| Remembering 9/11 1/8/07 Fallen Giants 12/18/06 I was a teenager when the World Trade Towers were constructed. I traveled from my home in Pennsylvania just to see them, admire them. They were unbelievable, but true. They were Giants.
I was there again by mere chance the day John Lennon was gunned down. Late in that day, I parked on the street beside the towers, they somehow made me feel better.
As Fate would have it, I was in NYC again on that fateful day. A retired firefighter, turned photographer, I was shooting a panorama of the fantastic NYC skyline on that incredible September morning. I witnessed first hand what took place, helpless to stop it, almost unable to believe what I was watching. But it was true. The Giants were falling. I had to go down there, and do whatever I could.
I am going to process those images I captured on that day, and the ensuing days working on “The Pile” and publish them on my site as a remembrance and one man’s history of that event. Look for more images each day.
Re-mem-brance , n
The state of being remembered, or of remaining in people’s minds.
Remaining in my mind, constant, unrelenting and vital. Nothing has faded and these are thoughts as real and flush with feeling as though they were taking place right now.
We moved from to NYC late in 2000 and my wife and I felt fortunate when we found our high-rise apartment with such a spectacular view of lower Manhattan. There are two remembrances of that view etched into my brain now.
The before and the during. The after view is in flux.
Before: Extraordinary, beautiful, inspirational and arrogant in its vitality and ability.
The attack, the death and destruction are a nightmarish loop that seems to constantly run through my thoughts, not in the subconscious but in my consciousness and just under the transparent film of the necessary thinking for every day life. After all, life does go on.
I began that spectacular September morning as always, with that spectacular view. Just the day before I had thought of taking advantage of the clear conditions and going to the observation deck atop the WTC to photograph the view. I put that off for another day and no one will ever have to remind me again about letting opportunities slip away.
This morning, I set up my tripod and camera to capture my view, taking advantage of the early morning light and crystal conditions.
Later, I saw my wife off to work at her job in the upper East side. She would take the 4 train, the Lexington Ave line. It was about 20 minutes to 9 when I completed my first series of shots that would make-up the perfect panorama. I was loading them into my PowerBook. I heard the first jet approach.
The loud roar of it's engines clued me in that this was not the passing of a normal commercial approach. Unable (at that time) to even harbor a thought with any likeness to what the reality was, I simply reasoned it away. My thought was that I wasn't the only one taking advantage of the beautiful day and extraordinary conditions, that it was probably a Lear jet on a photographic run. I made a note to get up and look as soon as I finished my upload. When I heard the explosion, I made no association with it and the jet's approach. That, I reasoned (with my still reasonable thought process) was something they dropped at the docks, or some other bellowing from the standard selection of noises that rose from the city every day. But I would have a look, in just a minute.
When I did look, I can't explain the unreality of what I saw and how my mind fought against the realization of the information my eyes were feeding it. I looked right past the black, billowing smoke, refusing to acknowledge it and instead my mind attached itself to the countless, fluttering pieces of paper (the documents of life & bustling commerce) that were blown through the north tower and into the bright morning sunlight. It seemed, at first, to be an enormous flock of white birds and I thought why? What were they doing? I don't know why my consciousness chose to paint that picture right over the grim reality of what was actually happening or how long that fantasy lasted, but it is still remarkable to me how my mind chose to deal with the horror I was witnessing.
A dozen years ago I was a firefighter trained in incident command, rescue, damage evaluation and damage control. I have a very methodological and matter-of-fact thought process, usually, and when it finally kicked-in, I tried to grasp and categorize the cause, effect, life & property loss, and response. It was the firefighter thing to do. When it finally kicked in, it went to auto-pilot.
I calculated: 50K people in the towers, 1 tower = 25k, top 10 percent gone, 2,500 dead... At least. It sounds cold and clinical I know, but it was my honest thought process. Must have been a bomb because there is insufficient fuel load with the building and its contents to feed such an intense fire let alone to ignite or accelerate it. (I still had not connected the jet noise to what I was witnessing.) The building seemed surprisingly stable and the overall scene had such an eerie quietness and calm (aside from the inferno) as the city stood still with it's jaw dropped open and a gaping wound in it's chest. The thoughts and emotions flooded in as I began to hear the sirens approaching from literally everywhere.
I grabbed my camera almost instinctively but I couldn't bring myself to take any pictures. I just stood there, staring. I worried for my wife and examined a mental picture of her train's route. She would not pass directly under the inferno.
Too quickly the fire became undeniably too intense for the steel superstructure to endure for long and I feared the collapse of the floors above the damage and I worried for the emergency response that I knew would be flooding the building's parameter and racing up the stairs.
Then the second aircraft approached. Still, I hadn't made the connection and I told myself it was just an emergency approach to Newark. It wasn't. The jet swung wide around to bear down on the south tower and it all became so painfully clear in that instant, in that Deadly Bead. "You Son of a Bitch" I said it out-loud. Can't I do anything? Somebody stop him! The engines roared to what I presume was full throttle, a mechanized scream that I can't relate in words but will never forget. And that bastard waved the wings of that jet, left side down, then up and right side down, in a sickening victory gesture as the aircraft slightly dipped and then began a graceful ascent up and, almost surreally, into the south tower.
A fraction of a second of nothing, but that instant seemed to linger in a vain attempt to suspend the next, then the fireball and the ejected debris and smoke. Following later, as though unable to believe the scene it haroled, the ugly crushing sound of the plane and it's people, and the building, and its people, becomming one pulverized rain of wreckage. The rumbling explosions followed.
Sometime later, I would realize that I inadvertently snapped a photograph of the second plane's fatal approach. As I held the camera in my hand, I must've put pressure on the shutter release as I watched in awe.
As the structures burned and more and more of the steel became red hot, I reasoned that while collapse of the upper floors seemed inevitable, the buildings as a whole, might make it. My mind tried to calculate the new loss of life totals. I hadn't taken into account that it was a voting day and many had not yet arrived. I also hadn't accounted for the incredible emergency response and the effectiveness of the evacuation. My calculations were 10-15K dead.
Then...Oh my God, that looked like someone jumping. It was. There was another. And again. How bad must it be? Then, a couple jumped together, holding hands until they fell out of sight. This shattered me. I am in tears again as I type this. Would somebody please, do something. But I knew nothing could be done. I knew firefighters were racing up the stairwells, not because they knew exactly what they were going to do when they got there or because even in their wildest imaginations they believed they would have the water pressure to battle that inferno but, simply because they couldn't stop themselves from trying. If somebody was going to help, they were it. I knew that feeling. I was already grieving for their loss. From my perch, I could see it all play out and there would be no happy ending.
I tried to call my wife at her office. No answer, I left a message... "Just come home". I called her mother 1,200 miles away, to assure her that she would be fine, that she was uptown, away from that horror. As I hung up I knew that those words would not be enough. That until I had her in my arms, how could I trust any reasonable thought. My whole concept of what was reasonable had already been altered.
I paced back and forth in front of that scene. When the south tower first tilted and then descended into it's cloud of ruin all I could do was sigh. A sigh of ineptitude, of frustration, of realization that it could, even now, still get worse. What followed that "slow-motion film" (that is what it seemed like) was a crackling sound from the depths of hell that I can only attempt to explain. A feeling as much as a sound, as though someone, while hideously screaming, had stuck an ice pick in your lower spine and raked it upward to the base of your skull.
My incident evaluation skills were unable to even deal with what I was absorbing now. I couldn't (until then) even imagine such a level of destruction. I've heard Manhattan called "The Rock" because of the granite and bedrock foundation that supports the seemingly overwhelming load of concrete and steel that rises from it. But when that tower fell, Manhattan shook. Literally. I could see water ripple away from that rock into the east river. And when the north tower gave up and joined her fallen sister, all hope seemed lost.
As If to give me a respite, time to process and come to terms with what I'd seen, everything was obscured by the dense cloud of smoke, ash, and concrete dust for about 20 minutes.
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