On my recent trip to New York City there were only two places I really wanted to visit -- the Empire State Building and the 9/11 Museum. We ended up seeing tons more than that -- it's New York, there's something cool everywhere you go -- but the place we spent the most time at by far was Ground Zero. Partly because there was just so much to look at, but also because I think of it as part of my own personal history; to be there for the first time walking the grounds and examining the pieces of what's left of the Twin Towers was surprisingly moving. I was caught off guard by how emotional it all was for me. If you ever make it there, you MUST GO.
Walking onto the memorial site is a little surreal. That part of town is still an incredibly busy place, so on the blocks surrounding the Freedom Tower you see people walking around in typical business dress, construction on the streets, traffic everywhere -- just like any other part of New York. Then you walk onto THAT block and one of those two gigantic building footprints appear in front of you out of nowhere and you realize that you're on sacred ground. There are trees all over what used to be the World Trade Center Plaza, with one particular tree planted near the South Tower's pool. They call it the Survivor Tree -- it was the only tree still living at the World Trade Center after September 11. They took it offsite, and with what I can imagine was only the most meticulous of care, nursed it back to health and replanted it at the memorial 5 years ago. There are still ropes in the branches helping them support each other. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.
We walked around the entirety of the South Tower's footprint -- an acre -- and all I could think was that there were once over 100 floors this same size just in that building. That was so much space for so many people with so much potential for damage.... But there was plenty of damage done. All of those names stretching out in rows -- too many to read, all people with families who needed them, mothers who loved them. I felt the lines of their names cut into the metal and cried for them again.
Past the museum, kitty-corner and closer than you think it would be is the giant imprint of the North Tower. There again is an infinity pool and more rows of names. I hadn't realized it, but in addition to all the people who died in New York and Washington D.C. that day, they've included the names of the World Trade bombing victims who died in 1993. They also have a spot in the museum, along with artifacts saved from that day. I don't know why I was surprised, but it reminded me that this tragedy had started long before a Tuesday in September of 2001. Also that evil -- because there is no other word -- is patient.
Our tickets for the museum were for 2:00, and because we had reserved them the day before, we walked right in. If you go, you can reserve them online at the museum's website -- the only line I saw at the memorial was for tickets to get into the museum. The entrance is on ground level, but once you're in you can choose to go up to the little theatres where they have a couple of short films playing on intervals, or way down to where the bulk of the exhibits are. We went up first, just in time to catch the 15-minute movie that walks you through the events of the morning of 9/11 from the perspective of President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Rudy Guiliani and other government officials as well as firefighters who were there that day. The group in the theatre was pretty diverse -- people of different nationalities talking to each other in foreign accents, older people in visors sitting still in their seats, little kids and young adults who can't remember a pre-9/11 world -- and I had the sense that most of these people had come to get a peek at our national tragedy. It hit me then that, in that room, I was probably in the minority as an American who experienced that day firsthand and who still carries the scar of it with me. Granted, I wasn't in New York or Washington D.C., but the world changed in the days and weeks following September 11; it was a watershed moment -- there are the days previous to that one that are BEFORE and every other day since has been AFTER.
For me, the morning of September 11, 2001 started with an early phone call. I say early, but it was 7 a.m. -- early for me because I had a 2 year-old and a 4 month-old baby who still wasn't sleeping all the way through the night. I was scheduled to teach a piano lesson later that morning, but I had planned on sleeping at least until 8:00, so when Steve called from work and woke me up early, the first words out of my mouth were "This better be good." He told me to turn on the TV, that someone was flying planes into buildings in New York. Sleep-deprived as I was, I was still coherent enough to think he was kidding. When I turned on the news, it was just minutes after the second plane hit the South Tower and both towers were burning. I was still trying to wrap my mind around what I was seeing when the news about the Pentagon came in. There were still conflicting reports as to exactly what had happened; by this time everyone was sure it was a terrorist attack, but details were still sketchy and there were scary stories of more planes being unaccounted for. I gathered up my girls, and we sat on my bed for more than an hour just watching the fires burn. That's where we were when the towers fell from the sky. Of all the things I expected to see or hear that morning, I was most gobsmacked by that. As the first one went, I remember thinking there was no way everyone inside had escaped and that I had probably just watched thousands of people die. Until that moment, I had hope that some of them above the fires might make it out.
The television didn't go off all day except for the couple of hours I did piano lessons. My kids didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, but I couldn't seem to do anything but sit and watch. It was sometime in the afternoon when I saw footage taken earlier in the day of people in suits jumping out of windows 100 stories off the ground that I started to cry. What kind of desperation could drive someone to think that might be their best chance of surviving? By the time Steve finally got home, I was an emotional mess and completely wrung out. We were finally all understanding the details of the events of the day and beginning to breathe a collective sigh of relief that there might not be any more attacks to report before the day ended. It seemed to be over. I didn't realize until the next morning that even though the sun rose and the world outside my window looked just the same, nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.
It was the feeling somberness and the weight of our collective sadness in the weeks that followed that many of the people at the memorial that day with me wouldn't understand. How everything stopped -- planes weren't flying, for two solid weeks there was nothing on any TV station but news, and no one seemed to want to laugh. How my generation experienced patriotism on a level we had never done before and the flag became a personal symbol of resilience. How anger and grief at our loss coexisted with pride and wonder in the way ordinary people became heroes. And the sense that we were Americans, dammit, and this was not going to end us. All of it came back to me as I spent the next couple of hours walking through the museum looking at remnants of what was BEFORE.
The exhibits there are impressive in their scale and sheer volume. There are pieces of the towers themselves -- a massive piece of steel that formed one of the decorative arches the base of the towers were known for that stretches from floor to ceiling, the cross made notorious by American Atheists, and two chunks of jagged metal, located in different parts of the museum, that were taken from the point of impact of one of the planes (one was above and one was below). Parts of the towers' foundations have been incorporated into the museum as well. There is an exposed piece of the slurry wall that actually serves as a museum wall and exposed bases of columns previously supporting the towers have become an exhibit. You can also see what's left of a fire truck that was parked in the plaza, the staircase named the Survivors' Stairs that was the salvation of a group from the North Tower, and, this made me cry again, a huge concrete wall covered with blue papers -- one for every life and each a different shade of blue, mimicking the color of the sky that morning. In the middle is a quote from Virgil, "No day shall erase you from the memory of time." Beautiful.
We were feeling a little like we could have seen more, but then we got to the central rooms. These are two enclosed areas on the floor of the museum surrounded by black walls and set apart from the rest of the exhibits. The first is a gallery full of victims' photos and artifacts belonging to them that were recovered from the site. There are touchscreen tables throughout that play short tributes given by relatives or friends as well as a central theatre featuring expanded tributes. It occured to me as I was walking through looking at damaged cell phones, broken watches and almost illegible ID cards that the items were already showing their age. That even though the tragedy of 9/11 seems recent, the distance created by time is becoming noticable. One day the people walking through the museum will see the artifacts as pieces of a far away past, much like I do with the objects brought up from the Titanic. Quaint and interesting, but not really connected to a time I understand or relevant to my life.
The second set of rooms contain all the objects, small and large, you might expect to see in the museum accompanied by various forms of media from the day and much more. This gallery has its own set of doors which deposit you into the morning of September 11, 2001. There is a large picture directly in front of you of the Twin Towers as they looked that morning -- the last one of them undamaged thought to have been taken. Your path takes you past the morning's newspapers right up to television screens playing the first live reports of a plane having crashed into the North Tower. As you move farther into the exhibit, you advance through the day accompanied by a timeline of events running along the wall. Everything is set up in chronological order so the entire day unfolds again as it did before. Screens replaying images, objects recovered from that specific event, and any other relevant pictures or other items having to do with that point on the timeline are located together. Along the way there are a few dark alcoves where you can sit and listen to recorded phone calls made from the towers, from the planes, and between rescuers. There are more artifacts than I had thought to see; I guess I was expecting battered firefighter helmets and scraps of paper, which I got, but there were also pieces of the planes and an entire storefront window, the clothes covered in grey dust, left just as it was that evening. And pictures by the hundreds. I can't begin to describe all of what's been collected. One of the things that struck me hard as I was nearing the end of the exhibit was a quote from a wife of one of the victims. To paraphrase, she said as terrible as it was, she didn't want the day to end because it was a day she had shared with her husband. I can relate to that.
There is also, at the end, a small section with pictures of the hijackers and video of them walking through airport security. My first thought was that I was almost offended to see them there, but I know they're a necessary part of the narrative. My second thought was that because of these [insert any bad word here], I was going to have a much tougher time getting on my flight the next day than they had getting on theirs. Yet they also had mothers who loved them. How does hatred take over a person so completely that they could disregard every good impulse and commit mass murder on that scale? Satan is real and pretty powerful, my friends.
Coming out of the museum back into our current post-9/11 world was almost a relief. The sun was shining, the New York sky was blue, and there was life on the plaza again. I remember thinking this was sad because it showed we had moved beyond the events of that day, but also so good that we had been able to move beyond the events of that day. The world continues to turn and we, as a nation, keep moving forward, although not always in a direction I agree with. I think September 11 changed us in ways we'll never be able to quantify, personally and collectively; the path it's put our country on is well nigh irreversable. It made us afraid. We've become a nation of overreactors, looking to our government to take care of the minutae of our lives because it gives us the feeling of being in control. We've given away our privacy in the name of security because we think we can stop every bad thing from happening if we are careful enough. Fear is the lasting legacy of the attacks, and it's reared its ugly head time and time again in the last 14 years, dividing the people of our nation and destroying our personal liberty to the point there's no going back. I grieve for the world BEFORE, the one now lost to all of us. The one we are living in now is harder; it's going to challenge us much more, and I think it might even get worse. But I think we're up to it. I think we were made for it. After all, we survived 9/11, and we're still standing.
