Posted on 11/03/2001 12:41:32 PM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Searing Images Speak of American Spirit http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=138471 Paul M. Rodriguez The cardboard sign declared: "No pictures or videos please! Signed, The Management." Taped to a lamp pole at Rector and Carlisle, this sign of respect was 100 yards from the clearly visible "ground zero" in New York City. Adjacent streets, similarly cordoned off by police barricades, had no such signs and provided vantage points from which tourists, TV crews and news photographers stood to capture slivers of the devastation of Sept. 11.
Only invited guests could get beyond the barricades to see the full effect of the devastation. There, it was a formal "No pictures or videos please." But this newsman didn't need photos to remember it indelibly. All one had to do was look out at the vast expanse where the magnificent twin towers had been, only to be startled by a butterfly fluttering above the void, to remember the images.
A windowpane about 17 stories up in a nearby building hit by the falling debris from the twin towers drove home the horror that news footage is unable to capture. The brick above it is marked with a dark shadow that descends through the top half of the glass below. The bottom is marked, too, but differently. An ornamental iron railing, perhaps 6 inches high, rises from the sill, bent in one corner as though struck by a sledgehammer. And less than an inch away, the unbroken pane of glass reflects the remains of what once was a human being who had come hurtling at unimaginable speed from a place that lies in rubble today.
In a nearby apartment, caked in dust and debris from the fallen towers, is something else just as startling — a love letter dated in 1998. The fate of the recipient, someone named Chris who presumably had kept it with him or her, is unknown. The writer was frustrated about law school and the rigors of German criminal law. The letter had fluttered from the falling towers through burst windows to rest in the wrecked apartment next to a dried orchid saved from the occupants' wedding day. And, incredibly, the letter was dated on the groom's birthday.
How to sort the poignant themes of broken and unbroken glass and a letter of love? That is the question a young Australian whose apartment this is asks as he shows photos of his child born just one day after the carnage. He and his pregnant wife had been at home on Sept. 11, looking out over the towers, and witnessed the first explosion. They then saw the second plane strike, hurling flaming debris toward their home. They were witness, as a Canadian neighbor later recalled, to "unspeakable things" before racing down their stairs and into the street as reports came in that the towers were collapsing.
A police officer a short distance away waved the panicked couple into an alcove just nanoseconds ahead of the shock waves as debris exploded down the canyons of skyscrapers. Their child will be told all this and much more as the family makes a home elsewhere. Their building, though saved, no longer seems a safe harbor.
A Russian immigrant, a security guard who works two blocks from the devastation, points to a parking lot across from a New York Police Department precinct house. The cars sit there, covered in ash, waiting for owners who won't be coming back. An attendant says the families of those lost apparently can't face coming for the vehicles. He grimaces as he says he hopes the ghostly cars will be destroyed rather than winding up on eBay as grisly souvenirs. Those who have been here have had souvenirs enough — the gritty air they've tasted, the phlegm coughed up from inhaling the wafts of sickeningly sweet air, putrid on some days.
But while the families and offices and businesses that were here may now be gone, their spirit and that of America are present in this place. The national mourning may abate, but I pray this memory of why we must vigilantly protect, secure and defend our land will not.
This is New York City and the work goes on. Street vendors hawk their wares, artfully staying clear of trucks carrying gigantic steel beams, twisted like wire, cut from the debris at ground zero. In just a few weeks a grim pile of rubble more than 10 stories high has given way to crews working day and night in the shadows of the two cathedral-like skeletons still rising 15 or so stories above the devastation. The somber task below stops only when respect is paid to recovered remains. The Canadian and his American wife say it was the same with recovery of the remains scattered across rooftops and courtyards. And yes, for the shattered body wedged against that iron railing above. All were, carefully, tenderly removed.
Fires still rage deep in the rubble, giving rise to constant smoke through which one sees a yellow sawhorse with arrows pointing left and right — for building debris on one side and bits of human flesh and bone on the other. The searing images will not go away, nor should they. But in memory of those thousands who died here — and especially of those who died saving others — let us be certain that none of this horror is allowed to imprison our souls or threaten our liberty. And let us not forget that beautiful baby. And especially not that love letter, witness to a message transcending evil, reminding those who survived of the treasure we create when we dare to reveal our hearts.
Paul M. Rodriguez is managing editor of Insight.
Not to mention a truly decent individual and a very good reporter.
Not to mention a truly decent individual and a very good reporter.
I'll 'Second' that.
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