I Just Came Back From New York City... And the scene that it's become - Monday broke with fog and foreboding as my friend Noel an engineer and I made our way to the station. The commuter parking was free this week which was helpful since we didn't have the normal permits anyway. The train ride was uneventful into Grand Central and we cabbed it almost to Chambers St, the road that borders Battery Park City along the Hudson where we began the journey on foot. But at that point things changed completely. The view south down West St. was sobering. We could clearly see the remains of WTC # 7, now just a rusted hulk of smoking steel in the distance and since the army would not let us go farther we were forced to turn away from the ruins and the river and move inland to West Broadway. Every few blocks the site lines would clear and we'd see in the haze more distant rubble. At one point, near Wall St. we came upon a jewelry store with heavy, quiet dust blanketing the empty gem displays like some kind of strange and desperate Christmas window. I wondered if the owner got his goods out himself with help from his family and how long it took or if it was all stolen by looters. After showing our drivers licenses to more police we eventually came to an intersection where the wreckage was clearly visible – if it hadn't been blocked. But the authorities had used tarps and even buses to block the view. “Keep Moving! No pictures! Crime scene!” they barked and we had to press on. At last we found an open space, a concrete park called Harry Helmsley Plaza at the corner of W. Broadway and Liberty St. with a clear site line to view that awesome pile of twisted steel and spires we've all seen smoldering in pictures. And it really is different at the scene. Huge, foreboding and absolutely otherworldly. Nothing prepares you for the experience. I've heard it described as like a movie set but I've been on them and it's not like that at all. It's like the end of the world and an angry landfill rolled into one. Your mind bounces back and forth trying each concept on as if were some devilish optical illusion, lighting on one for a moment and rejecting it for the other as it finally creates the new category for what it really is: Insanity. So Noel and I stood there and looked and thought about the last moments of the victims' past. And wondered about the future of ourselves and the world as the rain began to fall. We wondered also if New Yorkers will chose to leave that iconic latticed facade in place or at least intact somewhere, as a way of never forgetting those indelible few hours of horror on September 11th. After taking pictures and a few pounds of dust we left the desolation and the gaping people, standing on walls and benches and needing to see this as much as us, behind. We picked up the girls and took them to lunch in the East Village, listening to them chatter away about work and life while the skies cleared and things appeared to return to normal. It was good to just sit at a sidewalk cafe while New York walked by and take in something normal and nice and alive. But our noses will be filled with that terrible dust for days. A couple of observations: we think that most of the people inside the buildings were essentially and instantly vaporized by the overpressure of the five million pound, three foot thick, one acre concrete floors and will not be found whole. Indeed we think that many are in the dust that now blankets New York and are slowly being swept away by the rains. We also noticed from where we were Monday smells no different from those of demolition sites - a sort of inoffensive damp concrete tang - and no small break for the waiting families wasted nerves. And even though New York is ringed with police and army, and life for many is indescribably grim, the city is surprisingly normal with people going about their day and forging ahead with their lives in ways that I believe would make the terrorists regret their actions and their wasted suicides. - js.
