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NYC, Day 5Here is Michael Stern's latest report. — DS, September 16, 2001 Years ago I studied the work of archaeologist Lewis Binford, who travelled with Alaskan Eskimos, mapping where they hunted and camped, and noting the debris that they left behind. A year later, he returned to these sites alone to see what artifacts remained. His work allows other archaeologists studying similar cultures to calibrate the conclusions they draw from fragmentary evidence. This ethnoarchaeology came to mind earlier tonight as I helped break down the triage and surgical center south of the 23rd Street rescue center. This was the first large emergency medical center set up after the bombing, when it was presumed that all the hospitals in the city would be swamped with wounded people. I spent six hours with a group of EMTs breaking the center down. If I had never known why the installation was there, I would have noted the many burn kits and antibiotic vials. Was there a fire? The piles of mismatched supplies suggested a volunteer-supported effort of massive scale. Gloves and scrubs were tossed all over, worn but clean. Syringes were prepped and scattered but none of them had been injected. These final clues were the most important. Not a single one of those beds had been used. Five people were pulled from the wreckage on Wednesday, but none since. All over the city you see people in uniforms. This starts with the police, fire department, army, paramedics and city officials. It includes welders and electrical workers. Anybody in a uniform gets respect, and this has encouraged people to pull out any official-looking uniform they have in the closet. Guys who drove trucks for the National Guard in the 1960s swagger around in ill-fitting jumpsuits. One man haunting the pier today wore a Gilbert & Sullivan-worthy uniform which, upon closer examination, signified his authority to provide medicine in sporting arenas. I'll cop to a bit of this myself -- after finishing my volunteer shift around midnight, I wear my EMT Volunteer nametag for the three or four hours it takes me to walk back midtown, send these e-mails, and get home. Right now, people in uniforms are treated better than people who aren't. I wonder if a generation of New York children, imprinting on this, will sign up for the police and the army in larger numbers than their parents did. Local uniforms get a bit more respect than the rest, as we all know about the hundreds of police and firemen who died on Tuesday trying to rescue people from the towers. The loners in black with assault rifles are FBI. The U.S. army looks like the toughest group in town, with the possible exception of a French emergency rescue squad I saw this afternoon. They were a mean bunch of hombres. The pier on which I volunteered tonight is usually used for filming the television program "Law and Order". Saline bags were hanging from prop hatstands, and a prop wheelchair had been drafted into service as the real thing. This medical center was off limits to most volunteers, as organizers feared that the equipment or the medicine might be stolen. We had six EMTs working a room half the size of football field. If I got away from the active part, my footsteps echoed. Yesterday's note may have suggested that the bombing victims were all lawyers and securities traders. This is not the case. For every 35 year old bond trader, there's a 20 year old assistant clerk or a 50 year old pastry chef. The "have you seen?" posters show white, black, hispanic, asian faces. All dead. The loss of the towers changes the urban ecology of New York. People who live here learn to judge the weather by the way the sun glints off a particularly shiny tower and, even in unfamiliar neighborhoods, we can orient ourselves by reference to large buildings. We do these checks so instinctively that we don't even necessarily realize which buildings we're keying into. However, I find that now at particular places around the city I am suddenly disoriented. Though the towers were visible from a great deal of Manhattan, each of us has different checkpoints from which we relied instinctively on seeing them. I found one of these on 8th Street as I walked to the subway this morning, and another from the Chelsea bike path. It's almost like the feeling when you have lost a tooth, and your tongue continues to probe the place where it used to be. For a while, the sense of absence is much stronger than the sense you had from the tooth while it was still there. I hear from friends that it is possible to get below Canal Street now. I will try tomorrow, and hope to get into my office then or Monday.
Michael Stern
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