Recalling 9/11
How should we mark the terror attack? Thoughtfully, former New Yorker Andrew Dansby says.
Ray York died 11 days after we met him.
My wife and I encountered him at the Fire Zone in midtown, a New York Fire Department museum that served the dual purpose of informational institution and recuperation site where injured firefighters could work until they were able to again race inside buildings engulfed in flames.
I don’t know the nature of Ray’s injury, though I seem to remember him walking with a limp. He just happened to be working at the Fire Zone on my wife’s birthday, Aug. 31, 2001, and we had an hour before dinner. So, why not check out this spot, which at the time didn’t see many visitors?
Ray talked about various pieces of NYFD equipment, and he brought up some of the preventable fire hazards in a city full of old buildings with old wiring. He was cautiously garrulous — taking even this hazard-free side of his job seriously.
We didn’t know Ray’s last name. I learned it later, when I found out what happened:
Ray was at the Fire Zone early in the morning when he learned something catastrophic was going on in downtown Manhattan. He pulled equipment from the walls of the museum and snared a ride on an ambulance that was screaming toward the financial district. He did what he did, going toward the problem instead of away from it.
Like more than 300 other firefighters, he died when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed.
York was 45, if I remember the story right, and a husband and father. Fifteen years have passed since then. I haven’t seen a photo of him, but I remember his face well enough to draw it, a mix of warmth and seriousness. I’m now 43, and a husband and father, and find myself thinking about him around this time of year most years.
I remember passing Engine 219, Ladder 105 each day on my walk to the subway in Brooklyn. John Chipura, Vincent Brunton, Thomas Kelly, Henry Miller Jr., Dennis O’Berg and Frank Palombo worked not 100 yards from my apartment. “Worked” being a relative term. They reported for work there. Their work took them to far more dangerous environs. But I still remember the firemen on the block tending to injured kids on the adjacent playground. Greeting people on their way to work. Sturdy threads in the fabric of a community.
While visiting New York four years ago, I walked the old block. The firemen at the station were in their formal uniforms headed to the annual memorial service.
I was aware what day it was, yet I was caught off guard. We don’t always make the fuss unless the anniversaries fall on those five-year increments we arbitrarily gravitate toward. This is one of those five-year increments. The sight of those men who served my neighborhood then sits with me each time I pass my neighborhood firehouse at Richmond and Dunlavy now.
How we remember these events is a subject that has buzzed around me this year. Back in September 2001, I was in TriBeCa in New York interviewing musician Nick Lowe two weeks after the attack. The burning smell — distinct to this day — lingered. Lowe offered some tea. “I appreciate you coming, though I’m not sure what we are supposed to do,” Lowe said me as he rolled a cigarette. “Talk about my stupid (expletive) album?”
Eventually, we did talk about his album, which was full of comforting and beautiful songs. He may have made better albums before and after, but that one resonates with me.
I don’t have any answers for how to react to any tragedy, particularly this one. I have opinions regarding how not to react to such events.
Within a year, I’d see tourists wearing shirts and hats. I remember one hat in particular: “GROUND ZERO!!!” it read, the letters akin to those you’d see advertising a wrestling match. What did the elderly man wearing it think that meant? Would “MASS GRAVE!!!” have earned his $15?
We should be contemplative and cautious with words.
Also, what vile creep underestimated the American public enough to know he could make money selling that hat? A tone-deaf ad this week made by a mattress seller in San Antonio suggests the understanding of what happened that day has only grown dimmer 15 years later. I recall some nasty old cartoon in a nudie mag as a kid, a guy taking a dump on toy boats in his toilet. His wife made some crack about reenacting Pearl Harbor. Tragedy plus time equals comedy, the saying goes. Tragedy plus time also equals obliviousness and ignorance. That’s a damning combination.
I’ve asked friends if they think the merciless people who planned and carried out this act knew the degree of damage they’d cause. Obviously, they thought they could take down two buildings, a piece of the Pentagon and aspired to do more. I believe it’s reasonable to think they could have conceived of a scenario in which their actions could bait us into combat, and maybe they knew that combat would further their crooked cause.
But what about the 15 years since? Could they have known they’d create the cultural fissures in our country that they did? Who could have that degree of foresight? To see that molten anger and anguish would rush to the surface and scorch anything resembling reasonable discourse?
Times Square today is closed to automobile traffic, but on Sept. 12, 2001, it was not. In those days, it was always a tangle of cars and pedestrians engaged in a tense dance with one another. That morning, it was a haunted and hauntingly quiet, due in part to most workers staying home. I recall one taxi honking at another. A disapproving reprimand followed by all within glaring distance. Then more quiet.
The din returned as we got back to thinking about things less valuable than life and sacrifice, which couldn’t begin to measure up to the deafening discourse that has followed in 15 years. We don’t listen, we make noise. And if others make noise, we attempt to out-noise them. Perhaps this electoral season, the din will reach its feverish crescendo. Or, regrettably, it may grow louder.
I see no politics in the lives of John Chipura, Vincent Brunton, Thomas Kelly, Henry Miller Jr., Dennis O’Berg and Frank Palombo. Or Ray York. Or the thousands of others who died that day, or the thousands who served and died since. I see the connections that can occur among people who barely know each other.
Sometimes a person we don’t know at all can leave fingerprints on our lives. I don’t feel rage when I think of Ray and what happened to him. I feel humbled and quieted and grateful.
To use such sacrifice to sell security via insecurity, to sell a political campaign, to sell political commentary or to sell a hat that any thinking person would feel ashamed to wear on the appendage that carts around their brain — that’s commodifying sacrifice that shouldn’t be sold at all, and certainly not so cheaply.