticut Lighting & Power has an estimate for when power should be restored! Governor Malloy made a statement!) and forward them up the chain. The day honestly flew by.

 Now, Summit 5 is moving on again, this time to New York. I have no idea when we're leaving, where we're going exactly or what we'll be doing. Future FEMA Corps Members take note: when they say FEMA Flexible, they mean FEMA Flexible. For now, we're keeping our bags in the van and a change of clothes in our backpacks, and getting ready for yet another highway jaunt to parts unknown. I wouldn't have it any other way. Summit Five, WE RIDE!

*The rationale for not posting our destination before coming here was that people in as-yet-undeclared counties might erroneously think they'd gotten a disaster declaration. However, four of Connecticut's six counties (although not ours) have been declared already, and the presence or absence of FEMA Corps in a county doesn't mean anything declaration-wise, hence this sentence.

The Lakes of Georgia

For half a day, everything was perfect.

After one of my fellow Corps Members told the team on Tuesday she was leaving, half a lifetime ago, everyone had been sleepwalking. It was like a death in the family, hearing that one of the people you’d laughed with and trained with and been bored out of your skull with was pulling up her roots and leaving for home pastures, that she had declined this program and our duties and everything we were supposed to go out and do. Everybody took it differently, but nobody was unscathed.

Chelsea, in the name of team morale, had us go and play hooky for a day. We’d already worked a forty-hour week in four days, less one visit to the CDC, and one more day of fluorescent light and sitting on the computer might have laid half the team low. So we slept in ‘til ten o’clock in the morning, had the rest of the morning and early afternoon free to walk around or loll on the beds in our rooms or go to Applebee’s or fried chicken and mozzarella sticks, whatever, and around 2:30 we all piled into the van and headed for a little trail next to a big lake. It was the best decision any one of us had made since getting here.

Picture a forest of great big oak trees, showering red-gold leaves onto the forest floor, with little winding paths leading down to the water where you have to climb down roots and rocks and jump down onto one huge stone before scrambling the rest of the way to the beach. Picture a beach of red clay and sparkling mica and all kinds of rocks littering it—clear quartz crystals, black pancakes of basalt, a hundred kinds of rocks so soft they crumble at the touch. Feel, if you can, your feet sinking with a squelch into the sandy bottom of the lake, which busies itself rolling past your ankles and curling between your toes like the world’s best massage. Observe the glittering clouds of silt, dotted with a million specks of mica that sparkle in the sun, that billow up from the bottom whenever you take a step.

That lake was irresistible. Ringed with orange and shading a beautiful blue-green the farther out you go, it demanded we abandon our propriety and just dive in. One by one, we shucked off our shoes and socks, stripped down to our underwear or T-shirts and plunged into the ice-cold waters to meet curious fish. We skipped those flat black stones for what felt like miles across the water, made impossible dives for overthrown Frisbees that usually ended in a huge SPLASH, slathered ourselves with mud from the bottom and flung it at each other and laughed and laughed.

All too soon, it was time for the magical afternoon to slowly wind its way down. We’d long since wandered out of the water, drying out in the warm sun and reclining on our rocky thrones, snapping pictures of each other and playing the-floor-is-lava with boulders and pebbles on the ground. Clothes had to be donned, dignity reassumed (as much as it ever was), shoes found and rocks collected. As we trekked back up the hillside, lazily tossing memories and chuckles back and forth, Summit Five could scarcely help but feel a deep sense of peace.

Fifteen hours later, we would be eating up I-85 on the way to an unknown future on the East Coast. One of our team members would be on a bus back to Mississippi, having left the program for good. Another would have just returned from the hospital and most of the rest of us would be exhausted and stressed from a sleepless night and morning of packing and driving around Suwannee. For now, though, we were leaving Paradise.

Pointing North: First Signs of Sandy

All the clouds are pointing north.

It’s still I-85, passing exit Forty-Eight A in a town I’ll never visit in a state I barely know, passing breaking waves of traffic down a fresh black highway, and all the clouds are beckoning us on.

Like divers, like dolphins, they sit like endless schools of fish in the sky, huddled and waiting for the great plunge. The northern ends are invariably darker gray verging on black, little wisps of fog hanging ominously off the bottom, while the southern ends are light, fluffy, harmless cumulus. They have that streamlined shape where they actually do come to a point at the northward end, flattened on the bottom and tapering in the front and puffing out in the back.

It’s an armada that would have put Spain to shame, great darkened galleons on either side of us, above and behind and all around us, plowing slowly through the great wide sky. They pass over the trees of gold and brown and pine, the six-lane highway dotted with green signs, the parasitic rest stops and fast-food establishments that suck a little life from the travelers before letting them go again, gluttons of the roadway. They pass over factories and fireworks stores and used-car dealerships, far above crumbling bridges and autumn leaves and inane billboards, far over our little van. Inexorable, unstoppable giants heading mindlessly north.

Onward we roll, passing blown-out tires in the middle of the road and calling out “yellow car! Yellow car!’ every now and again, listening to Bon Iver and digesting the Arbys we had for lunch and snacking on occasional cookies as Hildie eats up the miles to the pre-staging area.

And all the while, the clouds are marching on.

Fema Corps Moves North: Tales of the Red Bag

-->This is your red bag.

Clothes go in first: socks, boxers, T-shirts with witty slogans on them, blue FEMA Corps T-shirts with “FEMA CORPS” emblazoned on the back and a real patch on the right bicep, not just a decal but a patch actually sewn on. Black dress pants, neatly folded. Brown sandals that need to be glued back together for the dozenth time. Khakis and bandannas and that stupid vest that everybody had to pack all disappear into the cavernous maw that is the red bag’s biggest pocket, there to reappear neatly folded and pressed and somehow taking up far less space than the laws of physics say they should. Willpower trumps reality every time in this area and this area only: packing for a spike.

Next is the gewgaws, the consumables, the borderline necessities. A deck of cards, a pair of toenail clippers, cords for various phones and razors jumbled together into an incomprehensible muddle, half a bottle of shampoo, a straggly bar of soap inside its protective blue shell. A brand-new copy of The Count of Monte Cristo shares space with a blue hoodie and a windbreaker, both of them coiled up into hard balls of cloth. A pair of blue jeans that you just discovered have a rip in the crotch are wadded up in the last pocket of space available, just on top of half-a-dozen folders full of bank information and handbooks on how to be a Community Relations Specialist and a bunch of mostly useless class notes.

All of this detritus probably weighs as much as a respectably sized suitcase, but through an ingenious system of clips and straps, you can carry it on your back for a little while and not collapse. In your other hand, or hanging off your shoulder, will be a personal bag (laptop, charging cord, personal folder and marked-up copy of your senior thesis that are worth more than their weight in gold to you, red Frisbee and peanut butter crackers for the road and a water bottle with a carabineer clip hanging off the side. Detergent and Listerine go in a separate bag that used to hold a brace of potatoes, safely double-bagged and waterproofed. Sleeping bag and pillow, the one crammed under the seats, the other resting comfortably in the back of the van with the rest of your team’s gear.

Red bags always travel in packs. We have nine of them piled up high in the back, ten sleeping bags because somebody from our sister team left theirs behind, countless pillows and blankets and water bottles and laced-up black leather boots. Personal gear shares space with team gear; there are boxes and bags of cutlery, pots and pans, garbage bags, dishwashing soap and sponges and other ingredients of a daily nomadic life. We’ve taken all the food we can—bags of cereal, granola bars, endless bottles of Gatorade, anything that can live in the pantry for longer then an opera—but all the perishable stuff had to go. We managed to give much of it away to a needy family in our motel, but bags of grapes and cylinders of yogurt and carrots and cartons of soy milk tumbled one by one into a garbage bag because there simply wasn’t any way to take them eleven hours to the north.

That’s why we’re on the move. We’re headed up to maybe, possibly, if our FEMA overlords and the whims of the storm smile upon us, respond to Hurricane/Cold Front/High Tide/All-Around Monster Storm Sandy as she tears towards the East Coast. It is entirely possible that we will not lift a finger in the relief effort; it is entirely possible that after driving up to [location omitted, but it's east of the Mississippi] to be “pre-staged” and hunker down and wait for the wind and the rain and the snow to pass us by, we will be told that there is no need for our services and isn’t the weather in Atlanta nice this time of year? and go back to the Sun Suites Motel in Suwanee, Georgia. But all that is still safely parked two days into the future. The happiness of reunion with friends we haven’t seen in a month, the jolt of electricity as the storm sweeps over our city, the bitter disappointment or wild jubilation of being told whether we’ll finally get to do what we were trained to do, all of that is yet to come.

For now, as the Starks would say, winter is coming. And we’re headed to the fight.

Waiting for Hurricane Godot (I mean Sandy)

The phrase "jailhouse lawyer" has always been one of my favorites. It refers to a prisoner whom, due to an enormous amount of time on their hands and a similarly overwhelming interest in a particular issue (like the law pertaining to their case, for example) will become a stone-cold expert on the subject. Interest + time = supreme competence. Now, I'm not saying that FEMA Corps is becoming expert on the path, prospected landfall and media reports regarding Hurricane/Frankenstorm Sandy, but we're getting close.  It seems like Sandy is certain to make landfall on the East Coast, and given that it's a really humongous storm and that the East Coast is full of people and expensive buildings, several media outlets I've seen are predicting over a billion dollars in damage.

Before I continue, wherever I'm going, I'd like to put something to bed real fast. During FEMA Corps's four weeks of inactivity and six weeks of training, the point has repeatedly and persistently been raised that we work only during disasters. Therefore, if you're rooting for the Corps to get off our tuchases and start performing the work for which we were intended, you're also indirectly rooting for widespread destruction of some very nice places that looked much better when the buildings worked properly, not to mention immense human trauma and suffering. Can we put that idea down once and for all, please? You want to do work, and you want to help people. That's natural, human and totally logical. You want to serve communities in the way you've been trained to do. That way just happens to be disaster response. It's not your fault that that has to coincide with a disaster; disasters just happen and there's nothing to be done about it. The storm doesn't care about what you want, it just does what it does. Enough discussion on this tired point already.

So where was I going? Yes. Twenty-one teams, plus the Vinton contingent, are currently eying Hurricane Sandy as she grinds toward the East Coast. Barring a miracle, she'll touch down somewhere, and unless the concept of logic decides to turn inside out and eat itself, FEMA Corps will be part of the response effort. 

Where will we be? Will Summit Five go anywhere? It's impossible to say. The thinking here is that they won't need every single team, but that's pure speculation. My TL just texted us asking everybody to keep her informed of their location (if we go away from home or whatever) in case we need to pack up and go on short notice, but that too is just a precaution. We really don't know anything yet about whether we'll be needed, although I've volunteered to come in and work the weekend shift at the Region 4 Coordination Center if needed. 

I don't know. This is our chance to go out and use our skills, a chance to finally end a month of inactivity, a chance to go help people in need like we were always supposed to do. But the previous paragraph aside, I find it almost indecently selfish to be even thinking that way. Sandy is predicted to hit some of my favorite places, filled with some of my favorite people and their families. If it made a U-turn and headed off to go bother the Azores instead, I'd be overjoyed. 

For the next 72 hours, FEMA Corps--and everyone in the path of the storm--will be waiting on tenterhooks. I just hope this whole thing ends with everybody I know over there still OK. To my friends in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and D.C: keep your heads down and stay safe.

More Viruses, Fewer TPS Reports

In another example of cross-pollination among government agencies, today Summit Five visited the maddeningly named Center(s) for Disease Control and toured the museum that I had no idea they had on-campus. Just to get it out of the way: according to everything they told us, there is actually no secret bunker--Walking Dead style--hiding in the basement to serve as an impenetrable refuge against zombies. The nice Bostonian lady who guided Summit Five around told us they didn't like the series "because it's so ridiculous", but praised the efforts of pandemic movie Contagion, which at least used parts of the CDC in its movie (the Walking Dead blew up the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center instead).  

That doesn't mean zombies are entirely absent from the CDC. Once we made it to their communications department, the image of a dead-eyed girl peering over the top of a wall was on half the walls and every Powerpoint slide we saw, not to mention plastered on the back wall of somebody's cubicle so she can stare at the back of his neck all day (I question this decoration choice). Our tour included its share of pandemics and diseases that are only marginally less terrifying than zombieism, though: HIV/AIDS, Legionnaires' disease, Lassa fever, Ebola/Marburg and half a dozen more. I've been reading about those since I was in high school biology class and borrowing Mrs. Zauner's copy of Level 4 Virus Hunters of the CDC, which was about a worldwide search for horrible diseases. Scientists skulking through the African jungles, looking for the source of a mysterious deadly virus that gruesomely disfigures and kills its victims? Fiction doesn't have a patch on a story like that!

The problem with the CDC museum, spacious and well-designed as it was, was that stories like that one were extremely sparse. It turns out that the CDC, like some other government agencies I could mention, has many more unexciting duties than exciting ones. For every story of the hunt for Legionnaires' disease, there were half a dozen nutritionists' experiments or iron lung machines or copies of the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (I shit you not, that's what it's called. Dead Puppies Monthly would hardly be a more depressing title). Maybe part of growing up is realizing that the world isn't always as awesome as the highlight reels make it look, but I would have preferred to learn that lesson somewhere other than one of the supposed Coolest Places in the Universe.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. We saw only a tiny fraction of the huge, sleek, beautifully modern campus; one museum and one third-floor conference room does not a comprehensive portrait make. And we only met three or four employees, including one guy with a ridiculously curly gray mustache that would put Teddy Roosevelt's to shame; I would have liked to meet more people and hear more of their stories, how they got to where they are, why they wanted to be where they are. Maybe that'll come on some future trip. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be a bureaucracy where it's all about the job and not about the work. I'm from a family of musicians, a profession where it's rather difficult to succeed without a passion for what you do. Apparently that's the exception rather than the rule in the corporate world.