Watching the Manhattan skyline shimmer over Jamaica Bay had always been one of the charms of life in the Rockaways. But now, when the Empire State Building winks on each night, those lights feel almost like a punch in the gut.

It felt that way to the two women caked in the sandy silt that still blankets most streets here, as they trudged up Rockaway Beach Boulevard on Saturday, pushing shopping carts they had dug out of wreckage piled beside the boarded-up C-Town Supermarket.

The women, Monique Arkward and her neighbor Eyvette Martin, pushed the carts more than 40 blocks from their battered bungalows to St. Francis de Sales Church, where they had heard — by word of mouth, since phones hardly work here — that they might find bottled water, batteries and some measure of warmth.

“We’re living like cavemen,” Ms. Arkward said. “It’s like we’re forgotten. It’s like they say, ‘O.K., when we get to them, we’ll get to them.’ ”