This year, my family went to New York for summer vacation. The visit included a trip to Ground Zero. A block from the site, the fence outside a nearby church was covered in messages from around the world. Firefighters from Birmingham, England, had sent a Union Jack signed by all the firemen in their station. A T-shirt with a big pelican on it was signed by well-wishers from a Louisiana neighborhood. Letters, hats, banners and mementos from around the world surrounded Ground Zero, paying respect to it, offering condolences and support. And then there was the big hole.
As a thing to look at, the hole itself is vast and empty and really nothing remarkable. A chain link fence surrounds it, and a couple of dump trucks still remain at its bottom. One construction worker just on the other side of the fence was speaking to a gathering of people about his memories of what happened on 9/11 and what he did that day. The people stood silently, as if in church.
In fact, everyone walking around Ground Zero that day seemed in a trance. Nobody talked much. Everyone was completely quiet, waiting their turn at the few spots where viewers could get a good look into the big hole. Nobody pushed. Nobody yelled. A few people were crying, but mostly they just very patiently went about looking at the big hole and the surviving buildings that surround it.
I was surprised by how many people there were from foreign countries—Japan, China, Europe, Africa. As you walked around the site, you could hear so many languages that you came to understand just how international 9/11 really was: A handful of Saudi Arabian hijackers caught up in an Afghan terrorist plot and expressing their Muslim outrage at the Western World shook the firmament of the globe. In some ways, it seems hard to recall how insane it was.
For a brief period, I imagined the planes flying in above the ground where I stood—how strange that must have been, seeing them fly in against the blue sky—and then I wondered what it would have been like had I been there that day. (Where would I have run? Which way would I have gone? Could I have helped somebody?) I thought a bit about the nearby buildings that had fallen, wondered whether I would have been crushed by one of those, thought in general whether I would have run away from the scene after the first plane had hit, or if I would have stayed around because of my curious nature. For several minutes, these were the intensely first-person thoughts that wound through my head, like a video reel. I suppose all visitors do this at the site.
Even more profoundly, I tried to imagine what those people trapped in the buildings must have been thinking. How many of them got to call their families and say goodbye? Were they still alive as the towers began to collapse? Did they feel pain, as well as what must have been incredible fright?
In a cab on the way to dinner, our family talked about Ground Zero, and the best word we found to describe it was “holy.” I suppose that, now, Ground Zero is a place for people to come and be a part of some empty, cavernous space, where something very unknowable and awful occurred. I know they have plans to build parks and new buildings to honor the lives lost and pay respect to what happened, but for me, the experience of walking around something as empty as a hole, quietly and sadly and with not only my family but people from all over the world, seemed a perfect way to think about what happened there.
Just about everything that can be said about 9/11 has been. A year after it happened, I can say that nothing about being there made me any more patriotic, or more angry, or more ready to invade Iraq or less convinced that there is a God. The only thing the hole really did was convince me that the crater itself—an absence of space—was such a just and perfect symbol of the whole event. The hole says to us, “Do not look here for explanations, because this place is mired in the irrational. Here there is no world—no buildings, no trees, no people—just a deep absence. Here nothing is knowable.”
That was the mystery—the holiness—of the place.
