As eyes pan Ground Zero, words failBy Oliver Mackson The Times Herald-Record omackson@th-record.com  My
own words fail, because I was a gawking idiot of a tourist, walking
around the worst thing that words have tried to describe in America.So I desperately grab for the words of a man who helped invent the atomic bomb. After seeing the first one tested, Robert Oppenheimer turned to ancient Indian scripture: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I think I can start there because the most famous address in New York is no more. The forwarding address comes from an age of atomic bombs. "Where you headed to, sir?" is the question at a police checkpoint. "Down to Ground Zero," says a state police investigator named Paul DeSalvador. Ground Zero is the patch of earth right above where an A-bomb goes off underground.  Since
two planes were turned into bombs on September 11, there are so many
people missing they would fill an entire Orange County village. There
are enough grieving survivors to fill an entire country.So many of those men and women have tried to describe what they saw and felt. Mostly, they end up saying the same thing: It has to be seen with one's own eyes. Then, only then, can a description be attempted. Record photographer Jeff Goulding and I tried. It could be described as a war zone because only an act of war could rip a piece of New York's skyline right out of the sky. Only in a war zone could you find the pieces of that skyline lying on the ground. They were crumpled, burnt, smashed like a kid's tinker toy set after a tantrum. But then you look around, and you see hard hats everywhere, and a skyline of cranes, their booms extended like the arms of gigantic spiders. The air gets loaded down with gluey, burnt chemical smells, so loaded you want to push it out of the way like a smelly old curtain. There are men with barbed-wire stubble and far-away looks in their eyes, wearing police and fire uniforms. There are contractors with their jaws set, getting out of pickups from Virginia, Cleveland, Missouri. So maybe it's not a war zone, maybe it's the biggest demolition site you've ever seen, the aftermath of a hurricane or a tornado. And then three National Guardsmen blurt out, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" as you cross a checkpoint and they ask for IDs. One of them asks to borrow your binoculars so he can see if someone's got a camera mounted in a building nearby, trying to take pictures of body parts being recovered from nearby 5 World Trade Center. There are red Xs marked on the mountain of metal and pulverized concrete where the south tower used to be. They mark the places where K9 dogs have hit upon the odor of human beings. So, maybe it's not a demolition scene, maybe it's a crime scene, and you can't imagine how there could ever be enough detectives and investigators in this world, or any other, to gather the evidence and solve the crime. There is the steady hum of generators, and the howl of backhoes making a precarious climb up what used to be the Twin Towers. It takes about 45 minutes to make a circle around the place that is a war zone and a demolition site and a crime scene with a name taken from the language of atomic bombs. Near the blackened skeleton of a building that used to be 7 World Trade Center, there is smoke rising from the piles. The temperature is 400 degrees in some spots. It is heat from hell. And if the devil himself saw this place, he would take a detour. But there are people working here and all through the city, binding the city's wounds and their own. They work through 400-degree heat and emotion and pain that burns even hotter than that. Unlike words, these people will not fail. They will not be stopped. Not even by death, destroyer of worlds. © 2001 Orange County Publications, a division of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., all rights reserved. |