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A reporter, born and raised in New York City, is sent to cover the attacks on the World Trade Center. He sees pain, destruction - and a city whose spirit still stands.
By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 23, 2001
TAMPA -- At 8:44 a.m. on Sept. 11, I was thinking about terrorism, about religious fanaticism, about the FBI and about the death of civilians.
I was in a plane thousands of feet over Atlanta, on my way to Texas to cover a speech Janet Reno was scheduled to give in Waco, where 80 Branch Davidians and four federal agents died in 1993, inspiring Timothy McVeigh to set off a massive truck bomb in Oklahoma City two years later, killing 168.
By the time we walked off the plane, the first two airliners had hit the World Trade Center towers in New York. But news sometimes travels in strange and incomplete ways, so St. Petersburg Times photographer Carrie Pratt and I boarded our flight to Dallas knowing only that a single plane had crashed into one of the towers.
Terrible accident, I thought.
The first time I heard the words "terrorist attack" came when the pilot got on the intercom to say that a state of emergency had been declared and that flights throughout the United States had been grounded.
Stepping off the plane in Atlanta was the last time I thought about Waco.
Over the coming week, New York, the city where I was born and raised, became my sole focus professionally and personally. I came to understand that being a reporter puts a great deal of information in your hands, but the job doesn't give you an advantage in making sense of it.
Being a reporter didn't make it any easier for me to make contact with my relatives in New York.
Alternately dialing from an airport pay phone and a cell phone, I couldn't reach anyone. As I listened to the "all circuits are busy" recording, I scribbled notes about the reaction around me.
When I finally got through to my editor, he told me the Pentagon had also been hit. There were reports (unfounded, it turns out) of a bomb at the Capitol. Minutes later he said a plane had crashed near Pittsburgh. Information was hard to come by where we were because televisions throughout the airport stopped broadcasting CNN's Airport Network.
They came back on in time for us to see the second tower collapse.
Because Carrie and I were already on the road, it made sense for us to head for Washington or New York.
But first we had to get out of the airport. Thirty-thousand other people had the same idea. We met them in the line at the Hertz counter.
We abandoned any hope of getting a rental car (as well as our luggage). We hopped in a taxi. I asked the driver how far out of town he would take us.
"I can get you to Greenville, South Carolina," he said.
I asked how much it would cost, but I knew that the answer didn't matter. (Note to Accounting: $420, plus a $40 tip.)
I called my wife, Alliston, to tell her that I was headed at least as far as Washington. "Why?" she said, beginning to cry. There was very little I could say to comfort her. I had no idea whether there were more suicide attacks in the works.
I gave her all the numbers and e-mail addresses I had for my family and friends in New York and western Pennsylvania. I knew that my brother-in-law flies United Airlines across the country regularly for business. Alliston reminded me that her cousin is married to a Navy commander stationed at the Pentagon.
For the next several hours in the back of Larry Goodwin's cab, Carrie and I could do little but listen to the radio news. We'd lose one signal and pick up another. At one point, in a no-man's land between National Public Radio stations, we listened to a Christian radio announcer express his gratitude that "Condoleezza Rice is a woman of faith."
We rented a car outside Greenville, thinking we would make Washington, nine hours away, shortly after midnight. Then the editors decided we would be more useful in New York. The story changed for me in a subtle but disquieting way.
I was no longer bound for a city with which I had no personal history. I was going to a place where I had spent my childhood, a place that I had visited twice over the summer. Though word was gradually filtering back from Alliston that our relatives and friends were okay, the unrelenting and harrowing news reports proved that the city was not.
My apprehension mounted as Carrie and I drove north through North Carolina and Virginia. Hours passed. We scarcely talked. We listened to stories about final anguished cell phone calls from trapped workers, and I felt as if the air were being sucked from the car. Occasionally, we turned the radio off.
Carrie said she felt as if she were dreaming that she was running but not getting anywhere. We were anxious to reach New York, but I was scared of what I would find.
Wednesday morning, as Carrie drove along the nearly deserted highways of eastern Pennsylvania, I wrote a letter to my son, William, who is a year and a half old. I wanted him to read the letter someday and know what I was thinking.
". . . The highways are strangely empty, flags are at half-staff everywhere you look. No one seems to be heading to New York, which has been shut down to outside traffic. What a bizarre thought: New York, the most vital of cities, a city of immigrants, won't let anyone in. . . .
"Before you were born, I remember lying awake consumed by anxiety. My greatest fear was my realization that I couldn't protect you from all the madness and meanness of modern life. Right now, all I want to do is be with you and your mother, to hug the both of you and take you somewhere safer. But I'm heading in the other direction and that is causing me to feel a longing I never knew was in me. Someday, and I hope it's soon, we won't have to live like this. I wish I knew when that day will be."
By the time we reached the George Washington Bridge, the city had opened up again. That allayed my fears that we wouldn't be able to get into the city to begin reporting, but it was also a comforting sign the city wouldn't live under siege.
While two other St. Petersburg Times reporters and a photographer who had left Tampa by car the morning before went straight to the disaster site, Carrie and I headed for Jackson Heights in Queens, and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, to talk with members of the Muslim community.
There were rumors that things were getting tense, that people were prepared to march across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan to beat up Muslims in Bay Ridge. We saw none of that. Just a lot of sorrow mixed with the usual wary acceptance that comes from Hindus and Muslims and Christians living on top of each other.
I filed my story that evening from a friend's apartment in Greenpoint, in the north end of Brooklyn. As I typed, I listened to another friend's live radio broadcast on WFMU, an alternative station in New Jersey. He was playing Al Green, and I thought to myself that gospel was just the right tone, a mix of lament and stubborn faith.
It wasn't until Carrie and I reached our hotel in midtown Manhattan that we got our first physical reminder of the continuing misery. The smoke from the rubble of the trade towers was blowing north, thick enough to make you cough. When I checked in, the clerk asked me if I preferred a room on a lower floor.
"Some people have expressed a preference," she said.
Thursday night, I filed my story from a friend's apartment in Greenwich Village. It was convenient to St. Vincent's Hospital, where most of the injured had been treated, but it was really an excuse to see how he and his wife were doing. My friend had watched the towers collapse from his window. He would have been only a few blocks away Tuesday morning if he hadn't dallied to play with his 1-year-old daughter.
I visited my parents for breakfast the next morning. My stepfather's former company had lost about 120 people. One of the missing was a good friend of his who had called home to say he was safe just minutes before the building collapsed underneath him. We talked about whether the towers should be rebuilt as a sign of resilience. My stepfather noted dryly that his company had been the first to renew its lease after the 1993 bombing. The reason was the same.
Traveling through the city, there was no escaping the disaster. Even when you couldn't see the gaping hole in the skyline or you had turned away from the omnipresent news coverage, you couldn't avoid the signs that the city had been fundamentally changed.
The flags, for one thing. They were everywhere: car antennas, shop windows, handbags.
And people were looking at each other. They lingered over fleeting transactions. They discovered there was time for politeness. They understood that with more than 5,000 people missing, the chances were good that they were selling coffee to the friend of a victim or holding a door for a relative.
(Of course, there were also reports of people calling the phone numbers on missing person fliers and -- for whatever sick reason -- giving grieving family members bogus information about their relatives. And there were Web sites that purported to have authoritative information about victims' conditions but were utterly false.)
I saw, too, just how indomitable the city is, not just its spirit, but its sheer mass.
There was no vote taken by the 8-million survivors that the city would keep going, but what choice did they have? New York has too much momentum to hold it in check for long. As the week wore on and people returned to work, it became clear that most people would have to negotiate a way to operate on at least two levels: the emotional and the practical.
It made for some odd moments.
Saturday afternoon, Carrie and I and John Pendygraft, another Times photographer, stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant on MacDougal Street. We sat outside, and I deliberately took a seat with my back to the smoke plume. All I could see was a leafy street bathed in sunlight.
That's when six FBI agents ran by, handcuffs rattling from their belt loops.
Turns out they were chasing a man who had been pacing in front of a restaurant a block away. A week before, no one would have paid any attention to that guy. Now he's a federal case.
After lunch we walked south toward the disaster zone. I hadn't been to the site yet, and I knew I needed to go before I left town.
Crowds swarmed along Canal Street, where the police had set up their barricades. Vendors had set up souvenir stands. Someone was selling first-day editions of the Daily News for $30. "Greetings from New York" postcards showing the World Trade Center were selling as if they were splinters of the cross.
I reached a point five blocks north of ground zero. From where I stood, I could see what was left of 7 World Trade Center, the 47-story building that had collapsed after the first two towers. The rubble was at least five stories high. It looked to me -- as I wrote in my notes -- "like the leading edge of a glacier pushing its way through a narrow valley." (As I read these notes now, I realize how I vainly I was struggling to make sense of what I was seeing.)
The 5-foot-tall Statue of Liberty didn't make things any clearer.
I saw her when I turned around to walk back to Canal. She was standing in the middle of Greenwich Street, dignified and bright green. She had been standing there for about four hours by that point, moving only when police with megaphones shouted for people to clear the street.
"I came here Tuesday night to help," said Su Quinn, a 50-year-old illustrator from the Bronx. "I gave water to the workers. That made me feel good. But I wanted to do something different, to make a statement."
Quinn had spent the better part of two days hunting down the components of her costume. She would have been there the day before, but the papier-mache she used to make her book hadn't dried yet.
It seemed at first ridiculous, part of the sideshow that attaches to big news stories. But there was something thoroughly respectful about her performance. At least the firefighter who drove by and gave her a thumbs-up thought so.
"I want them to feel good," she said. "I make them laugh. They are working so hard."
That night I went out to dinner with the best man from my wedding. He and his wife and I went to a restaurant we had eaten at three weeks before. I ordered the same meal. It was cooked as perfectly as it had been the first time. We ordered the same wine. We drank too much of it, just like the last time.
Everything was the same except for the argument we had about whether it was okay to combat terrorism by bombing innocent civilians in Afghanistan.
It went on like that. For a minute, I would yield to the instinct to move on and right quick I'd be yanked back by an event too shocking to be disposed of easily. There was no escape from the story that I was writing. Each time I called someone, the conversation began with a summary of where we were during the attacks and who we knew who was missing.
A baseball writer I know had accompanied his college friend to the Armory, where the missing person reports were filed. He was bringing in some personal effects that belonged to his wife, hairbrushes and toothbrushes for DNA sampling. His wife's office had been on the 93rd floor of the north side of the north tower, almost the exact point of impact. They had been married one month.
I wandered through Central Park on Sunday afternoon, biding my time until that evening, when our train home was scheduled to leave. I was struggling to lay hold of my emotions. The fear from Tuesday and Wednesday had dissipated, but I wasn't sure what I had replaced it with. I needed something to take home.
I headed for the Museum of Modern Art. I reckoned there had to be something permanent there. Most of the museum is closed because of renovations, but a select few paintings from the permanent collection were on display. Amid the cubist Picassos and the Monet lilies, I found what I had come looking for: Jasper Johns' 1954 painting Flag.
I didn't think another American flag would help clarify anything for me, but this one did. Johns made the painting by mixing pigment with hot wax -- encaustic, it's called -- and he laid that mixture roughly over strips of newspaper. I saw the record of our daily lives woven into the fabric of the flag.
I made one last stop in a church around the corner to listen to a choir sing psalms. It was the same church I had visited two days before during the national day of mourning. This time I put my note pad away and pinned a poppy to my lapel.
The last I saw of New York was from the window of the Amtrak train. The sun was setting when we came out of the tunnel on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. The Empire State building was once again the tallest building on the skyline, just as it was when I was 7 years old.