As Hurricane Sandy ripped across New York in October of 2012, thousands of New Yorkers were forced to leave their homes and never look back. Floodwaters, electrical fires from damaged infrastructure, and intense winds pommeled large swathes of the metro area, razing homes and inundating the subway. For New Yorkers who were unable to afford the high cost of renovation or repair, the damage was even worse as stagnant floodwaters ate away what might have been salvageable. The disruption wrought by superstorm Sandy is still felt nearly a decade later. For lucky New Yorkers like myself, who had the means to repair the damage the storm inflicted, or lived in neighborhoods more insulated from flood risk and electrical damage, the disruption was relatively transient. Everyone my age got a few days off of school, and one of my close friends had to reschedule his bar mitzvah. Friends who lived just outside the city lost a few trees in the storm, and my parents were left to catch up on work from home in the days before Zoom and Teams were commonplace. Sandy didn’t force all of us to leave our homes, but it was a potent sign that our home is slowly leaving us.

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Every year or two I come across a photo—it shows up on Reddit, on my Instagram discovery page, in a museum in New York, in an architectural history class. It’s a beautiful photo, hauntingly encapsulating a bygone era. Dozens of figures glide through the frame, the darkness of their wool coats disguising the telltale silhouettes of late 19th century garb. In the foreground, they stand in high contrast to the pale, flat background of an icy lake. In the distance, atop a dark slope of leafless trees, a stately building rises from the horizon, its pitched roof and ornate styling dimly illuminated under a flat cloudy sky.

At first glance, the image looks as if it was taken somewhere in the French countryside. I, however, can immediately place the ice skaters a few hundred feet from my apartment building on the Upper West Side. I can see the lake they skate on from the windows of my apartment. The stately manse—now one of New York’s most famous buildings, the Dakota—is just two blocks away from mine. As a child, I would make faces at the black gargoyles that adorn its balustrades along 72nd and 73rd streets. I spent many afternoons (secretly, illicitly) feeding ducks from the gazebo tucked away amongst the trees at the ice’s edge in the photo.

As familiar as the image is, as much nostalgia as it evokes for old New York, it holds within it a dissonance with which I struggle to reconcile. As much as the Dakota, the Lake, and the gazebo were fixtures of my childhood, so too were the menacing signs erected each winter in 100 foot intervals around the perimeter of the water. 

“DANGER: THIN ICE” the posted notices declare from atop the red safety ladders, conveniently provided for emergency rescues. Some years the signs bear images of figures falling through cracking ice. Other years they contain fine-print warnings of injury, death. 

I have never been stupid enough to set foot on the pond, and have never seen anyone else attempt to do so, even when it turns from dark gray to pale white, as the paper-thin ice becomes just thick enough to support the dusted blanket of snow that might fall to cover it. 

As long as I have been alive, ice-skating in Central Park has always been confined to the man-made Wallman rink, about ten blocks further South. Some time before I was born, a slow, relatively inconsequential disruption occurred for New Yorkers. It did not inflict some acute trauma upon us. It didn’t confine us to our apartments for days at a time, or even stop us in the streets for a moment to look up. Nobody’s home was destroyed, no aid was disbursed. I doubt many cried, and after a while those who noticed forgot. But at some point, New York City winters stopped getting cold enough to skate on the lake in Central Park. Though this change was slow, it was dramatic; in the 1850s and 60s on the average January day, over 95% of pedestrians entering the south half of park did so to ice skate, according to official park records.  The New York Post even blamed the opening of Central Park for starting a “skating mania” amongst the city residents, drawing crowds of over 70,000 people to the park’s frozen lake on good skating days. 

As trivial as it might seem in comparison to the losses many communities around the country experience daily as climate change progresses—like losing a home to a wildfire, a season of crops failing that your livelihood depended on, or watching a beloved critter disappear from local waterways and forests—it signals a sad truth about climate change that not enough people recognize. A changing atmosphere won't bring Sandy-level disruptions everywhere, every day. There won't be California wildfires in the forests of Westchester, or Kansas tornadoes in the Financial District. But there will be changes, even if they aren't apocalyptic.

There will be more days each summer that it’s just a bit too hot to play basketball at the asphalt court you have been going to with those couple buddies since you were little. There will be more times that the heat on the subway platform is truly unbearable, causing you to arrive for your date slightly stickier and smellier than you planned. There will be more days where your apartment feels like a swamp, and more days that the hot trash on the corner makes the whole block smell like one. 

There will be more days that your commute to work might involve navigating a river running down the side of West End Avenue, or scaling a three-flight waterfall on your way out of the subway. You might find that your favorite spot to grab lunch is closed because the guy who works behind the counter got stuck at home after it flooded from the rain last night. Or when it snows (which it still will, just more unpredictably and more intensely), that disgusting slush will probably last a little bit longer, trapping your elderly neighbor inside.

Understanding climate change doesn't mean subscribing to the belief that it will be doomsday-everyday. It does mean recognizing the small changes and losses we will experience, in addition to the larger and more severe disruptions that are likely to occur. It means knowing that even if you don't have to leave home, the home you know might be slowly leaving you.