There is a lot of wind around, sweeping the sand away in thick clouds so that with every gust you can hear it crunch under your teeth.
Curved shadows drag black sacks or push shopping trolleys full of indefinite junk.
It's getting cold, very cold, and the lights haven't been restored yet....

In Astoria (Queens), where I was staying for almost three weeks, nothing happened, apart from a few broken trees.
I was skeptical that anything serious had happened and actually thought that the scaremongering around Sandy's arrival was doped with American sensationalism.
I was wrong.
Many lives have been extinguished, many changed and many uprooted forever.
There are many places on the east coast of the United States that bear the profound marks of this destruction, but since I was unable to move independently and given the consistent paralysis of transportation that New York had to adapt to for more than a week, I was only able to visit (partially) one of the main fronts on which the storm hit.    
From Rockaways, or what's left of a charming hamlet of New York, I had to fly to Detroit in order to start my travel along the so called "rust belt", once one of the most important construction lines, now mostly transformed into an open-air museum of industrial archaeology, where small towns populated by workers have become almost deserted, a fate that also befell Detroit in part.