Moving to New York City, I prepared myself for all kinds of challenges, the crowds, the subway, a whole new semester’s worth of classes. I never once anticipated a hurricane. Ida’s wrath descended on us two weeks ago and made for quite the culmination to my first week of college in NYC.

The rain started Wednesday evening, just as I was getting back to my dorm. The clouds had been ominous all day, so I’d arranged for a solid stay-in-and-do-homework night, which my professors had wasted no time in doling out. Apparently there are no introductory team-building icebreaker games in Calculus II, it’s logarithmic differentiation from day 1. So I sat down at my blond wood dorm-style desk with a pencil and a problem set and listened to the storm come in. It was like the sky had split open, its shards battering the pavement, blown by a screeching wind.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve witnessed a fair number of summer thunderstorms. The true intensity of this experience was in the way nature took such a swift, firm hold of the city. Walking down a Manhattan sidewalk, the place feels like a monolith, impervious to anything the clouds could throw at it. And yet there I was, beholding that very impossibility.

Sirens ran through the night, one of the dorm’s fire alarms even went off sometime in the wee hours, but when Thursday morning came, the sun ushered in an obnoxiously beautiful day. The sky was pure blue, the deathlike humidity that had plagued us for the last week was finally gone, everything was wet and sparkling. A perfect day to walk to campus. So I set out for 68^th Street to attend my morning classes, and that’s when I started to see that things were out of whack. There were crowds at every bus station and not once did I hear the whir of a subway passing underneath the street vents. And of course, the minute I opened TikTok, I was met with a barrage of videos of flooded stations, leaking apartments, rivers where the roads should be. That’s when I got the email that all instruction had been moved online for the day. Moving here, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d never see another school day affected by weather. Not in the city where snow days are less and less common every year. It seems they are to be replaced with hurricane days as the planet warms and the climate inevitably shifts.

So there I was, on the Upper East Side, all of a sudden with nothing but Zoom calls to attend. So I went and got a bagel. I sat in Central Park and answered concerned text messages. A friend of mine had taken a leaky train upstate that night, and the next day, I took the same line up to spend Labor Day weekend with my family. Even after a full day of drainage, I still saw submerged cars on the side of the tracks.

Ida was no joke, but the city is resilient, just as it was 20 years ago in the wake of 9/11, and still is in the wake of COVID. With each new challenge, each devastating setback, the city learns to adapt all over again. And as a new resident, here at last for college in person, I am so grateful to be able to bear witness to its amazing, irrepressible strength.