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Nothing's back to normalThis email from Isabel Walcott was sent today to Jerry Michalski's Retreat list — a group with many New Yorkers that has been brought closer by this week's events. It is printed here with her permission. — DS Just being here is difficult; walking down the street even as someone who has not lost an immediate loved one is difficult. The hospitals are papered with colored flyers showing the smiling faces and birthmark and tattoo statistics of the "missing". You cry just walking by, reading such lines as "he is wearing a gold wedding band engraved on the inside 'I love you -- Lisa. 3/15/1995'". "She has a small tattoo of the letter 'M' on her left ankle". They all say the person's last known location: 107th floor of the world trade center, 103rd floor of the world trade center, and so on. Every major intersection is traffic-directed by police, many of them clearly retirees or the gray-shirted new academy recruits. Emergency vehicles careen through the streets. Police cars escort huge trucks of lumber and supplies southward. There are flyers taped to lampposts from restaurants inviting emergency and rescue personnel to dine without charge. Someone went around and stuck up xeroxes asking neighbors to check on their neighbor's pets if their neighbor has gone missing; and said that the ASPCA shelters are standing by waiting to take in ownerless pets. People are confused about the subways and buses, many of which are closed or re-routed. Every new person stepping into my train asked the same question: "Is this going uptown?" People walk out of unfamiliar subway stations into the subway and ask for directions. Nobody pushes. Barely any cars beep. People who accidentally touch you say "excuse me", as if we all suddenly got very fragile, or as if we were back in Kansas again. I left my volunteer information with the Red Cross and was asked to head down to a shelter to keep a 92-year-old French woman company while she waited for her family to come pick her up. She had been evacuated from a small low-income residential building in the shadow of the WTC -- probably escaping, although this was hard to ascertain, before either building collapsed. She wasn't dusty at all, which made me think she got out beforehand. She was confused and could not remember names or phone numbers of her family in the city; one thing she did remember is what an outrage it was that someone came banging on her door and dragged her out of her apartment without even giving her a chance to get dressed or collect her things -- she said she didn't understand what the man's problem was, it only would have taken her five minutes, and that he was very rough with her, rushing her down the stairs. Because this woman only spoke French and was foggy anyway in that 92-year-old way, she hadn't had a chance to understand what had really happened. As I explained it to her (trying not to scare her) it seemed to sink in a little -- although even for those of us who aren't very foggy, it's taking awhile to sink in. She wouldn't believe my estimates of over a thousand dead, so I revised my estimate to 600 for her, which seemed to be the most she would comprehend. Not knowing that the entire downtown is off-limits, she told me that if I hadn't had a chance to look I should go down there and have a peek -- it was the most unbelievable wreckage of a building she had ever seen (keep in mind this woman was born in 1909 and was a Russian Jew who grew up in Geneva, moving to Paris in her 20's). Although I tried to explain to her that her rescuer might have saved her life and there was no time to waste, she insisted he had rushed her and forced her into a crowded car against her will -- she felt like a hostage and kept calling him a ruffian -- and I wonder if that man kept rescuing people until he died, or if he is OK. The Red Cross somehow successfully located her son, who lived with her in the apartment. A friend had called him to let him know the first plane had hit, and he had gone outside to have a look. Although this seems crazy to us now, I can imagine that it would have made sense at the time. He got hurt by falling shrapnel when the second plane hit and was taken to the hospital. His story helped me to begin to understand the loss of life-- not just the people who were trapped in the trade center, but the huge crowd of onlookers who stood gaping as it fell, and the people who lived in the surrounding buildings. It seemed fortunate that this man was injured when he was and got out of there, or it would have been a case of "curiousity killed the cat". Oddly, he was laughing although it was no time for laughing, calling himself stupid. His mother looked at me accusingly and said to her son that I had tried to tell her there were as many as 600 dead. He looked at her matter-of-factly and said, "Oh, far more than that Mom -- far, far more than that". Having been there, having seen the crowds, he was the first person I heard who seemed to have a direct understanding of the enormity of scale of the event. The man's niece was also there, the granddaughter, in her 20's. Her lack of understanding seemed severe to me, but this is an example of how little people still understood yesterday, and how little has yet sunk in, about the catastrophe. She asked the Red Cross workers where she was supposed to take her grandmother, now that she wasn't allowed back -- as if it was simply not possible that people weren't allowed downtown. Her grandmother's building will probably not still be standing upon her return, but she didn't realize this. "What am I supposed to do now?" said the young woman. "Am I supposed to have her staying with me? I don't have room for her!" She acted as if the whole thing was some bureacratic inconvenience, as if the city had conspired against her to kick her grandmother out of her home, and as if she hadn't been watching the news -- which, perhaps, she hadn't. The whole episode was completely surreal (not to mention that it all took place in French). Without seeing these things firsthand, I would imagine it's close to impossible to sense the unreality that is going on in this city. The thought of others elsewhere doing their normal workday, talking about anything other than this, or even moving on to thoughts of next steps doesn't make sense to me right now. And I haven't even been directly personally affected yet. When I think of the relatives of the victims, it reminds me of what a friend said about people left at small tech companies after a huge chunk of staff has been laid off: it seems as though it might be more comfortable to be one of the terminated than one of the survivors. more news later-- Isabel
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