Notes from a father to his daughter a week after the attack on the WTC

Notes from a father to his daughter a week after the attack on the WTC

The rubble still smolders. The southern tip of Manhattan is shrouded in a brown haze. The air is still acrid with the smell of crushed steel and concrete and glass. And they have yet to find a single soul alive. 2300 people are dead. So many people. So many families. The hurt is enormous.

You are six months old now. With blue eyes and a smile that is bright enough to melt the coldest heart. You get fussy with the noise in New York restaurants. You love being outside. And whenever we step outside, you and I, you grow quiet and your eyes grow wide and you just watch and stare at the world.

I took you on a walk down the West Side Highway today. Carrying you in a sling close to me. The day was glorious. Warm and sunny. A perfect September day with the sweet nostalgia of the end of summer in the air. Or so it seems and so I wish it could be. But it is not.

The West Side Highway was closed to all but emergency vehicles. Still in front of Chelsea Piers, that enormous and extravagant health club that juts out into the Hudson River, is a long line of ambulances from all over the state. EMT personnel wait by their trucks for the call that will send them to their shift into the rubble that was the World Trade Center. It is ironic that this health club, a very expensive one, has been set up as a temporary morgue and EMT center. The EMT folks are rather grim faced knowing that there is little hope that they will be rescuing anyone alive in that mess. They are now there to support the rescue workers who have been injured in their efforts to help. As you and I go to sleep each night we hear the constant wail of sirens as they carry injured rescue workers off to area hospitals. We just live two blocks away from this. Each time I hear a siren there is something deep inside me that twists in anxiety. It stays with me. I will never hear a siren again without the fear of what happened that day. And each time I hear the overhead roar of an airliner landing across the river at Newark I am brought quickly back to my experience that awful Tuesday just a week ago.

I was there. Just a few blocks away when it happened. When the first tower crumbled into a pile of dust.

Your mother was in the shower listening to NPR when the radio went static. She heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I was just heading out the door and on my way to work when I heard her and ran into the living room to turn on the television. It was live. Then a noise of an airplane flying down the Hudson River that felt just over our heads. And then a black blur of the second plane as it hit the second tower. Neither of us could understand what was happening. Was it an accident? What was going on?

I’ll never know why but I jumped on my bicycle after your mother and I saw the second airplane hit. I grabbed my camera and pedaled slowly down West Street against a stream of people, thousands of them, all heading uptown on foot. Police tried to wave me off but I got around them and managed to get all the way down town.

I was down there and watched a man jump off one of the burning towers cartwheeling downward to his death. Falling man. His business suit flapped around him like broken wings. I couldn’t look and yet I couldn’t pull myself away. I heard later that many people jumped. Some jumped in groups holding hands. One guy jumped like a skydiver with perfect form to his death. No parachute this time. They chose this death jumping from those high floors because they did not want to die in the flames below them. You’ll see these images again and again. I pray that you look at them with compassion and not with a hardened or forgetful eye. It was a shock and something that I cannot stomach even now. The images burned into my brain make me cry. I was always fearful of heights and never went to the top of that building. Friends had to drag me kicking and screaming to visit the top of the Empire State building.

The day a week ago was perfect. It was glorious. It was a crystal blue day. Both buildings were burning when I was down there. When I did look up at the Towers so beautiful against that blue sky I could not fathom that these Towers were actually burning. That they would eventually collapse. Not even in my most bizarre hallucinatory dreams.

There was smoke. There were flames. There was paper, tons of paper, raining down, and there was movement on the upper floors. From the windows. I couldn’t tell what it was until I saw the photographs in the newspaper the next day. It was then that I realized it was the people trapped on the upper floors above the flames getting ready to jump.

And all around me just two blocks from these buildings were crowds of people and emergency crews staring upwards transfixed at the sight. Everyone seemed to move slowly. Always lookup up. I turned and moved away after minutes which now seem like a lifetime. I cycled down to the FDR Drive trying to get farther south to the Battery. To get under and away from the smoke. And I stopped and looked over my shoulder and saw nothing because of it. I was downwind and wanted to move farther south to get out of the smoke from the burning buildings. People were all around me. Watching these buildings. I was the only one on a bicycle and the only one that I saw besides the Fire Department and EMT personnel who had come down to watch and hopefully to help. That was my desire. Or so I thought. Everyone else was in suits and business attire. They moved slowly. Too slowly as it turned out. They were evacuees from the areas buildings who got stuck in the fascination of it all. Wandering and wondering where to go. It’s strange but maybe I was stupid. I don’t know what I was doing there. I’d hoped it was as noble as this – just to serve as a witness. But in the end it wasn’t. I was stuck. Like them. Wandering and wondering where to go.

And then it happened. As I was just a few blocks east from the first tower. A sound that I will never forget. It was all around me. A roar so incredible it was as if I was in a jet engine. There were two guys on the corner in front of me and the one with a briefcase started to go into hysterics. I saw him first.  Drawn to the panic in his face. “Oh my god” he screamed. “It’s gone!”. Everyone around me cowed and started to run. Panic like I’ve never seen or felt. The first tower had collapsed. I looked back and within seconds I couldn’t see anything because this wall of smoke and paper was coming at me. Rolling down the streets like an uncoiling snake. My heart started to beat so hard in my chest. I moved quickly but I did not panic. Like the rest. They scattered and pressed against the East River. I saw many contemplating a jump into the water. But the water was filthy with debris.

Time moved so slowly. But seconds passed. Only seconds. And within those seconds I ducked under the FDR Drive and found a little nook against a wall. Pressed myself deep into it. Four or five others saw and joined me. We all huddled. And the cloud uncoiled all around us. Large flakes, they were a quarter of an inch big at least, remains of the building I suppose, started to fall. Like a silent secret snow carrying the whisperings of those people that were just dying. But there was a noise, like a crackling, that accompanied these flakes. An angry noise that spoke of the crazed madness of the attackers. And the violent death of those now crushed by the rubble.

At that very moment when the smoke started to wrap itself around me I suddenly realized that I was no longer in control. Here I was, just a guy on a bicycle, now stuck in something that was worse than any nightmare. The tower was gone. I could feel my stomach, my gut, twist in anxiety and fear.

I suddenly have this image in my mind now of a crowd of young women manning a police barricade on Broadway. I cycled through them on my way down to the burning towers. They were all young and pretty and wearing FBI jackets. They didn’t stop me. They didn’t know what to do.

Well, I got out of it. So many people around me running and scared in the smoke. A woman next to me in my nook praying to God and asking Him to not let her die that day. Please God. I left them. I needed to get away from their panic. From their fear. I wanted my own and felt best moving on my bicycle. I made my way northwards. Put my sunglasses on and tied my t-shirt tightly across my face. I grabbed a paper mask from a woman who had just a few. She was handing them out in the glass lobby of one of the office buildings. The lobby was crowded with people who watched through the window as the cloud swirled around us. The t-shirt was better. I cycled past people covered in this thick ash. It was like mud. I rode through it. Ash everywhere. Thick. So thick. The farther north I drove the more it cleared out. I passed a man dressed in a suit covered in this ash. He looked like a mudman. They started to walk out of the cloud. Like the walking dead. This one was in a public fountain trying to wash off his face. Still carrying his briefcase. I took my camera out and snapped a picture. Or so I thought. I had no film in the camera. Nothing. I had forget to grab any before I left our apartment.

When I made it to South Street Seaport the second tower came down. The noise. And the screams and panic again around me. And then the smoke. Again. This time I bolted and headed uptown and got to the Brooklyn Bridge where I caught up with the crowd watching the smoke from the collapsed towers. Hundreds and hundreds of people walking away. And a crazy woman in the crowd screaming that this was the end of the world. I felt her madness. Too closely.

It is hard to reconcile. These buildings coming down. In my fantasies of destruction I could imagine Washington DC invaded by aliens (I’m sure you’re laughing at that one) or San Francisco falling off the edge of California in a massive earthquake. And here I was in a city experiencing the collapse of these twin towers. Something that I could never have imagined. Something that I could never have dreamed. Something that has put a twist into my reality. Permanently.

I made it home to your mother who was watching the events unfold on television. I watched the collapse of the two buildings being replayed again and again. And then it hit me. All those people that I stood next to. I was just two blocks from the first tower. What had happened to them? Firemen. Policemen. And gawkers like me. I knew the debris had covered blocks. I knew it had covered the corner I was standing on. I was sure of it. What had happened to those police and firemen I was with? Had they gone in to help? Had they been caught in the collapse? I think I know the answer. I sat on the edge of our bed and I cried. I was shattered. The thousands of people, tens of thousands I had then thought, had just been killed in the most unbelievable conflagration I had ever seen. I was a witness. With a camera with no film. I didn’t need it. Those images were seared into my brain. Painfully.

I picked up the police scanner that I had bought a few years back. Always a Boy Scout. And at first I heard nothing but panic and confusion. But I wanted to help. I wanted to go back down there. I felt guilty for leaving as I did. So after some time of listening to the confusion I heard that they were accepting volunteers down in Tribeca. No official service was left to help. It took me a while to make this out because there was such a muddle of conversations on air between all the departments. Your aunt Mimi joined me. We headed back down into it and made it to a streetcorner with some two or three hundred other folks who had put their names on a list. Remarkably we had all heard the same call for volunteers. We put our names down too. And sat around for a while. Looking downtown into the smoke occasionally and wondering anxiously if we really had the guts to go into it. They seperated the crowd into those who had construction experience and those who had EMT training. We looked for the EMT crowd. We crossed the street to join them and I was stopped by a young policeman who asked where I was going. When I told him that I was joining the EMT folks he leered at me and asked if I had a professional license. Did I have experience with triage he asked? Was I prepared to pick up body parts? Weakly I wheezed under my breath that I had been in Beirut during the civil war. I quickly realized that I was way out of my element. Way, way, out of my element. Your aunt and I wandered a bit. Sat on a streetcorner watching things. So much smoke. All sorts of vehicles racing into it. And lots of explosions. Probably from the gas mains that were exploding in the heat.

I’ve got to tell you this story. While we were down there volunteering someone, probably a mischevious kid, started to rain eggs down on us from some high balcony. Here we were. Hundreds of volunteers. Getting nailed by eggs. I’m sure that kid will grow up to be someone really special.

And here my notes end from ten years ago. After I wrote these notes I spent a good three years suffering from the worst PTSD imaginable. It was as if a door had opened that day and all my repressed memories from my time as a six year old during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War – my first brush with violence – and then the time I was in Beirut during the Civil War in 1983/84. They all had seemed like grand adventures until those towers collapsed and that door into the hidden recesses of my mind slammed open. All of it came screaming out. And three years of hard core therapy to wrest me back into saner territory. Ten years later I’m a lot saner. And a lot better than I had been before the towers collapsed. As I think we all are. Because before then we skated on a world of American dreams. Unrealistic and a suck on the rest of the world. Like a vampire. That was the United States. Separate. And now we are not.

The president who lead us into vengeance after that event is gone. I am glad. I have never hated a president as much as I hated him. His world was simple and small and venal. His response to the attack was more violence. Now the trillion dollar wars and the hundreds of thousands of dead linger. It is vengeance and the violence of wars “over there” that plague us like a pestilence. I wish I could tell you as I look into your ten year old eyes that it could have been different. That it could be different. It isn’t. But I can tell you what we all felt during those few months after the attack. When it seemed that all of us had entered a state of grace. When all of us understood the importance of saying hello to each other on the street and acknowledging the value of life. Hello. We had not died. We were alive. I am thankful that I can look into your ten year old eyes and now too the eyes of your six year old brother and tell him this story and of those hours which changed all of our lives. And my wish now is simple. These events, over time, will be forgotten. As I think they should be. But I ask that you try to remember these two words and pass them down to your children. And theirs. Love life. That was my lesson in those hours. Love. Life.

With so much love to the both of you now, to the end of the universe and back.

Your Dad.

-z