What a week to visit New York. Allow me to preface the following account by pointing out that earlier this summer I reserved a week off from work, months in advance, to go hiking in Colorado. That vacation eventually got called off due to raging forest fires in the region where I planned to hike. I ended up spending that week in Chippewa Falls drinking Leinenkugel's. I was hoping this second vacation would go as planned. It did ... sort of.

I went as planned, in that I arrived at my destination as I had intended. However, I experienced a much different city than I had anticipated.

In the days leading up to my departure, when I said "I'm going to New York City," a number of people responded with "good luck with the storm." To be honest, I hadn't paid much mind to the storm they were talking about, which was being called a hurricane, a superstorm and Frankenstorm (since it was occurring around Halloween) - it's hard to take something named Frankenstorm seriously. Besides, I was flying out to visit my girlfriend Emily whom I had not seen in nearly two months. In other words, short of a forest fire, I was going.

And I did.

As the plane descended upon LaGuardia Airport, which is nestled on the north end of Queens alongside a number of bays, I was surprised at how close the runways were to the water. They would all be submerged in two days.

Thanks to The Weather Channel and New York Mayor Bloomberg, I quickly got up to speed on the storm, where and how it would affect the city and what we needed to do.

The storm was scheduled to hit in force on Monday night, and classes at Emily's university - New York University - were canceled. So we hit the grocery stores Monday morning for water and non-perishable food items, as did thousands of other people, and returned to the apartment to wait for the storm.

The sky, which had turned gray shortly after my arrival, turned grayer still as the storm, which had been churning out over the Atlantic Ocean, made it's turn west toward the United States. Back at Emily's apartment, we sat nine floors up in a tower building along 3rd Street in Greenwich Village, two miles north of Battery Park and the southern tip of Manhattan.

The wind increased steadily throughout the day Monday, and gusts whipped past the windows so fast they made a siren-like howl. Tuned in to the Weather Channel, we watched Jim Cantore give live updates from Battery Park. The bay was already beginning to swell, and waves crashed into the island. The initial flood level was anticipated to be somewhere in the area of 8 feet or more. It was not a matter of if the power would go out, but when.

Our parents were calling and texting, making sure we were OK, and we assured them we were. We had our laptops and phones charging, anticipating a prolonged period without electricity, and at 8:30 p.m. Monday night, the apartment went black and quiet.

Looking out the ninth-story window, I saw flashlights dancing in apartments across the street. Beyond that, it was dark building after dark building. In our own apartment, however, we were blessed because the water was still running and generators in the basement provided limited power to the hallway lights and outlets, as well as to Internet access throughout the building. We opened our door and welcomed the hallway light in to the apartment, as did several of our neighbors.

We spent the first night sitting in candlelight, playing cards and eating our perishable food items while we could - my parents had sent me along with some sausage and cheese from Wisconsin. We even tipped back a few warming beers.

After that, there was nothing really to do except go to bed and wait to see what world was waiting for us in the morning.

After waking up, we headed out to survey the damage.

We descended the nine flights of stairs and exited the front of the building. Branches and leaves that Sandy had stripped from the trees above crunched under our steps. The air was considerably quiet. The usual whir of cars was absent, save for police and taxis. The subways were flooded, and buses were not yet allowed in the area, but the people were out and about.

Traffic was full on the sidewalks and New Yorkers formed perpendicular processions as they walked up and down the blocks viewing the storm's results. Every store sat depressed, powered down and locked up behind bars. Inside, no coffee was steaming, no bacon was sizzling, the chairs sat empty, the product hung motionless on the racks.

A man walking in the opposite direction attracted many a stare, as he sipped warm coffee from a mug as he passed.

Banners hanging from the sides of the university buildings were torn and the stone overhang of one building had broken off and partially rested on the sidewalk below. The nearby park, which was lively two days prior, was gated shut with several trees downed inside.

Traffic lights all around us weren't lit, and taxi drivers seemed to not know when or if they should stop. The monotonous foot traffic stopped at every intersection and awkwardly danced with passing cars as they tried to cross the street.

We had heard that a lone coffee shop was open and serving, so we decided to make our way there. A line had formed outside and stretched about 30 feet down the sidewalk. We got in line. Inside, employees were boiling water on gas stoves and pouring it through filters, and people were buying it up. Elsewhere in the store, patrons walked past warming gallons of milk and were grabbing perishable food off the shelves: cereal, canned goods, chips, etc. We got our coffees and walked back to the apartment.

Later that night, we found out that a dining hall (with power) was serving free meals to students. Hungry and not quite interested in cooking in the dark, we headed out. We arrived at the building and took the elevator up to the third floor where the dining hall was located. The doors to the elevator opened up to a sea of people. We quickly located the line to get food and followed it back downstairs, nearly to the point where we started. As the line proceeded upstairs, students who had been served came downstairs with their boxed meals. We wondered what was inside.

When we finally reached the end of the line, we got our meal of turkey meatloaf - "mystery meat" as one server joked - rice and vegetables, and it was delicious. Many thanks were given to the servers, for the free meal and their service.

An email from the university came that night, saying that classes would be canceled for the third day in a row - a week-long stretch students eventually started calling a "hurrication." Emily and I decided that we would walk uptown the next day to where there was power to get a bite to eat and take in some sights. This day trip would prove to be much different than our first.

We left the apartment the next morning and much of the debris on the sidewalks was still there; city officials had more important things to tend to. The traffic lights were still out, and traffic was once again mostly confined to the sidewalks. The occasional police car patrolled quietly down the street.

Homeless people meandered up and down the avenues, pushing their carts made full by the gatherings of the day: piles of refuse and recyclables ripe for salvage. The grizzled street residents rifled through every bag and container, collecting bottles and cans.

We passed a grocery store that had begun to build a mountain of trash bags on the sidewalk, each filled with untouched, spoiled food. Such a waste to see so much cast to the gutters. I wondered how long it would take the homeless to mine the pile of its offerings, even as the majority of residents walked by with their noses up and breath held, trying to pass by without inhaling a hint of stench.

Such was the scene for most of the 30 blocks we walked. But eventually the stoplights we passed were lit, as were street lights and store fronts. Restaurant doors were open, and the smell of their freshly cooked food screamed at us to come inside. We decided on turkey wraps and soup at a bustling bistro.

Outside, the streets were much louder than the ones we left by the apartment. I wondered if the sidewalks were more crowded than normal, with people like us coming up and out of the affected area for a reprieve.

Since we had already walked a good distance (1.5 miles), we decided to head a little further north to Central Park, for a rest amongst the trees and animals. We arrived at the entrance to find barricades and a notice of closure. Within the park, city employees were hard at work cleaning downed trees and knocked over trash cans. I could see the grass and paths that seemed to stretch forever through the park. We could've lost ourselves in there, and we wanted to. But we were turned away back toward the crowded sidewalks. We took shelter from the city in a movie theater in Times Square, plugging our brains into the world of cinema for two hours.

When we emerged from the theater, it was dark out. Well, it was night, at least. There in Times Square, it was bright out. Every sign was electric: restaurants, theaters, stores, attractions.

The amount of man-made light that lit up the streets was impressive, but it was also depressing. How weird it was to be bathed in so much light - light intended to attract your attention and, therefore, your money - when 2 miles to the south, refrigerators were not running, food was spoiling, people were retreating to places that had heat. Further south than that, water crept into people's apartments, floating their furniture. Further south than that, entire cars were underwater and there existed a death toll. Elsewhere, on Long Island and along the New Jersey shore, people who would not or could not evacuate were killed. Some people were still missing; their bodies would be found later.

Even though she had left the area, Hurricane Sandy was still alive. She had collided with a storm that had headed eastward across Pennsylvania. The two cells created more destruction. The total cost of the damage was still being tabulated, and the death toll was still rising.

Where we stood, however, you could not tell. The city was alive; people were buying and selling. Sidewalk vendors offered me this and that. I wore out my "no thank you"s and eventually just ignored them.

On the walk home, the glow of the north illuminated our backs and the northern faces of the otherwise dark buildings we walked between. The blocks grew darker and darker on this Halloween night, and the costumed city dwellers came out to celebrate. Their visages were complemented by the abundance of darkness, and their presence became increasingly uncomforting, as they ushered us home to the area now devoid of light.

When we finally returned to the apartment, we spent several hours sitting in the lit hallway next to one of the few working outlets. I quietly read my book, Emily studied and we charged our phones. We made a meal in the dark, over the gas stove and ate in on the floor of the hallway: plain buttered noodles, canned beans and canned pears. It didn't taste as good as our uptown meal but it sat better in our stomachs.

The power came back on three days later, on the day that I had to leave for home.

My vacation was over and while it was not what I had expected, it was a very valuable and educational experience. I joked with friends about it being like an impromptu camping trip, with us resorting to a reserved lifestyle for five days. It wasn't hard. We easily survived the wrath of Hurricane Sandy, but many did not.

And others less affected by the storm got on with life as usual, moving, consuming, using and disposing. I could not.

I was, and still am, filled with thoughts on why weather events like Hurricane Sandy and the forest fires that ravaged Colorado this summer happen, how they may continue to happen, and how we may not be taking them as seriously as we should.

I imagine some of the people whose houses got washed out to sea or burned to the ground, or whose family members were killed, are haunted by similar thoughts, but they should not be the only ones. Such a thought process should not be born in a mind only after a life is lost.

Sadly, the environmental issues that fuel these catastrophic events are largely being ignored.

Before the storm hit, residents who were advised to evacuate their homes did not because Hurricane Irene, which struck the East Coast in 2011, was "not that bad." But these events are only getting stronger and more frequent - of the 10 most costly Atlantic hurricanes, seven have occurred in the last decade. These issues are not ones that you can just "go with your gut" on.

This year's presidential race was a golden opportunity to bring light to environmental issues, but they were an afterthought at best. Not only were issues dealing with the environment left out of the presidential debates, after Hurricane Sandy hit more mind was paid to how the storm was a hiccup in campaign momentum than anything else.

And after it left, many people were desperate to just get back to comfortability. In the apartment building in which I stayed, even though residents were told to use the hallway outlets only for charging devices like cell phones, people strung together several extension cords to reroute electricity into their apartments to power refrigerators and bedroom lamps. Rather than adapt, they wanted to just go on like normal and not accept the situation.

Eventually, serious attention has to be given to these issues. Hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.

- Jeremy Pink is Night Editor at the Times. He can be reached at jpink@themonroetimes.com.