The two following posts were written soon after the dates given in the text; some friends asked that I post them here, for others to read if they want. They are mainly written to myself, and sent to family and friends to share with them my thoughts and my observations about the times after the WTC attack. Many others have written more eloquently, and more intimately, of what happened and their experiences. This is my voice, for what it's worth. They are in reverse chronological order, because that's the way posts are done here, so you will need to scroll down to the September 24 post first to have them in the order written.

October 2, 2001

A pilgrimage to the WTC

The traffic lights at Maiden Lane and Broadway are still changing. Red…. green…yellow…red…. Underneath them huge 18-wheelers rumble by, empty as they head south, full as they return north along the avenue, full of what remains of the World Trade Center complex and its people. No one pays attention to the lights. They keep changing. Red…green…

I stand two blocks from Church Street, which ran alongside the WTC when it stood tall, and now forms one boundary of its grave. It’s night time, three weeks after the world changed, Tuesday evening, October 2. I had to come here, to see it now, this place I had passed through many times. Gone: The bookstore where I found a Christmas present last winter. The Godiva store where I bought chocolate strawberries for a friend visiting town. Ecce Panis, a wonderful bakery. The place I transferred from the PATH train to the subway whenever I ventured into the city. My gateway to Manhattan, closed.

But it is not only the grave of the WTC. The tall skeletal shell and the smoking rubble still carry the secret of how thousands died, where their bodies lie, if there is still a body to find. It is a mass grave of the future, of the hopes and dreams of a rippling tide of people – victims, families, friends, children unborn, discoveries unmade. When I read a list of those confirmed dead, I was struck by how many were in their 30s – just hitting their strides, the force of our future. How would this country have been different if they had lived? Who will guide our country in the decades ahead, when we have lost so many? We will persevere, and perhaps some who would not, in that alternate future, have come to prominence, will surprise us with their vigor and knowledge, their ability to lead. There is always, even in the face of horror, hope.

***

I wanted to visit the site last week, but even though I came into Manhattan I couldn’t make myself go below 9th Street. I shopped, and then took the PATH home. It seemed odd, not going through the World Trade Center.

***

On Tuesday October 2 I took the PATH from Grove Street, near my office, on the line that formerly ended at WTC, now rerouted and ending at 33rd Street. I stood in my favorite place at the front of the train’s first car, looking through the window, watching the grimed walls and unidentifiable pipes and wires whipping by, noticing the dirty water underneath the tracks. The tunnels under WTC were partially flooded, I was told two weeks ago; they’ve filled them now with a thick concrete plug to protect the rest of the tunnels while those are repaired. I wonder what it would be like to be standing here, and suddenly see a wall of that dirty water splashing toward me. Thankfully, on that day, no one faced that. Those on the trains got out.

***

The PATH train station on 9th Street is around the corner from Balducci’s, a world-famous gourmet grocery store in Greenwich Village where a friend of mine once saw Cher. New York looked like New York as I headed south on 6th Street – the Avenue of the Americas. It took me a few moments to determine which direction was south – as my roommate had said when she first went into Manhattan after September 11, the compass was gone. The buildings by which we orient ourselves weren’t there. The brief moments of disorientation that resulted seemed somehow an appropriate welcome to the new New York on this journey.

I passed an attractive older woman in a black skirt riding a bicycle north on the sidewalk, a young man in dreadlocks talking to friends, men playing handball in a small park on my left. Most people here are young, smiling, New York as you dream about when you grow up in the South or Midwest and watch it on television. The restaurants in this part of town are filling up as the dinner crowd comes out, 7 p.m. on a weeknight. I keep walking, no compass, and uncertain which train to take south. It’s a long hike, a mile at least, to WTC.

The further south I go, the fewer people I see. I don’t know if it is because fewer people live in the middle of downtown Manhattan, or because it is closer to Ground Zero and people aren’t as interested in just hanging out. Dusk begins to fall, and I see the first signs that life is different. Three men sit at a table outside a restaurant, finishing dinner and talking; one has on a T-shirt that says on the back, “Toronto Fire Department.” Had they spent the day at Ground Zero? Further along, three young National Guard troopers – two men and a woman – pass me headed north, chatting and laughing. Police officers are at every corner, at least two and sometimes four or five. This is new too.

Ahead it appears that 6th Avenue ends; I turn left and go a block to Broadway, then head south again. The streets are quieter, and now barriers line the streets, separating the sidewalk from the road. Construction is ubiquitous in New York – is this a sign of normalcy? Or were these barriers the remnants of a city shut down?

I see in the distance a glowing light dissipating into the sky, smoke moving lazily through it. Ground Zero. I’m feeling cold inside and yet it seems that nothing has changed. Up ahead I see lights again, unnatural light as dusk turns to night. Some people coming toward me are carrying little surgical masks. Most stores are closed. There is the pharmacy I went to the last time I came through WTC. It was unharmed.

Barriers crossed Broadway here too, but here were the beginnings of people watching. They stood, in twos and threes, looking toward WTC, quiet. I skirted them, continuing down the street. I began to see clusters of people, pressing against the metal barriers, looking. Finally, at St. Paul’s Chapel, I stopped and looked too. The sidewalk in front of the church was lined with portable toilets, the fence hung with banners, workers walking around the front and sides, heading to or from the carnage. And behind the church… behind the graveyard of stones older than our country… a blackened husk of a building rose. Inside was the bookstore I always went to, the pages inside now dust and cinders. Beside it, behind it, a pile of metal, papers, rubble shone brightly in the huge lights making day in the night. A man beside me videoed the scene. I moved on.

A bank facing Broadway, facing toward WTC, was closed, its ATM machines covered with large blank sheets of light opaque plastic. An impromptu memorial coalesced there, people writing on the plastic. A young woman knelt before the middle one, copying over in heavy marker a commentary, a narrative poem, she had written on it. She wore a flag-patterned head scarf, high clunky tan slides, and a sheer gold-glittery halter dress that exposed her back to the waist and, through the glitter, her blue panties; she would have been born after the end of the Vietnam War. She would have been in high school when we fought the Gulf War. When I passed by later, she had put on a black turtleneck under the dress, and she was offering others markers so they could write their own poems on another piece of plastic.

Beside this was a legal-sized piece of paper, at the bottom a 3x3 photo of a cute boy, about 5, hair and clothes reminiscent of the 1970s. Above it was one man’s story – his friend Marc, his best friend since they both were 5 years old, had died because he worked on the 105 floor of one of the towers, and couldn’t escape. Marc was his childhood hero, he said, the one who encouraged him, who taught him how to talk to girls, who was always successful and seemed golden. He was always proud to be Marc’s friend, he said. He loved Marc. And now Marc, his childhood hero, was dead. He cried until he was empty. Then he wrote his story and taped it up all over downtown, so others could know the hole left by Marc’s death. In tiny print at the bottom, he wrote this story is for no reason other than to let others know one person’s story, to make a personal connection to this tragedy.

I wanted to hug this man. I wanted to bring Marc back. I turned and walked further down. I wanted to see all I could see.

At each cross street, closed to traffic, the police had set the barriers back at least 20 feet from Broadway, hanging tarps or camouflage fabric up on the corners so people wouldn’t cluster there, but would go down to the barriers. I crossed Maiden Lane, with its clearest view, and went down to Liberty Street from where I could see the end of the site. Not much to see – just several narrow, very tall metal sections of the WTC exterior stuck in the ground, incongruous in their beautiful unplanned symmetry, surrounded by a wasteland of torn dreams. Just. My mind refused to grasp it. On the street behind me, people walked their dogs, a garbage truck loaded trash that workers were removing from a building damaged by the crash of the towers, a bicycle rickshaw driver clanged his little handlebar bell to see if anyone wanted a ride. In front of me was the site where 50 bodies were found in the previous 24 hours. And thousands more were still missing.

Back to Maiden Lane, looking toward the center of the WTC plaza, now under tens of feet of rubble. In the distance, on top of a jagged section of façade, sparks cascaded in bursts. To me the section looked two or three stories high, but the sparks were from a metal worker’s cutting tool; from his height I could tell the section was closer to ten stories high. He did his work from a bucket suspended from a huge crane, tiny against the sky. Such was the magnitude of the fall – even the pieces of the WTC are bigger than most buildings in their entirety.

Pulling into myself, I stared at the remains of the WTC and cast my mind into the stairwell, where those people were found that day. How they must have rushed from on high, three weeks ago today, smoke in the stairwell, the building rumbling, firefighters shouting for them to hurry but be careful, women tossing off their high heeled shoes so they could move more quickly, maybe slipping in their stockinged feet, thinking about family or maybe not thinking at all, frightened but hopeful as they came close to the ground, escape only yards away. And then…. the building came down around them. Did it fall on them? Or did it lock them inside, whole but hopeless? My thoughts flashed to an article I read, in the words of the firefighters who came to the scene first, before the towers fell. One said, I watched them fall. I saw the bodies falling. I saw a man fall, his eyes wide open, then he hit an awning, hit a car, and his body just exploded. The bodies just exploded. I will never forget that.

Their eyes were wide open.

Which would be better? Dying with your eyes wide open, seeing death rushing toward you? Or in the dark, where it creeps on slow silent feet?

Tears flow down my cheeks. A foreign videographer films the site from beside me at the barrier. On the other side, a man with a white beard looks my way several times, perhaps unsure whether he should offer comfort, thinking perhaps that I lost someone I loved. In front of me, two police officers stand chatting of mundane things, laughing occasionally. Two dogs meet with feral barks, pulled apart by their owners who continue on their way. Sparks cascade from the metalworker’s tools in the distance.

The traffic lights change… red….green…yellow…

September 24, 2001

A memorial service

Last night I sat on the ground at Liberty State Park surrounded by the families of victims of the World Trade attack, by those who worked at Ground Zero, and others, like me, there to show support. In the New York Harbor just off the shore of the park stood Lady Liberty, her torch held high and glowing ever brighter as the sky darkened. She was in front of me, and I watched her as the ceremonies and speeches continued. To my left was the skyline of Manhattan, forever changed. Behind the Battery Park buildings was a void where the Trade Towers once stood; in the early dusk of our arrival, we could see clouds of dust and smoke still rising lazily from the ruins below, showing between the buildings left standing. In the darkness of our leaving, there was nothing but blackness there.

The acting governor of the state spoke; Christopher Reeve and his wife, both from New York and New Jersey, spoke; Ray Charles sang. Their tributes were moving. But the real part of the evening was when the son of a victim spoke about his father, how much he loved his family and the things in his life that he had probably been thinking about that morning before his sudden and shocking death – his 33rd anniversary upcoming, a new grandchild on the way, a daughter’s wedding in the months ahead, the ways he would provide for his family. The real part was where a leader of an urban search and rescue unit spoke about being at Ground Zero, and the comrades he lost, yet still they worked on. The real part was the Port Authority police officer who stapled up a sheet with 37 small photos of fellow officers, all of whom died when the buildings came crashing down. They were her friends. They were her coworkers. She could have been there too. I hugged her and we cried together.

The photos of the officers were affixed to a Wall of Remembrance erected for the occasion, of plywood boards painted white. Mourners had staplers, magic markers and candles. During the ceremony we were all given glow sticks to raise during the “candlelight vigil” part; as my friends and I were told when we sat holding lighted candles we brought from home, real lighted candles aren’t allowed in the state park. But at the Wall, where people stapled photos of their loved ones most likely gone forever, and wrote messages of sadness and love, there were flowers and yes, a few candles. After the ceremony, as many of the thousands present crowded through the pathways to the buses to carry them back to the parking lot, a few hundred came to the wall. I walked down the length, reading the messages and crying.

At one place a family stood looking at three framed photographs of a beautiful young woman, likely in her early 20s, dark and smiling, with long black hair. A woman who looked very similar to the young woman in the photograph leaned forward and placed one of the pale blue glow sticks in front of it. A young boy beside her asked why she did it; a man replied that they had forgotten candles. Without a word I handed them mine, now unlit, then I handed them the two my friends carried, and my box of matches. They thanked me, and together lit the candles and placed them in front of the photographs. I moved on, in tears again.

Near the end of the wall, at least 40 feet long, a young man wrote a message beside the photo of another lovely young woman. He wrote, Please come home. He wrote, I miss you and I love you, babe. He wrote again, I love you, and signed his name. As he turned around, friends hugged and kissed him, then another took the marker and began writing beside her photograph.

In some ways I felt out of place at this memorial because I did not lose someone I love in that horrible attack. But then I realized that, in truth, I did lose someone I loved, because a part of me is a part of all those Americans who lived their lives in peace, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in robust disagreement, but all brothers and sisters, Americans, who died because someone hated America. Not them specifically, but all of us. You. Me. My mother. My 18 month old niece. My boss, the cop who directed traffic this morning, the Muslim woman in traditional garb who walked in front of my car at the traffic light on my way to work – Americans all. They hate us. They killed us. We all have to remember. We miss you, babe. We know you won’t come home. But we will always remember that you lived.

This blog is a complement to my others, basically for the purpose of posting essays and other writings that I've done that don't fit elsewhere because of length or subject. So... enjoy :) and visit as often as you'd like, even write, if you want. And thanks for stopping by.