"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
9/11: The View
from Ground ZeroPosted 11:55 p.m., Sept. 11, 2004;
Updated 9:51 p.m., Sept. 16, 2004
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I did the spots Saturday from Ground Zero for WCCO Radio as promised, and I hope some of you in the Twin Cities area heard them. I've gotten positive feedback from the people around me who heard them, but you know how friends are.
It was an emotional event for me and for my girlfriend Tammy, to be present at the site of the 9/11 disaster, even just to get a gauge on the enormity of the destruction. I won't soon forget it, and that's despite it being a relatively benign scene now.
As is the norm with me, I'm afraid, my sojourn to the site of the Twin Towers started off errantly. I was supposed to have arrived down there at 7:30 a.m., phone into John Wanamaker at WCCO to let him know that I was ready to go live. But that didn't happen. I hadn't set the alarm the night before, so I overslept.
That meant leaping out of bed, skipping a few key cursory early morning rituals, and racing to Grand Central Station to get on the subway train to the Fulton Street station. I arrived at 8:20 a.m., in time to make what was supposed to be my second live dispatch from the scene.
As I emerged from the subway, the first thing my eyes fell upon where the two emerald-topped buildings that stand adjacent to where the towers once loomed. Though I never had gotten so close to the Twin Towers on my one previous visit to New York in February of 2001, I knew immediately where I was. I think any American would have recognized the place.
A few notes about my visit to Ground Zero:
- There were a surprising number of protesters. On the subway car on the way down, an obviously embittered young man carried a sign that said, "Complicity at the highest levels of government! This is an inside job." A young woman with him had sign with a slightly less intense, though no less accusatory message: "Stop the 911 coverup. www.911sharethetruth.com."
- The crowd gathered around the hole at Ground Zero (I described it on the air as resembling "a case of bad dentistry") was smaller than I had anticipated. There were thousands gathered around, but on the third year after the event, it is clear that many New Yorkers preferred to stay at home. Though there were many people carrying enlarged photos of their lost relatives and friends, and while there were indeed many firefighters and police, both on-duty and off-duty at the ceremony, there also was no shortage of sidewalk space around the grounds. It was not a capacity crowd.
- For those who were there, the commemoration was a somber occassion. I looked about me, and saw almost no one smiling, very few people even speaking to one another, even after the two moments of silence I witnessed marking the moments when the two planes struck the towers.
- Though no one else seemed to notice, during the reading of the victims' names, there came a moment that made me shudder. I looked skyward, and there, flying just beyond the grounds of the Twin Towers, flew a small airplane, tracing an arc that from my vantage point wouuld have been blocked by the towers, were they still standing. I was struck by how close to the scene the plane seemed to fly.
As part of my reporting for WCCO, I interviewed several people at the scene, though I stopped as the names of the relatives began to be read, so as not to interrupt people possibly hearing their loved ones commemorated.
The first person I talked to was Ron Preeson, a Denver firefighter who had traveled to the city to be pay his respects. "It's important for all of us to come down here and acknowledge the lives that were given for the New Yorkers and for the American people," Preeson said as a chorus of angellic voices emanating from deep in the hole sang "The Star Spangled Banner." "That," he said, "is what we're here for."
I then approached a female police officer who only gave her name as "Officer Rodriguez," a 10-year NYPD veteran who said she had spent a number of years assigned to lower Manhattan in the area of the World Trade Center, and who lost many friends in the disaster. She was on-duty when I spoke to her.
"I'd do anything," she said, "to buy back the years and to see all those people alive again."
The one encounter that really encapsulated the experience for me at Ground Zero was a young man sitting on the pavement with his girlfriend. I approached to ask him why he'd come to the third 9/11 anniversary ceremony. He didn't answer at first, just held his hands, palms up, in the direction of the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. "That's why," was all he could say before he began to weep.
-- Kevin Featherly
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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
