I’ll never get over it, none of us will who were in town that day. If we were trees cut down after a century and cut open to reveal the rings, an arborist would observe one that was darker than the others, denser and resin-scarred, and he’d say, “What happened there?”
And you’d say, “That was 9/11,” and he’d nod because he’d seen such rings before.
Now it is 25 years, and maybe this will be the last time I write of what happened, and I ask for your indulgence because I spent much of the past week reading what I’d written about it over the years, and I saw all the things I’ve thought. I wrote about 9/11 and attendant themes every week for one year; I felt that my readers and I were processing it together.
The first year was a lot of street-level reporting—the sound and look of a changed city. Two days after 9/11—before it had a name, and people were calling it “what happened,” as in, “they think he died in what happened”—I wrote a piece called “What I Saw at the Devastation,” which said that Americans were experiencing an end to the illusion “that we rich and powerful folk will be kept safe by our status, wealth and luck.” History had come knocking. I wrote of the return of the signs and symbols of religious faith in “God Is Back.” There was a piece on the 343 New York City firemen who had died, “Courage Under Fire,” and I was humbled by the photos I started receiving of that column posted on the walls of firehouses. There was a celebration at the return of a certain kind of masculinity, “Welcome Back, Duke.” All those columns said new things, and those things became part of how we remember that time.
From the first anniversary of 9/11, in “The Fall After Sept. 11”: “The other day I walked by St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Manhattan and thought, as I always do when I walk by: This is where they waited for the wounded. The interns and nurses waited outside right here with gurneys for patients who didn’t come. Because so few people were ‘wounded.’ The three thousand were dead. What happened to them? They were exploded into air. They became a cloud. We breathed them in.”
On the fifth anniversary, I focused not on the pictures of the event but the sounds, especially the tapes and transcripts of the last phone calls. Part of courage is a realistic admission of your true circumstances. That piece was built on quotes from loving realists.
The 10th-anniversary column, in 2011, was about what we owe the dead, which is memory itself. It turned to the theme of what had left New York uniquely shocked: “It’s that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren’t there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings. And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between ‘safe’ and ‘not safe.’ It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability.” I still think that’s true.
The 15th, in 2016, a tribute to a beautiful young man named Welles Crowther, “the man in the red bandana.”
A final word about the sound of things. On 9/11 my 14-year-old son was in his second day at a new school just across the East River from the towers. The telephone lines had gone down, I couldn’t reach him nor he me, but that afternoon he got through, from a phone booth in Brooklyn, a line of students waiting behind him. He assured me he was safe, said there were rumors all over, what do we actually know? I filled him in and suddenly heard something muffled, his hand over the speaker. What I was telling him he would broadcast down the line to the other students. It is over. It was a terrorist attack. It is not true the State Department was hit, it is true the Pentagon was. He was reporting to those behind him with a voice that sounded older and surer than 14. And I was moved: He is a boy who in crisis gathers information not only for himself but to tell people what happened. Giving information is a way of taking responsibility. I thought it may have some bearing on his future professional path. It did. But I didn’t know that till that terrible day.
He didn’t come home that night, that 14-year-old boy, but stayed, with other students, in the Brooklyn house of a teacher. The next morning he took a patched-together, roundabout subway route back home to Manhattan, and the train came up from a tunnel and started to curl north. At that point, he was told, riders would always look left, just for a second, at the towers and the gleam of downtown Manhattan in the sunlight. And that morning everyone turned as usual, and saw the debris cloud where the towers had been. And from everyone in the car came a soft collective sigh, a groan, an ohhhhhhh. There was a big man, a union guy, tough, standing in the middle of the car, and he looked with everyone else, and then lowered himself to a seat and began to cry.
When my son told me, I thought of the story of the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1913. The living participants, in their 70s and 80s, came in their old uniforms. It was huge, 50,000 returned. They reenacted Pickett’s Charge and something happened. The old Confederates came out of the tree line and began to make their way up the long slope. The Union soldiers awaited them at the famous stone fence, and as they saw the Confederates struggle through in their doomed charge, the Union soldiers made a sound—an ohhhhhhh, “a gigantic gasp of unbelief,” as David McCullough put it in Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.”
It was a sound of pity and awe, a sound that said this isn’t only history, it is human tragedy. The Union soldiers found themselves unable to re-enact defeating them. They embraced them.
That is how I feel now, on the 25th anniversary, when anyone tells a story of those days, of 9/11 and its brave.
And now it’s so many years later, and the son has a son and expects a second soon, and life goes on, and fills you. But never lie about the things that break your heart. I’ll never get over it, none of us will. The line in the tree trunk, the darkened ring, will never go away. And now and then someone will say, “What happened there?” and you’ll tell him.