One
of the cool things about going to school in New Jersey is that I am only an
hour's train ride away from New York City.
Growing up in northern Indiana, Chicago was the nearest big city, and it
is one I still love. I got to visit LA
once, which was fun, but kind of a weird place--so laid back that I don't know
how they ever manage to film tv shows on schedule there. I've even gotten to see London and Paris and
Rome. But none of these big cities is
anything like the sprawling monstrosity that is New York. I've only been up a few times, but it has
been delightful to play tourist and explore the city.
My
most recent visit was this weekend. My
sister is on Spring Break, so my mom took some time of work, and they came out
to New Jersey to visit. We did a
whirlwind tour of as much of the city as we could. One of the places that we determined to visit
was Ground Zero, the memorial at the site of the 9-11 attacks on the World
Trade Center towers
There
is a security checkpoint before you can see the memorial--not quite as strict
as an airport, though still reminiscent:
the x-ray's and metal detectors, those typical grey bins for everything
in your pockets. It was kind of eerie to
experience a security check while thinking about how the attacks were carried
out.
The
memorial itself was all very well-done.
The grounds are very simple, but all with the same motif of towers and
squares evoking the images that had defined the World Trade Center towers. There are square blocks that serve as seats
and long narrow paths to evoke the towers.
The lamp posts in the grounds are shaped like towers. There are rows of trees planted, all
surrounded by a paved square with a smaller square cut out for the trunk, kind
of evoking the pools that are main part of the memorial. There was a pear tree planted there that had
survived under the rubble, been transplanted to Brooklyn where it
"recovered," and then replanted at the site. The first buds were just starting to come out
on the branches. It was all very well-
thought out.
Then
there were the pools. They are
massive. But large as those cavernous
mouths are, it is mind blowing to think that the towers that had stood there
were even larger and impossibly high above it.
You can get lost watching the ceaselessly flowing water. It is like watching fire or a waterfall. I though about how many tears must have been
shed because of the attack and how many are still being shed--how it changed
our country, our society, and our world.
It is as though the earth itself is grieving because of all the pain the
attacks brought about.
At
the bottom of the pools are holes into which the water is flowing. They are haunting. Always open.
Always dark. Always swallowing up
water. In some ways, it is
comforting: the grief can flow
away. But in another sense it is
bottomless. There is no end. And there is still a feeling that the land
has been scarred; it is an open wound that still shows in the ground. But in spite of that it is still majestic,
stately, beautiful even in its way. It
pulls you in.
And
around each pool, they have the names of all the victims engraved. So many names, and all of them had a
story. There was one spot where I saw
two people, a man and a woman with the same last name, and I couldn't help
wondering if they were related, and how.
Husband and wife? Mother and
son? Siblings? Every so often there would be a flower over
the names usually a white rose--someone nearby must have been selling
them. A couple of them were pushed into
the names so that the roses stood up--a simple token, but very moving. I also saw someone making a rubbing of a
name. I had to wonder, looking around,
how many of these people were like me, tourists just taking in this piece of
history, and how many knew or loved someone who had died there?
Before
we left, my mom, my sister, and I huddled together to pray for families of
people who had died. It was all a very
heavy experience.
