A decade later, returning to the scene of something unfathomable - Los Angeles Times
"I remember you like it was yesterday," Bury said.
There were things still fresh in my memory, too. The all-night sobbing of the person in the hotel room next to mine. The grieving stranger, in search of his missing daughter, who hugged me in a city park and made a tearful plea for help. I remember slumping onto a bench the first time the adrenaline slowed and the enormity of the suffering and loss hit me.Full coverage: A decade after 9/11
In 2001, I flew with colleagues in a chartered plane from Los Angeles to New Jersey, two days after the attacks. I dropped my bag in a Manhattan hotel room and hailed a cab, driven by Bury, who was then 48. He drove as close to the collapsed World Trade Center towers as we could get, through smoke and dust and streets teeming with rescue workers, volunteers and people searching for lost loved ones.
"Look at this. Just look at this," Bury said in September of 2001 as we approached Lower Manhattan, the scent of death and destruction sharp. "That used to be a beautiful sight of the towers, but I'm going to tell you something. You see all these people out here? Everybody helping out in whatever way they can? They tried to break us up, but this city's never been more unified."
And now I was back.
I checked into a hotel across the street from where the jets went into the towers, where innocent thousands lost their lives on a day that began like so many others until the planes roared low over the city. I called Bury, a native New Yorker who's been a cabbie for 26 years, and he agreed to come pick me up for a reunion of sorts. I wanted to feel what I felt that night, see how his life had changed, and better understand how mine had changed.
We smiled and shook hands. Now 58, he looked much the same, though with less hair and more gray. He drove us along West Street, past the cranes that maneuver like muscled arms above the construction zone. New towers are rising near the site of the old ones in a defiant statement of resolve and renewal. Gawkers, tourists and the curious still come with cameras, with disbelief, with fear, with hope, with respect for the dead and admiration for those who tried to save them.
Prior to last month, I had done what many of us have done, for the sake of sanity if not convenience. I had pushed Sept. 11 into the recesses of memory, back to a place where uncomfortable or unfathomable things are stored.
That's not hard to do if you reside in California, a continent away from the heat of that day. But being back in New York, where I lived before moving to Los Angeles in May of 2001, brought the catastrophe closer. Close enough to be reminded that we all have a stake in what happened that day and in the days that followed.
The numbers are staggering.
Three jetliners commandeered by hijackers went down in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring more than 2,300.
In New York, 343 firefighters and 75 cops perished.
Two wars, started in response, are still being fought. More than 4,600 American servicemen and women have died, tens of thousands more have been injured or permanently maimed, and for some, the invisible wounds will never heal. Estimates of civilian deaths and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan range into the hundreds of thousands.
The U.S. cost of those wars is counted in the trillions, and we spend $75 billion a year on domestic security, including millions in remote locales. We've handed police greater power to intervene in our lives. Grandmothers are searched at airports, children's stuffed animals inspected, nail clippers confiscated.
And are we safer for all that? Wiser? This early in the story, all that's clear is that some of the world we thought we knew went up in smoke 10 years ago, when iconic symbols of wealth and power exploded and the survivors ran screaming into the streets.
From Vincent Bury's cab, I gazed up at the replacement towers and shuddered at the memory of people leaping to their deaths from the sky, choosing obliteration over incineration.
Bury sees the events of Sept. 11 as "a wake-up call to mankind," a reminder that each of us has a responsibility to "contribute some light."
11 Sep, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF0Xh6fXeIhlEapqDa0rRYbQAIJXA&url=http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-me-0911-lopez-10yearslater-20110908,0,4850267.column
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