The Leftovers
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I was fourteen when Hurricane Sandy hit. It was October 2012, the leaves had yet to fall, and a mandatory evacuation had been ordered for our neighbourhood on Long Island. While my mother packed flashlights and family photos, I straightened my hair in the bathroom and studied the size of my nose pores in the mirror.
My family’s house was in the marshy lowlands, so near to the creek that at low tide, I had to close my bedroom window to block out the smell of sulphur. To escape the surge zone, we had to go to a family friend’s house on higher ground. It never occurred to me to be frightened. Our home was built of wood and concrete. To me, it was as fixed as the face of a mountain.
I recall distinctly the moment of charged silence when Sandy made landfall: we lost power at the friend’s house; our silver game tokens glittered in the candlelight as my siblings and I played Monopoly. We were too wired by the storm to sleep, and I felt secretly disappointed by the evening – I had expected something more dramatic to happen.
Meanwhile at home, an eight-foot wall of water had exploded through the cement sea wall on the edge of our property. The deluge rushed over the lawn, then drowned it, as the wood cladding of the roof snapped in the wind. A current gushed into our basement, filling it with rank bay water.
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When the storm broke, there were uprooted trees slumped over homes and cars, and those trees still standing had been stripped of their foliage. Telephone wires lay like sleeping snakes across our road. When we got home, we discovered that the hurricane had razed our sea wall and flooded our basement.
We had a pump to suck up the water, but the wall insulation needed throwing away, and all the furniture with it. The carpets had to be replaced. The cost would drain my parents’ savings account, a fact they hid from us kids for years. Even after the water was drained, the stench of decaying animal corpses and the wet of the bay clung to our home. For months, I went to school smelling faintly of dead fish.
‘We were the lucky ones’: that is all anyone said to one another in the aftermath, as we shivered in the dark without power and gas for the better part of two weeks. The most affluent part of the island – the Hamptons, where we did not live – had been hit worse, with parts of their shore completely destroyed.
The wealthy people still needed somewhere to summer, and so looked across the bay towards us. Our town was an old whaling port populated by fishermen and farmers – a stretch of craggy shoreline dotted with modest cedar-shingled homes, potholed dirt roads and potato farms. Quiet but for the sound of cawing seagulls over the water, as fishermen gutted sea bass on their skiffs.
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Centuries before our lighthouses and townships, this stretch of coast was home to the indigenous Shinnecock people. By the time English colonists first arrived to the area in 1640, the Shinnecock tribe had already lived here for over 10,000 years.
Because of their skills in whale hunting and fishing, European settlers enslaved and indentured many members of the indigenous population for use on whaling ships. Others were killed by a European-borne smallpox epidemic in 1658. As colonial power in the area increased, many Shinnecock children were kidnapped and sent to residential schools, forced to assimilate to English customs and abandon their Algonquin language and cultural roots. With the Native population effectively displaced and enslaved, the area was soon on its way to becoming a prosperous English port.
As local children, we learned about how the indigenous people had lived; in elementary school we built miniature wigwams for school projects and studied their quartz arrowheads at our local museum. We learnt about the town’s nineteenth-century whaling industry and the rum runners during twentieth-century Prohibition, but we never knew that indigenous fishing knowledge had been used to create our ports and their labour to enrich our towns. We knew how the quahog clam shells that line our beaches were also known as wampum – that their brilliant white and purple interiors were made into beads for use in indigenous ceremonies and trade – but not that generations of Shinnecock children were stripped of their own rituals and language. We knew that many of our geographical names are in fact derived from that Algonquin language – Corchaug, Shinnecock, Montauketts, Peconic – but the near-eradication of the language means we still do not know what many of our own street names mean.
The Shinnecock Nation only became federally recognised in October 2010, just two years before Hurricane Sandy.
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That first summer after Sandy, the economic boom was welcomed, as it always is: a trojan horse at the gates of Troy. Then, our mom-and-pop music shop was replaced with a store that sold pressed linen shirts on white-oak hangers. Cafés began to sell açaí bowls and celery juice, and security gates were suddenly fixed at the entrances to vineyards, beaches and new housing complexes. There was a mass exodus of longtime residents, and an influx of holiday-goers. Sandy had decimated our marine life and scarred our coastline, and then came the developers to carve up the carcass. These days, the new residents have a saying for the remaining pre-Sandy locals: the leftovers.
In London, where I live now, I once visited a department store I could not afford in search of a dress to wear to a wedding. There, I overheard a woman brag about a new summer home she had recently purchased on Long Island. She stretched out the name of my town unnaturally, imbuing it with esoteric charm – the linen shirt store, the ‘for sale’ signs, the gated communities. ‘It’s a tiny gem of a hamlet,’ she told the sales attendant, fingering a £2000 jacket. ‘No one knows about it’. Knew, I thought bitterly. No one knew.
I saw a flicker of Sandy in the Spanish floods of last October, when King Felipe VI visited the disaster-struck Paiporta for a photo opportunity, and the residents hurled mud and insults at him on the streets. A fleck of dirt stuck to his cheek as his security team pulled him away from the crowd. I saw her, too, in the January wildfires of Los Angeles, as I watched the news footage of firefighters pulling belongings from homes in flames. On cue, LA landlords price-gouged rents, and began charging 300% above the market price for displaced tenants. I see a trace of Sandy even in the Palestinian genocide, in Trump’s ideas of taking over Gaza: bulldozing, investing, developing. ‘A Riviera of the Middle East.’ A gem.
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I remember the sound of my footsteps on the basement stairs, as I opened the door to see the damage wrought by the flooding. The stained walls perspired, and debris floated in a half-metre of miry water. A Barbie Mermaid doll swam among the grey crab shells and decapitated reed flowers. I blinked and it was still there, not a strange dream after all. Wood warped and furniture ruined, craft-paper drawings reduced to glittery pulp in my hands. It was as though some great tension had finally been released: like hearing a teacher shout, or seeing my father cry.
I felt, in that moment, the cracking of some foundation, and believed that the precarious nature of the world had been laid bare to me. The facade had been unrolled like brine-soaked carpet from concrete ground: it could not be set down again. When I ascended the stairs, I could hear my mother in the kitchen. She was on the line with the insurance company, describing the fallen sea wall, the wrecked furniture, the flood. Asking what could be done. There was no answer, but the question remained.
.
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Image details: Tornado in an American Forest, Thomas Cole, 1831, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Gabrielle Showalter is an American-Australian writer of narrative non-fiction and fiction. Originally from New York, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 with an MA in English Literature and now lives in London. Her work has appeared in New Critique, Roi Fainéant Press and Idle Ink, among others.
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