Hannah Logan ’03 Reports From Ground Zero

I see the sun rise in Manhattan for the first time in two days. The sky is bright, sun cutting into my stinging eyes. I keep forgetting why my whole being is exhausted and it’s only a few hours after dawn. I think, is it bedtime yet? And what’s for dinner? And then I remember again that it is only 9 a.m. I have to keep reminding myself, I was there.
I had the privilege this fall break to spend 12 hours of one night of my life volunteering at ground zero. Bob, a friend of my parents from seminary, is the pastor of a church on West 86th Street. His wife Andrea is a former Obie. They offered their sofa to me for a few days over fall break so I could wander the city and go to art museums. A few weeks ago, Andrea e-mailed me to let me know things going on in their schedule the week of my break, including a group of volunteers through Bob’s church going to serve food to rescue workers.
I said I’d be there. I didn’t stop to think about it, because I hadn’t stopped to think about any of it much since Sept. 11. I went because I wanted to wake up and realize this whole political mess is happening.
We go downtown at 8 p.m. with bags of food. I have only been to New York City once before, so when we get off the subway I have no idea where we are. I look up to get my bearings but I can’t even see the tops of the buildings. A glowing white fog is rolling up the street above us, covering the sky and the outlines of buildings. It looks like the fog that crept up the train tracks in Elyria two nights before I left. But I realize it’s not fog, it’s smoke.
The night shift volunteer coordinator meets us and gives us a speech about patience, flexibility and a sense of humor. She says, “Don’t go west of Broadway,” and makes us repeat it. Then she leads us down the street, through a guarded police barricade and then another onto the porch of St. Paul’s church. She takes us inside, sits us in the back of the dimly-lit sanctuary plastered with posters and thank-you cards from all over the country. She tells us, “This is a quiet space. The rescue workers come here to sleep, or to pray, or just to sit, or to get food.” I look around. People are wrapped up in blankets on the pews. Some are praying. In the back, a massage therapist, two chiropractors and a podiatrist are digging into tired backs and feet. The walls are stacked with boxes of food and toiletries. We are given the phone number and address of a meeting place in case we have to evacuate, and the volunteer coordinator tells us, “I don’t care if you actually go there, but at least call, so we know you’re alive.”
I am put to work serving food on the porch of the church. Tonight there is jambalaya, cooked on propane stoves by guys who drove up from New Orleans to feed some of the 20,000 workers. The air on the porch is bitter. I can see the smoke curling around the edges of the church. Things that sit still too long become coated in a fine white ash. Burning concrete, glass and steel, office papers, latex paint, asbestos. “And human bodies,” someone else says to me, when I mention the smell.
I am breathing in human ashes. No matter how small the proportion. I am part of this now, ghosts sucked in and out of my unmasked mouth and nostrils. I wish I could stop breathing. I know we should be wearing masks, but our smiles and clear communication with people are more important. Standing behind the jambalaya masks the smell. Every time I lift the covers to serve someone, I forget about the smoke.
“How big is the... was the World Trade Center?” I know I am naïve. Rick gives me an answer in city blocks, but I shake my head. I don’t think in city blocks. “Almost a mile by a mile,” Rick tells me. “A little over three quarters.” I say, “That’s the size of Oberlin. The campus.” Imagine Wilder Bowl, North and South campus to J-House, Tappan Square and the art museum, full of rubble twice the height of Peters.
“And how many weeks will it take for them to finish cleaning it up?” I ask. “Weeks?” Rick says. “Weeks? Try years. Or, 70 to 80 weeks, at least.” “Is there a place you can go see it?” I ask. “The rubble?” “If you look down the side streets,” Bob says, “You can see some of it. Take a walk down Broadway.” To look west, where we have been instructed not to go.
For the first half hour all the uniforms make me nervous. I keep checking myself, looking around for speeding. But they keep coming and I cannot keep it up. They eye the jambalaya skeptically, and I give them my most charming smile and assure them the Cajun food is real good and not too spicy. They take the food and sit down on the porch, most for 15 minutes, some for hours. Like they can’t bear to move. Serving these people is the one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
The American flags and words “You’re our heroes” that have been accosting me from the walls take on a new meaning. These people I am serving and giving my smile and energy to are heroes. They are setting aside their lives and physical limitations for 12, 24, 36 hour shifts to salvage the wreckage of thousands of other people’s lives.
I have to put myself aside, forget that uniforms stand for something I cannot agree with, that this whole thing happened, in part, because of symbols I don’t believe in. Forget America, forget borders and politics and policies. These are real people eating, sleeping, praying, exhausted from the tragedy that really happened.
A few hours later, Bob says he’ll take me on a coffee run. We grab supplies to take down Broadway to the police. We walk along the inner barricade, coated like the church with posters and banners. I peer down the side streets at smoke and the bright lights of forced day for round-the-clock work. The buildings close enough to see are burnt out windows and sides charred black. The streets are gone, too, full of holes, chunks of asphalt misplaced or crumbled away. I see a jet of water aimed at a smoldering pile.
I think maybe I’m back at Universal Studios on the Earthquake! ride, and in a few minutes the crumbled buildings and torn up streets will be pulled back into place, good as new.
We walk down several blocks, pouring coffee for the policemen, and then we are at the end. Our coffee is almost gone anyway, so we turn back, smiling and chatting with the police. Bob slows at the fence so he can read the signs and cards plastered there. There are flowers, too, and other memorabilia. One continuous shrine encircling the site. I ask Bob if the big gap in sky scrapers was the World Trade Center. I don’t know what it looked like before. He says yes.
For eight hours I serve jambalaya. Bob comes back from a break and tells us he was taken west of Broadway. He just asked a policeman, and they took him in on a Gator, a little motorized vehicle. Rick tells me to come with him. We walk down the street and hang around two policemen until Rick explains what we want. The policeman says, “Yeah, sure, just give us a minute.” Another policeman standing there says we should take in coffee, if we want to get further without questions. Even though another policemen tells us that isn’t necessary, we go back to get a pot. We climb in the back bed of the Gator with another volunteer. I put on a hospital mask but no one else does, and we pass through the fence.
We drive through the rubble on decimated streets, past a black building with hundreds of vacant eyes. The back side of it facing the WTC is melted away. A Borders sign is the only thing left.
I am horrified. My eyes wide and my legs paralyzed, all I can do is silently stare and grip the cardboard box with sugar and milk and stir-sticks. My companions do the serving.
I could be anywhere in the world. I am not in New York, not even in America. I am in Afghanistan; I am in Kashmir; in Palestine and Israel, in Korea, Vietnam, Germany and London. For a second I presume I know what it is like to be in a war.
I know what I am looking at is the WTC. But it can’t be. It is cranes and dump trucks and only a hole in a sky of buildings.
Our coffee is out so we leave. Watching the scene recede behind us, I am terrified: maybe we won’t get out, and then we are on the other side of the fence. I take off my mask. Bob looks at me and says, “Pretty incredible, huh?” I cannot forget but already I am.
Who can reduce 5,000 people and a square mile a hundred stories high to a nightmare moonscape of rubble? I am thankful I have already forgiven the people who caused this terror. I feel my body clenched with grief, replacing the terror of my few minutes inside ground zero. Where does this kind of rage go? How do we make it dissipate without more harm?
I close my eyes and prayer pours forth in whispers from my soul. For a moment my mind is clear. I know everything to thank for and everything to ask for. And then I begin to cry, to sob quietly into the silent sanctuary.
When I open the doors outside, the smell of the smoke hits my nostrils. I gag. How have I been out in this all night?
“It’s light,” the guy working next to me says. I look up at the sky and feel cheated. The morning after. Daylight comes and all the fear and emotion from the night before seems unfounded. I love watching the sunrise but the buildings block the ascent of the sun. I’m not ready to go. I want to stay, to sleep all day and return to ground zero tonight, every night and then move on to wherever I am needed to serve.
I am opened. What is important is not theoretical concepts, research, sitting in a remote sterile office writing policies and debating. What is important is basic human interactions, smiling at someone to help them smile back, giving people our energy when they need it, and helping everyone to stay alive.
I was there. I am here. We are here.