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Through a fence, vastly Viewing AreaBy Rick Horowitz
NEW YORK -- Because it wasn't all that far, and because there was time before you had to leave for the airport (you'd made sure there'd be time), and because the calendar was only days short of one complete circle, you went to look. And just because. It was another sunny Tuesday in September -- bright blue skies again, and not a cloud in sight. You took your bearings as you emerged from the subway, made your way west, toward the river, and south, toward the island's tip. Before you saw the signs, you saw -- you sensed -- the space: unobstructed views of buildings blocks away. Then you were there, and it was enormous. You had been there months and months ago, with the wound still fresh and the wreckage still piled high, but you were kept at a distance. All you had seen then was what you could see through crevices, and behind curtains. The damage was clear, but not the vastness of the damage. You'd seen the pictures since, and read all the quotes: "It's so much bigger than we expected!" And still you were unprepared. The buildings surrounding the great emptiness were large enough in their own right, and yet as you mentally moved them -- one, two, three, four, five -- into that emptiness, they didn't come close to filling it. So now you understood. You followed the signs to the viewing area, on the downtown edge of the site, near what once was Liberty Street. Between the walkway and the hole, a tall chain-link fence, and along the walkway, hundreds and hundreds of people. They'd also come to look. To look, to remember, to try to grasp the magnitude of the site, at least. (The magnitude of the deed was beyond all grasping.) Most of the visitors stood and moved silently, just as you did. You overheard occasional conversations -- residents explaining the precise where and how of it to out-of-town friends, groups of foreigners handing their cameras to strangers, asking to have their pictures taken with the emptiness as background. They all seemed to have cameras, just as you did -- film cameras and digital cameras and video cameras -- and if any of you wondered about the seemliness of photographing such a place, your doubts were quickly set aside. There was safety in numbers. This was history. So you each waited your turn for the best angles, and when your own turn came, you took your place along the fence, sometimes attempting to capture the entire scene, sometimes extending your lens right through the fence for a closer view of a particular truck, a particular wall. Then you'd yield your place and move farther along the fence, looking for the next shot, and the one after that. From time to time, men in hard hats passed nearby, just beyond the fence. Once, you heard two of the men share a laugh and you were briefly disconcerted, as you'd been briefly disconcerted by seeing some of the visitors smile. But who were you to tell anyone else how to behave? Grieving and recovering are such personal acts, you reminded yourself. For all you knew, these men in the hard hats had been digging through unspeakable horror for months on end. Were they not entitled to an occasional release? These smiling visitors may have only begun to come to terms with devastating losses. Should they not be allowed to express a moment's happiness? You put your easy judgments back in your pocket. You moved still farther along the fence, and then you saw it: off in the distance, down in the hole, a tiny cluster of dark, set against the lighter shades of concrete and dirt. You looked harder, and you realized that these were people, a half-dozen or more. They appeared to be in dress uniforms. Perhaps they were paying tribute to something, or someone. Perhaps they were practicing for ceremonies yet to come. What struck you, though, was how tiny they were. You thought you'd understood. But the hole was even deeper than that. Posted 9/5/02. Get
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Rick Horowitz
