Journal: September 27, 2001

The reverberations of the World Trade Center disaster pass out from Manhattan with a rippling effect. Part of it is the instant access media provided, giving the world an intimacy many disasters of the past lacked. But a large part is also the human chain reaction resulting from the spread of people over the last few decades, people settling along the main highway corridors and commuting great distances to and from Manhattan. Many of these people carried their first-hand accounts back from the event.
In some ways, the pain of the disaster seems more acute here as I drive west, as if a delayed reacted created by the wake of the attack has not finished with these souls. We near ground zero saw it all from the initial crash, flame and smoldering, through the second strike and final collapse of each tower. We lived with the days of smoldering, the smoke plumes seeming to replace the towers, standing as high if not as straight at the original buildings. For a time, it seemed as if they were still there.
Close up, we gradually saw those columns of smoke collapse, a slow motion replay of the glass and concrete version, and we got to see the vacancy of that space, growing as gradually used to the lack of towers in our lives.
Out here, the image of the attack and its aftermath come in fits and starts. They have no gradual getting use to things. They cannot step outside their doors and stare across the river to study the latest development. While the TV has ceased to broadcast the endless repetition of the disaster itself, it is that image that remains most vivid in the minds of the people I encounter, store clerks asking me about the site when they discover the point of my origin.
The TV sets show no more smoke-filled skylines. Yet they show no skylines free of smoke either, instead panning in for close up shots of the wreckage, sites largely invisible to us who stand staring across the river from Pier A in Hoboken.
To people out here, we present contradictions of terms. While we assure them that life has largely gone back to an unsettled normal, they live with the media portrayals of body parts and moaning loved ones, of FBI raids and war reports, of presidential promises for justice and refusals to cooperate from leaders of Afghanistan.
During the first 48 hours, they received nearly non-stop reports, but now get only brief headline flashes, leaving them with only the highlights of the aftermath, not the reality.
The 1950s vision of an enemy attack was misleading, presuming that the most damage to America would be closest to Ground Zero. Strangely, the opposite is true. While we get on with our lives on the rim of the crater, people well beyond the range of the blast still live with the fear and consequences, shuddering with each new ripple of reports.