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At the very tip of the Far Rockaway peninsula, right across from Coney Island with a spectacular view of Manhattan, the small working-class cooperative of Breezy Point is one of the coastal communities in New York City hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. One-hundred and thirty-one houses burned down to the ground, and most of the others flooded halfway up or knocked right off their foundations. Water rose to shoulder height on the streets. All week, people have been coming back to retrieve what they could and tear down what was destroyed.

Today, they came back to vote.

Here's Tom Dolan, the fire chief,Women's Canada Goose Victoria Parka Graphite ,The design of Canada Goose Parka is the good combination of style and function. a lean 44-year-old in work pants and a brown jean jacket who runs triathalons and once swam around Manhattan Island. On Monday, I watched him and his brothers rip out his beautiful, waterlogged kitchen while a generator worked to pump six feet of water out of the basement. He'd been there every day since the hurricane hit, when he went from house to house alerting the neighbors who had stayed. As the fire burned closer — his house is three or four houses west of the burn zone — he carried an elderly woman named Mrs. Wright through chest-high waters to his own house, where she and her husband rode out the storm.

“Your cousin was telling me about your swim around Manhattan,” I said. “I'm starting to doubt your sanity.”

“You and me both,” he laughed. “But that stuff was easy compared to what we've got to do now.”

“You had most of the sheet-rock out when I left.”

“We did, we got it all ripped out. But the water keeps coming back underneath, so that's screwing me up.Cheap Canada Goose Jackets outlet Canada Goose Trillium Parka.”

Seeing a neighbor, he breaks off. “Hey Angie, how you doing, babe?”

Angie is about 90 years old, from the looks of her.Shop for authentic buy monster beats By Dre products at our official store. She says she got out in time, before the storm.

“Next time, take the Wrights with you,” Dolan jokes.

Angie's leading a dog on a leash and holding the arm of a younger man named Joe. He says, “I figured I'd bring her down, she wants to see a happy face.”

Angie says she was happy to see everyone in church Sunday. Everybody was there, the first time the whole community got together. “And the dog went to church too.

This is how it is at the Breezy Point polling station, which got moved because of the disaster to a church in Roxbury, the next town down the road. All morning people have been coming and lingering, talking to their neighbors, catching up on storm damage and expressions of love and friendship — a day of hugs and hearty slaps on tired backs. Some grab a few split logs from a pile someone put out to help people who still have working fireplaces. Meanwhile the epic cleanup continues — all morning, a garbage crew has been clearing away debris from in front of the church. Everyone has a story about where they're riding out the evacuation until the power gets turned on and the real rebuilding begins — and there's no doubt in anybody's mind the rebuilding will begin. Walk down any street and you're likely to meet four or five people who are related and another four or five who married boys and girls from a few streets over. And these people have been hardened by disaster before. They lost more people in the 9/11 attacks than almost any other community. Dolan himself spent many months at ground zero as a fireman on the job.

So what brought him down, given all the stuff he has on his mind? “Honestly, most importantly,” he says, “I just like to be part of the whole process. I feel it's foolish with those people who want to complain but then didn't even come down and vote, so one day you prioritize that.” When they go, I ask Dolan how he voted.

“Uh, today,” he says, “today I went for the change. We got to change.”

He's a registered independent who voted for Obama last time, even though he was a little suspicious that he was a little young and inexperienced. “We gave the man a shot, he came up with a bunch of different failures, and I'm all in for giving someone else a shot now.”

But now Dolan's got to hustle to the FEMA tent with a buddy, then go cancel his Verizon subscription and write down the serial numbers on his ruined appliances and start working on which schools his four girls are going to attend now that he's setting up his temporary household in Queens.

A woman walks by saying to her friends, “We're staying in New Jersey but we came in to vote — it's too big a deal not to.”

Fred Gresser came in from Brooklyn to vote, too, even though his basement and first floor and completely waterlogged. “It's my duty,” he says solemnly. A retired correction officer who always votes a straight Democrat ticket, he voted for Obama again this year. “We just need somebody right now to keep us together.”

And here's Father John Jack Cullinaine, standing in front of a sign that dedicates the courtyard to him “in loving appreciation of his many years of inspired service and the joy and love he fills our hearts with always.”

“I voted for Romney,” he says. “I'm a radical conservative, so I really feel that the government plans are too much and really don't help business.”

Esilda Bruder was relatively fortunate — her house just suffered some flooding in the basement. “I'm a woman, I'm a Puerto Rican, I have a young son who is going to be 20 this year.” For her, the important issues were the economy and “the climate, obviously, what's going to happen with global warming.” She won't say who she voted for, but she adds another concern that seems to give it away: women's issues. “I have a daughter, too.Next you needs to have a carefully consider the Canada Goose Calgary Jacket.”

Marie Heffernan, 76, also considers it her duty to vote. Even though her whole first floor was wiped out and she had to come in from her son's place in Eastchester, where she's staying. “I don't like Obama, I don't think he's doing enough for the country, I think we need a change, I think we need to get back to our values, I don't think Obama is doing that.” But like most here, she's not as angry about it as much of the country seems to be. “I know he had a tough time, I know it was hard, but I think the spending is out of control.”

John and Marie Zaremba, 62 and 64 respectively, also voted for Romney. For them, the biggest factor is the economy — but the most important thing is simply to vote. “We wouldn't miss it,” says John, a self-employed contractor. “It's the most important thing we have, the best right we have.”

“Even our dog voted,” Marie jokes.
Mary Jane Dolan — no relation to the fire chief — is 81. Her house was on the bay side, but it still got knocked off its foundation. Voting is her “pleasure and privilege,” she says, but she had other reasons as well.

“You want to know bluntly why I voted? To get that asshole out, that's why. To get America back to what it's supposed to be.Cheap Canada Goose Mystique Parka Parka For Sale."