To walk toward Jacob Riis Park on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, through the beaches of Belle Harbor and Neponsit, is to wonder whether severe weather has its own particular taste, its own logic for exempting certain belongings from its animosity. While Hurricane Sandy buried some of the area’s large oceanfront houses in the sand or split them in two, smashing sport utility vehicles into living rooms, other structures suffered a more artful destruction. These might be called, for the purposes of a perverse disaster tourism, the doll houses — places where the facades were ripped off to reveal rooms with collapsed flooring from which still-made beds dangled and cable boxes hung in the air from their cords; a tableau of total obliteration save for a preserved Oriental vase or an intact fireplace mantel.

There is arguably no more evocative (or literal) portrait of suspended life in the post-hurricane world than these images provide. As of last week, power was still out in much of Belle Harbor and Neponsit, and waiting for return calls from insurance adjusters became its own consuming pastime. When would they come with their notepads and assessments, and how much nickel-and-diming would they really do?

The fear, of course, is that they would do a great deal of it. “They’ll cover you for this act of God, but not that act of God,” Jack Suben, who owns a ruined 70-year-old house in the Sea Gate section of Coney Island, in Brooklyn, told me. In true Dickensian fashion, his hotel expenses, as far as he had been told, would cease to be covered on Christmas Eve.