Island
Living 52: Everything's Broken
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
An astonishing
and terrifying day. I was at home here on Staten
Island on September 11th, working at my desk on
my laptop, just after 9 a.m., when a carpenter who's
doing some work on my front porch called upstairs
with word of the first jet crashing into the World
Trade Center, which he'd heard about on the radio.
I spent much of the rest of the day just watching
and listening to this horror on TV, on Channel 2/CBS.
(I don't have cable, and apparently CBS is the only
channel that wasn't using antennae located on the
WTC, since it was the only channel I could get).
So I saw the ghastly footage of the second death
plane, and then of the tower collapses, as soon
as they were broadcast.
Early that evening,
around 6:30, I walked down to a stretch of Bay Street
near the ferry terminal, just across from the Cargo
Café, and watched my city burn. Only a week
before, on September 5, I'd sat for the first time
in the Island's new baseball stadium a few blocks
away, watching the Staten Island Yankees in their
last season game get whipped ignominously by the
Jamestown Jammers, with a spectacular nighttime
view of the harbor and lower Manhattan just past
the outfield as consolation, the towers twinkling.
This time, as I stood there, smoke still largely
obscured that area of downtown; indeed, by then
wisps of it had floated south to our shore, drifting
lacily along the esplanade. But you could experience
the absence of the twin towers already, the uptown
buildings -- the Chrysler Building, the Empire State
-- visible dimly through the smoke where once the
WTC blocked the view. It will take time to get used
to that radical shift in the visual scape, which
from a distance now looks both oddly restored to
the way it appeared before the towers were built
and, in another of memory's chambers, like a huge
mouth with unexpected space where two extracted
teeth once sat. Incongruously, it smouldered colorfully
and even harmoniously against the backdrop of a
lovely, cloudless, bright late-summer sky.
They'd long
since halted all ferry service, and I didn't know
when they'd start them running again, nor when I'd
go into Manhattan next. Indeed, there was a police
roadblock between the terminal and the foot of Victory
Boulevard, which made me feel safer for no particularly
good reason. Living in the "forgotten borough"
has its advantages, momentarily including an unrealistic
but emotionally useful sense of insulation from
this devastating carnage. Walking along Bay Street
toward my sunset vantage point, I saw everyday life
going on all around me: people talking animatedly
about this catastrophe, of course, but also kids
playing on slides and climbing bars, people eating
pizzas . . . No man is an island, to be sure, but
sometimes living on one offers some compensations,
including the illusion of separation from what John
Donne called "the Main."
The fact that
no one has any specific motive to bomb Staten Island
reassured me irrationally in the face of this tragedy.
But it didn't leave me feeling foolishly invulnerable.
I'd been across the harbor in SoHo on Monday afternoon,
just the day before, in a café on Greene
St., meeting with someone on a professional matter.
I used to shop for CDs and computer equipment at
J&R by City Hall, found clothing in the shops
(such as Century 21 and the Burlington Coat Factory)
around the WTC area. I buy condiments and such just
north of that area in Chinatown, and eat there periodically,
and I'm in and out of SoHo just a bit further north
at least once a week on business. And of course
I'm often at the Staten Island Ferry terminal at
South Ferry. I could easily have gotten caught and
even killed in this. On September 11th, it so happened
that I stayed home. Pure chance.
So far as I
know after ten days of phone calls and emails, I've
lost no one close to me, nor even anyone I know,
in this chaos. But I'm not distant from it, by any
means. Here are my stories so far:
My UPS delivery
man's wife works in the World Trade Center's Tower
7 (which has now come down). She got to work at
7:30 a.m. that day and, while eating a bagel, saw
the first plane hit. Her boss immediately ordered
everyone out of the building, probably saving her
life and everyone's else's in that office. She got
back to the Island on the 10:30 a.m. ferry, the
last to leave Manhattan before they sealed that
borough off.
One friend of
mine who worked for a photography studio in the
South Street Seaport area got her pink slip on Monday
and stayed on the Island to go to the unemployment
office -- otherwise she'd have been in the thick
of it the next day herself. She has a roommate who
works in lower Manhattan and who got off the ferry
to walk to her office just after the first plane
hit -- when people still thought it was an accident.
She got as far as Bowling Green and then saw the
second plane find its target. Slightly injured on
the foot by flying debris, she got loaded onto a
ferry coming back and ended up hospitalized on the
South Shore, where it took her panicked sister and
my friend hours to locate and then reach her.
Another friend
of mine has four brothers in the Fire Department.
Three were called in for this emergency; all emerged
unhurt. But one of them, on the scene almost immediately,
was supervising a group of firefighters heading
into Tower 2 when a jumper fell on the fireman just
ahead of him, killing him instantly. They tried
to revive their fallen comrade, then loaded him
into an ambulance, after which they went looking
for another way into the building -- at which time
that tower began to come down, so they took shelter
in a doorway across the street. Had the jumper not
crushed their teammate, or had they stayed a minute
longer to load the ambulance, they'd all have been
in or under the tower when it fell.
Up to this point,
that's my degree of separation. When the final count
becomes known, however, Staten Island may well take
a disproportionate hit in the injuries and fatalities
department, since many Islanders work in the Wall
St. area (all those Working Girl secretaries,
among so many others), and many more of them are
police and firefighters and EMS personnel. And I
have friends and acquaintances all over the city,
many of whom I've yet to hear from or contact. So
I may not get off as lightly as I have so far. In
any case, I have blessings to count, with no casualties
or even injuries among my Island friends, nor anyone
else I've called or heard from who lives or labors
in that area. Even my son, Edward, who hasn't spoken
to me in some four years, phoned -- just to tell
me he was alive and okay, nothing more, but it was
a relief and good to hear from him nonetheless.
And of course I've had emails and phone calls myself,
from friends and family and colleagues across the
country and around the world -- Germany, Israel,
Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria -- making sure I'm okay
and sending words of shock, grief, condolence, and
support.
Like just about
everyone I know, save for TV's usual glib, spring-driven
talking heads, I'm still dazed and sorting out what
I think the "attack on America" signifies.
At a later date, I'll have more to say about all
this -- including the behavior of our duly appointed
President Chauncey Gardener, whose total ineptitude
at anything resembling intelligent spontaneous speech
and utter inability to rise to this occasion terrify
me more than anything. All I know for sure at the
moment is that, on the face of this incontrovertible
evidence, in the 21st century it's very hard if
not impossible to prevent anyone willing to die
for his or her beliefs from doing terrible damage
to the world and its occupants.
Tomorrow, September
21, I'm going into Manhattan for the first time
since the disaster struck. I'll report on that experience
in a subsequent column.
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©
Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002
USA.
