26th of July, 2010. Lower Manhattan, New York City.
There are some places on this beautiful planet of ours that are quite simply breathtaking. They're rare, and they encompass all landscapes, climates, countries and continents, but the one thing they have in common is that they are awesome. Not awesome as it is commonly used today by anyone under thirty as a synonym for cool. Awesome as in commands the visitor to stand before it in awe. They demand respect. They literally take your breath away.
Most of them are breathtakingly beautiful. They inspire writers to wax lyrical over colour hues, artists to spend hours at the site with oils and watercolours and tourists to take cheesy snapshots of themselves with said wonder in the background - just to prove to family and friends back home that they were there.
This place is breathtaking, but it is not beautiful. There are no painters here. The writers write, but their stories are of tragedy and death, chaos and destruction, tears, lost loved ones and fallen heroes. Even the tourists don't linger - they come, they wander awhile, trying to imagine what used to be here. They take a few photos of what remains, then they leave the shadows and windswept emptiness in favour of sunshine and light.
Behind me is the Cortland Street subway station. In front of me is an immense construction site. Ten years ago, it looked very different. There used to be five tall office buildings and two immense skyscrapers here. Together, the seven buildings were known as the World Trade Center, the heart of the New York Financial District.
The eleventh of September, 2001, changed all that.
Ground Zero - actually being here - is strange. Like the other tourists visiting New York for the first time, I too am trying to imagine that this huge crater in lower Manhattan was once occupied by two of the tallest buildings ever built, and am finding it a little difficult, to say the least. Some guy flogging an A4 photo book with "Tragedy 9/11" scrawled in red across the cover told me as part of his sales pitch that if you want to get a sense of scale here, double the height of the tallest remaining building in the area, and you're getting close to the height of one of the twin towers.
You can't see much of the site - well, of the ground anyway. All that's visible are the umpteen cranes, each with the stars and stripes proudly, resolutely, defiantly fluttering in the breeze from the topmost point. The two-metre cyclone fencing barricading the area is completely covered with a long plastic banner advertising the visitors' centre, which I had no intention of visiting.
I remember waking up the morning of the 12th of September in Australia - it happened at about 11pm local time in Melbourne. A Tuesday. I watched Rove, then turned the TV off before Sandra Sully's face popped up on screen with the late night news so I could get some sleep and make it to my Italian class at 9am the following morning. My mum woke me up long before my alarm though - she said something, a strange look on her face, then turned the TV on in my room. Like so many people, I thought at first it was a new action movie, then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and the footage of the second plane. The coverage had been going all night, and there was no escaping it during the next few hours, days, weeks and months.
That was more than enough opportunity to hear all I ever wanted or needed to know about what happened. Not only does the visitors centre have a photo display and various other informative resources, but they also coordinate guided tours of the site run by volunteers - living victims: people who experienced it firsthand, or who lost their partner, sibling, parent or child that day. There was no way I was going to do that. I wanted to visit Ground Zero, to see the area, see what's left, try to imagine what used to be there. Then I wanted to leave the area and not return. If I wanted to know more from someone who was there, I could listen to one of the hundreds of interviews, read one of the many written accounts or watch one of the several documentaries or feature films. To see the look on someone's face as they talk about their memories of the buildings coming down around them, or as they remembered someone they lost that day, someone they dearly loved and sorely miss... I couldn't do it.
So I didn't. I sat on the steps outside one of the buildings around the outside. For an hour or so. I just sat there, thinking, writing, remembering, imagining. At one point, a fire engine roared past, sirens blaring, lights flashing, and a spectacular American flag emblazoned all the way down the side. I took a deep breath. Listened to the sirens fade into the noise of the city. Then I left.
If you happen to be in New York and can handle an intensely negative experience, go down there. Walk around. See the memorials. Pay your respects. Experience the site. It's worth a visit. But I won't go back.
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