[A personal account for if you’re bored and want to “see how the other noodge lives.” Edited slightly on 11/8/12, with important fix between asterisks. The odd/even gasoline rationing in New Jersey ended at 6 a.m. on 11/13/12. Further edits 5/3/13.]
As many know, New Jersey took quite a hit from Hurricane Sandy, and there is no shortage of all the news we can take about this from reputable newspapers such as the state’s Star-Ledger and the broader-audience The New York Times; the Sussex County newspaper The New Jersey Herald; “newsradio” stations; and other media. There’s no shortage of helpful hints; info on where to go if X, Y, Z…. I don’t need to help my readers much in this regard.
Plus, my blog audience seems a rather select kind anyway, which is inevitable based on the posts I do—as to content and style. I know that if I do what plays to my strengths, it will limit my audience—which is OK. But when it comes to an exigency like this recent storm (with a nor’easter on the way to this region, to start precipitating tomorrow, November 7), what should I say? Not that I don’t have practically oriented stories.
I am doing well enough, and I can best “be relevant” by providing details to show how, in yet another instance, this storm has touched all sorts of people all over this area. And it helps in dealing with it to trade notes, when we can and want, and maybe to glean little hints for ourselves we hadn’t encountered before.
The gasoline supply and gas lines
This is the craziest area for me. As I said in my November 1 post (Part 2 on Close Encounters), we had wind damage up here. Flooding wasn’t an issue because we are not near the shore and we didn’t have very much rain from Sandy
Where I live, in the Barry Lakes district associated with the Highland Lakes ZIP code (long explanation to outsiders what this complexity of locations means), power was out for about 31 hours [sorry for miscalculated number originally here]. It went out about 7:50 p.m. on Monday and came back on about 3:10 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Others elsewhere in the township weren’t so lucky.
The most bizarre thing about how the storm affected us—in the Highland Lakes area, we are on a mountain, with the elevation up to 1,200 feet or so—was how power outages closed gas stations (which of course has affected more people than just in Highland Lakes, and of course at a range of elevations). If you were low on gas, this made it hard if not impossible to gas up.
Figuring out what stations had gas where was somewhat less hard. There would be an Internet site or two with info, and of course I’m sure those people who could were smart-phoning the latest tips.
Last Thursday, I was able to drive out, and I found there were small-ish gas lines at a station in Lake Wanda , a small district within the Highland Lakes
Unless you went to Vernon Valley Stockholm to West Milford , had power out (this ran for several miles). No traffic lights, no or few businesses open along the highway running through there. And the gas stations were closed. This was still true on Saturday, November 3. Rarely if ever had I seen this kind of power outage in that area for such a physical stretch, over so long a time.
On the weekend, Governor Chris Christie’s rationing system went into effect. On dates with odd numbers, only people with license plates whose last numbers were *odd* could get gas; same for even dates and even last numbers. So this hamstrung me even further (as of course it did others).
As it turned out, since in my family there are two cars, mine and my mother’s, each needing gas, I had to pull off a stunt to figure out how to get gas for one or both. And it had to be on an even-date day, because the last numbers on both our plates are even.
So Sunday, November 4, I was able to get gas for my mother’s car. And she wanted it so, as she suddenly was more motivated (on Monday) in order to do today, she could do her weekly food shopping. Which adds to some of the craziness I’m about to tell about.
Her car was very low on gas. So, first consideration: I couldn’t travel far to a gas station that both had power and had gas. Where to go? Sunday morning, I checked the Internet. The Vernon Township village of Vernon
An adventure on a Sunday morning
Sunday about 9-something, I was down there; the Lukoil turned out to have had its one gas line, extending about 600 feet or so, truncated because its gas supply was running out. A police car was denoting the end of the line for the Lukoil station—I’d found the previous week that police cars were turning out to be fixtures “keeping the peace” at gas stations, as seen in Butler , which is in Morris County
I was debating what to do. Was pretty low on gas; would I risk the trip, using up gas? I didn’t want to go back up the mountain to home, without gas. (I’d found the Lake Wanda
Got there, long line. By then my gas gauge was saying I was near empty (how down so low, so quickly?). Got on the end of the line. It extended maybe close to half a mile down toward railroad tracks, which also were located down a gentle slope.
Long story short: I stayed on the gas line, maybe an hour, until I got to the station and got gas. I was so low on gas, the way I inched along was, every time I came to a stop, I turned off the engine. Waited a while. If the line (the car in front of me, of course) started to move, I waited until it was appreciably moved ahead, and started the car and quickly put it into gear and moved it forward. Stopped, turned it off. I did this a dozen or 15 times. I was aware I used up gas rather inefficiently in starting each time. But I thought this was better than letting it idle for the many minutes you could be sitting waiting between moves.
As I was positioned going up the slope from the tracks—the gentle hill actually went on 100-200 feet or so—the car, when I started, sputtered one time as if it really was running out of gas. I sort of prayed—Just let me get to the top of this hill. Then if I run out, I can push the car on the even surface. (I also imagined pleading, or such, with a police officer about having run out of gas; I didn’t have a gas can [hence maybe he’d have one…]. I also considered, if worse came to worst, asking the woman behind me to give my car a gentle push if I ran out.)
I was in a panic a good part of the time, and wondered, What if the station runs out of gas? (We will see an example of this sort of thing.) Sometimes I was almost vibrating with anxiety. I had anger about things of ongoing cause for agitation (more on that later).
When I was about 100 feet from the station, I felt that getting gas was much more feasible. Still, start-ups, short move-along, turn off engine. Repeat, repeat; hope, hope. So crazy.
In the station, I got a certain amount of gas that my limited cash on hand could manage. Finally, with the tank half-full, I headed back home. My nerves were frazzled.
That was Sunday. The other car, mine, would have to wait till another day.
The following few paragraphs may sound like a lot of personal grumbling, but can serve as an illustration of how, in this region, many of us have had our angry whirlwinds of bad interactions.
There was, at first, some crazy confusion at home about what days cars could be fueled based on Christie’s rationing plan. This partly reflected nerves (for both me and my mother) and partly reflected my mother’s not fully envisioning the broader situation of the facts of things, and relevant choices, based on all the carnage and gas-station craziness I had already witnessed, over days, the few times I was on the road. She based all her ideas—and willingness to argue with me on points—on what she read in the newspaper. And she tended to match this with a sense of initiative on her part that I thought was clearly out of place.
The info she got in her chair-bound way was good enough in some ways, as to basic information, but for someone of her age (and personality), with a somewhat “sclerotic” tendency not to bend with variable plans based on ongoing emergencies, she tended to read certain things for giving rationale for her being limited and paranoid about what to do, in a way that sometimes made her difficult to talk to and sometimes resulted in little flashes of sharp arguments. More on this later.
Anyway, that Sunday, with her car gassed up, she could rest easy. She could talk about her outing plans for Tuesday. Now I had my car to worry about. Of course, trying to tell her about the both REAL and PLAN-SHAPING nexus of what was up with the gas stations at large—how, with many closed, and others having long lines (and being far away)—PLUS my having to plan what else I needed to try to do on the road—trying to tell her about the gas station conditions-and-consideration seemed to go only piecemeal, based on what individual horror story I could present (which I had half shit a brick to deal with), which she accepted as far as it was a concrete experience.
For instance, she did seem to accept, after my bearish experience (not that she outwardly acknowledged this as enforcing her understanding), (1) the gas station you may be limited to going to could be distant, (2) there could be a long wait there, (3) and the tank of her car was almost empty, so that tended to create a urgency to “make a connection,” and (4) I did get gas. (So this story had the benefit of a “happy ending.”) This served her kind of needs, you could say, so she accepted the story.
But before then and occasionally after then, as I have talked to her about this gas station situation (from the larger perspective) of the sheer craziness that was out there, if one was to take the kind of trips on the road I typically did, she still couldn’t form a larger picture the way I tried to present now and then (and me with a sense of half-futility about this, regarding her). It was a simple account of things! It squared with some stuff you read in the paper! It was practically oriented! Ugh!!
This gets at some of the trouble we had in communicating. Once I saw her again after she had finished her big shopping trip today, she seemed more amenable to “compromise”; but I’m sure some “future chapters” of this semi-rough story are ahead.
The situation Monday
Monday, November 5, was an odd-date day. So technically, I couldn’t gas up my car. What were my options?
First, I wanted to see what was up with the gas station in Lake Wanda
At 7-something in the morning, I drove to about half a mile from the station. Saw a pink-bright road flare, evidently provided by the police. The rise in road made it hard to see beyond. I turned around right away. Went to a roadside pull-off area near parkland, just north of Lake Wanda
Put boots on, and walked down. No gas can with me. (Had decided I would hold off on that stratagem.)
I found that a line of cars threaded up the side of Wawayanda Road Lake Wanda to Barry Lakes Breakneck Road Canistear Road Highland Lakes
I went to a little convenience store and got coffee and a roll. Took a break; wasn’t sure what to do next. Walked back up Wawayanda Road
They were on a rather narrow roadway, where there was generally no shoulder. The sight distance wasn’t great. If people were traveling south, toward the gas station’s direction but not meaning to get on the line to get gas, they had to travel down the “left” (northbound) side of the road—“going the wrong way.” An obvious traffic hazard.
There was a police car parked closer to the station, but were the police minding this traffic situation? No! (After a while I realized one policeman just waited, standing, by the gas station pumps, apparently to keep the peace if tempers flared, or such.)
So I did traffic management, a few hundred feet up from the intersection. I halted some cars and waved to others to come through, to manage the one-lane-passability situation. I did this, it turned out, for maybe an hour and a half, or close to two hours.
For days before, I’d felt rather helpless not being able to help out in some way, presumably volunteer, with all the dislocation and trouble caused some by the storm. Partly this was potentiated by lack of gas in our cars; I couldn’t do much else than stay home. But here I ended up doing some spontaneous storm-related help.
Monday turned out to be the one day that that kind of management was needed in that location. This Tuesday morning, the gas line situation seemed much reduced at about 8:50 a.m. (and I didn’t opt to help direct traffic).
I had done this sort of thing before. My first job, in December 1978-March 1979, was as a parking lot attendant at the Hidden Valley Ski Resort. It entailed the same sort of thing.
You find out how to do hand signals that most people will understand when needing to direct traffic. (I had done this sort of thing at other times over the years, as with a traffic accident behind my house years ago.)
There were different types of behaviors from others to observe, among those who wanted to pass by and not get on the gas line (whom I thus had to direct, partly for their own safety):
* Probably more than half of the total understood readily what I meant when waving (for them to stop or to come on—which could be at a distance of 150 feet or so). Numerous of these were courteous in giving a thanks wave, or occasionally commenting. These people ranged from (1) young to (2) thirties/middle-aged, but were usually the latter.
The people most oblivious (unapt to get signals, or not willing to cooperate too well) comprised a range of types (and I take a stab at determining some of their motives/excuses):
* the elderly (with a certain insensate/dulled quality or some other blockheadedness);
* some middle-aged types (due to stubbornness or bitterness);
* contractors in pickups with ladders or such (probably annoyed at road conditions along with the general hampering of their livelihood by the storm’s aftermath). In general, blue-collarish types, whether in a truck or in a hotrod-ish vehicle, seemed more apt to not cooperate than to do so;
* some of the youngest drivers (naivete—not getting some social cues or conventions, or not caring about these);
* the tinted-windows types (there weren't too many);
* and the occasional New Yorker (with the NY plates; in good times and bad, this category seems often to be on the arrogant side on New Jersey
There was a man who drove his way through, on the northbound lane and subject to either my flagging him through or stopping him—I think he seemed to not cooperate at first, so I “compromised” and let him through—and then someone else was coming the other way, whom I’d originally wanted to come through, and with the new situation, this person had to stop. The man uncooperative then stopped balkily, and gestured at the other motorist as if he or she was out of line. The uncooperative man was on a cell phone the whole time. There’s New Jersey
##
There is more I observed, but leave it aside…. I finally decided to call it a day (as it happened, the line along Wawayanda Road had shortened considerably by about 9:50), and tired and with a slight headache, trudged in my boots the half-mile or more back to my car. No gas for me on Monday. For one thing, I wouldn’t risk trying to get on the line when it wasn’t my day.
The Tuesday situation
Tuesday, today, I should have been able to get gas. That poses another nice juicy story. For one thing, I didn’t have any cash to get gas (the only way I could pay for it; never mind why) until this morning. But then, once I was free to go to the Lake Wanda
I couldn’t go any distance in any direction without knowing there was definitely gas there, and even then I might run out when on the road. So, when I would be free to use my mother’s car, I would need to take a gas can and get some gas that way for my car.
This story isn’t over yet, and so far, after time in the road, I am no closer to getting gas in my car than I was after I found the Lake Wanda station was out of gas. But this isn’t quite so bad, to the extent I don’t have to go anywhere in the near future (in my own car). (I leave personal details out not to clutter the story.)
