Ground Zero
You will find little here that can be called original, and would do well to skip this blog entirely, if you’ve already “moved on.” But I made my first trip to Ground Zero a few days ago, and I need to express a little of that moment. I have been to the City 8 or 9 times since September, but had not been required to go downtown, and hadn’t volunteered either.
I actually happened on it by accident: I know that sounds improbable, but it’s true. I got out of a cab at City Hall, an hour early for a meeting on Wall Street, intending to walk the last 1/2 mile. My tourist map of Manhattan was in the briefcase, and I honestly didn’t know quite how close to the WTC site City Hall sits. Off to my right, a blank spot in the sky suggested the proximity. This in itself is amazing. One looks at the spot where the Towers stood and understands immediately that no gap in the Manhattan skyline can be that large on its own. Someone has clearly done something to the skyline, and only one thing could do that much.
St. Paul’s chapel attracted my attention, and gradually it dawned on me that it was surrounded by banners and memorials, and posters of the missing and dead. It is very hard to describe the way in which this recognition snuck up on me, as did the banners themselves. Without planning or deliberation, I had crossed the street and was reading them before I had even fully acknowledged them. Heading along the North side of the chapel, peering into the graveyard as much as looking at the signs, I discovered that I had arrived at police barriers, and was gazing upon the site. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and silently prayed. At so many points along this short walk, I found myself on the edge of tears, scabbed-over wounds suddenly threatening to bleed again. The moment of prayer was the only time in my life I have ever felt utter silence in a city.
Startling things still live in the plaza, though most of the site now looks like an ordinary construction zone. Tall cranes and great shovels poke above the trailers that line the East edge of the site, and surprise you by depositing rubble instead of landfill into dump trucks. One skyscraper along the southern edge is entirely covered in black cloth, as though shrouded in mourning, a sign of gratitude and an American flag the only interruptions of its monolithic sadness. A building to the West, next to St. Paul’s, still has many panes of glass replaced with plywood. Somehow, in all that, the thing hardest to process was how dirty the windows of the buildings remain. No window washers have scaled the facades since September 11, and so the dust of the Towers and the airplanes and the workers and the firemen and the passengers and the police and the EMS teams and the terrorists still coats the glass. Who will be the one to wash away the dust?
Around a corner, large crates of marble sit, presumably for the restoration of a lobby. I find that hopeful. But up that same street, papers and soot still clog a storm drain.
I cannot count myself among those who think such visits ghoulish or inappropriate. My own visit lasted half an hour or 45 minutes, and in that time I saw others who were crying, or praying, or taking pictures. I want to be reminded, however much it hurts, of what I felt when it first happened. I want to remember, so long as the enemies of freedom and civilization still cower in their caves, and hide in “refugee camps” behind women and children. While they strap dynamite to their young and use civilians as missiles, I have no interest in forgetting. It is not a memorial, and I do not wish to make it one. It remains a present, active outrage.
