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Monday, 21 October 2002
An empty hole ::
Saturday, as the bus approached Manhattan from New Jersey, I found myself looking, as usual, eastward for glimpses of skyscrapers. It’s a ritual, perhaps a mental preparation for the sudden immersion into the city upon exiting the Lincoln Tunnel. I kept looking in the direction where I thought the twin towers of the WTC would have been, not expecting to see them, but trying to compare their absence with memory of their presence. It had been 2 years since my last trip to NY, one of perhaps 50 trips there in the last 20 years, so memory failed: I knew the towers were missing but I couldn’t point to a spot and say to myself, wow, that precise spot in my geographical memory is now missing something very large. Even in making my way to my SoHo bed and breakfast, I had that same sense: I know they had once dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan, and they were now eerily absent, but I couldn’t point to exactly where they had been. So a couple of hours later I found myself walking south toward Ground Zero, carefully watching my observations and recollections. Would their absence become more visceral, more real?
I knew I’d reached the area when I came to a church on Broadway, with its fences decorated all the way around with letters, pictures, signs etc., honoring those who were lost. The expressions on the faces of the people looking at and photographing the memorials were somber and often pained. The emotional impact I’d been expecting still did not arrive.
I walked across Church Street to the edge of giant, gaping hole in the ground where the towers had once stood. I remembered my several visits to the first tower, but still, the expected emotion did not come. I looked at the several aerial photographs of the area, spanning several decades before and after the fall of the towers, and that was as close as I came to comprehending what had happened. Two enormous towers, the tallest in the world when they were built, had once stood here. Now there was just a big hole in the ground. The only clues that violence had occurred here were in the surrounding buildings, a Thai restaurant and other shops, boarded up, a 20-40 (?) story building with large pieces missing and apparently reinforced to keep it from meeting the fate of its neighbors. I remembered the bombed-out church I’d seen in Hamburg in March.
I tried to imagine the jetliners slamming into the buildings, the horror and pain of the victims, the bravery and selflessness of the firefighters who’d died here. But the vision seemed barely more real and moving than the crude illustrations and maps at Gettysburg, memorializing a bloody battle almost 140 years ago.
It looked more like a construction site than a place of devastation. A steady stream of cement mixers crawled up and down ramps into the pit, like ants rebuilding their nest after a heavy downpour.
I called a friend I was to visit, a native New Yorker. He remarked how the images on TV had completely failed to convey the magnitude of what had happened. I thought of how many landscapes, for example in Utah, are too large to be adequately captured on film.
I wondered if I was simply seeing things as they were right then, or if I had completely missed something very big. Perhaps, not having been in New York during the calamity or the cleanup, there is no way to truly understand what happened except by listening to those who were actually there. All I saw was that New York was wounded, but remembering, healing and rebuilding, and that life goes on.
A few pictures soon.
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