In Times of Trouble, Is City or Country Better?

  |  November 5, 2012

Flickr/photo by Brian Birke used per Creative Commons license

We watched the count of Catskills towns without power slowly tick down over the weekend — Central Hudson customers without electricity were less than 3,000 at last count, with many in western Ulster County still waiting for the lights, delivery of local newspapers delayed, and gas shortages and long lines starting to migrate further north.

We decided to stay put in Brooklyn for the weekend, canceling plans to spent a few days near Tivoli, since we didn’t have enough gas to make it there, and we didn’t know what lay ahead. Our carless-ness mattered not at all down there — the bodegas were stocked, and anything we needed, including human contact, was within walking distance. We were particularly fortunate to be in a neighborhood on high ground that suffered nothing more than a few downed trees and a lot of kids with cabin fever, but all around us, along the perimeter of the borough and across the water in lower Manhattan, people were suffering.

For whom is such a natural disaster harder? City folk were powerless, in more ways than one, but food still seemed plentiful and they roamed the streets at night, in the novelty of the dark. Country folk suffered more from the elements — it’s colder in the country, of course — and perhaps felt more isolated, but had more access to gas and groceries than, say, folks on Long Island.

In our endless quest to figure out just where to roost, we got to wondering where it would be better. If the storm of the century is bound to happen every year now, does that make upstate more attractive, or less so?

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