Put Down the Camera

The first time I ever went to New York, a cop ran at me yelling.

It was a Sunday afternoon in June of 2005. I was in the city for exactly that one afternoon, being walked around by a friend who actually knew the city, and we’d come down through the financial district to look at Wall Street the way you do when you’ve never seen it. There was a flag hanging off the front of the exchange, the enormous kind that covers most of a building, and I did the thing I’ve done my entire life without even thinking about it: I lifted my camera.

The cop was maybe twenty feet out and closing fast. “Put down the camera!” It was not a request.

So I put down the camera.

Nothing happened to me. He wasn’t wrong to be jumpy and I wasn’t wrong to want the picture; it was 2005, there were police on every corner, and everybody was still braced for the next one. But four years out, and a 37-year-old woman wearing shorts and a t-shirt, holding a professional quality camera was still a question somebody had to come running to answer.

Ground Zero itself was behind a fence that day. I saw almost nothing.

That was the first of seven trips. I’ve been back six times since, and I’ve never once been to New York and not gone down there.

Before all that

I should probably say where I was, since that’s the thing everybody says.

I was in Georgia. I was married to Kevin then. It was a cool morning, the kind that tricks you into believing fall has arrived before the South’s second summer shows up to correct you. I’d pulled into the parking lot at work a few minutes late, which was not unusual for me. There were leaves on the ground in the lot. I remember that with absolute clarity.

Kevin called my cell while I was walking in and said a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was telling me what he was seeing on CNN and I was hurrying to my desk to plug in my laptop, and he said, in this order: Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. I just saw another one hit. That wasn’t a small plane. That was a jet. This is a terrorist attack. Oh shit.

Then the internet, as it existed at that time, fell over. Every news site in the country buckled under all of us repeatedly hitting refresh at once. CNN stripped itself back to almost nothing; just a text scroll on a page. My boss wheeled a television into our offices, one of those AV carts with the whole rig bolted to it, back when a TV was furniture and took two people to move. We all rolled our desk chairs around and watched.

I came home and sat on the sofa and couldn’t tell you what I did for the rest of that night, except that I cried. Kevin talked about re-enlisting. (He’d served in the USMC.) He talked about applying to be an air marshal. (He’d been military police and a cop.) He did neither and it’s never come up since.

2006

I was in NYC to shoot a wedding. I had an afternoon between things, so I went down and wandered into St. Paul’s Chapel, the little colonial church across from the site that served as a relief station for months. They still had the things people had left out on display: letters, drawings, teddy bears, banners sent in by fire departments in towns nobody in New York had ever heard of.

I read the notes and that’s all I did. I didn’t take a single picture, and I couldn’t tell you now whether that was reverence or just not knowing where to put my hands.

2008

I turned forty that January and gave myself a week in New York, alone, which remains one of my better birthday decisions.

On the day itself, the twenty-eighth, I went down to Battery Park and photographed the Koenig sphere, the big bronze globe that stood in the plaza between the towers and came out of the rubble dented and torn but still itself. They put it in Battery Park in 2002, supposedly temporarily, and it stayed until 2017. Even the sculpture took fifteen years to get home.

The site was still boarded off, but you could see steel rising above the plywood, which was new, and which was the first time it looked like anything other than an absence. No photographs of it, though. There was nothing to photograph but a fence.

2013

Zach and I had been dating about 9 months. He had to travel to NYC on business and he asked if I wanted to join him for part of the week and have evenings to be tourists together. His client put him up at the Club Quarters at Cedar and Washington, which is close enough that you can lean on the window and look straight down into the work.

So that’s what I did most mornings, with coffee. The north pool was finished and running. The south end was still a working site: cranes, mud, rebar, men in vests the size of ants from up there. The tower had a crane on top of it. I took that picture on the fifth of May; they set the spire five days later, on the tenth, and it became 1,776 feet and everybody wrote about it. I have the before, purely by accident.

I spent that trip walking that part of FiDi reading placards. There were still damaged buildings. There were still flyers and paint marks and temporary memorials and notices in windows. And I took hardly any photographs, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that a woman with a nice camera in front of a damaged building was doing something a little obscene.

The names I photographed. The names are meant to be seen.

2014

Another business trip. Another tag along for me. Zach was working in the new tower, WTC One. He walked through the Oculus construction every morning, back when it was still a rib cage. We were at the hotel across the street and I was working out of the hotel room, and every so often the welding would flare down in the site and pull my eyes off the laptop.

That was the year the museum opened, and I went for the first time.

I didn’t take many pictures. It was too much, and I didn’t have room in me for both the looking and the working. Afterward I went up to Chinatown and sat and watched people for the rest of the afternoon because I didn’t want to go back to a hotel room and be alone with it. And here’s the thing I have to admit twelve years later: I have no idea where those photographs are. Some old hard drive in a box somewhere, probably. The trip I actually needed the pictures from is the trip whose pictures I lost.

What I didn’t lose was the room.

The room

If you go, you’ll eventually reach the memorial exhibition, and inside it is an inner room where they keep the personal things. Photographs are not permitted. They ask politely and everybody complies, which is already unusual in a room full of tourists.

As you walk in you hear a chirping, soft and irregular and layered. My honest first thought was that somebody had piped in crickets, a summer field at dusk, and that it was an odd choice but a kind one.

Then you read the first sign, and it tells you what you are hearing is PASS alarms.

A PASS device is what a firefighter wears. If he stops moving for thirty seconds or so it starts screaming, so the people looking for him can find him in smoke and dark. On the morning of September 11th, after the towers came down, hundreds of them went off at once under all that steel, and you can hear them on the footage if you know what you are listening for: a field of crickets, chirping in the dust, each one a man who had stopped moving.

Three hundred and forty-three members of the FDNY died that day.

That is what the room sounds like. That is what I had been standing in for a minute and a half thinking was soothing.

I put down the camera. Nobody had to run at me that time.

2016

Another business trip, this time around Christmas-time. It was cold. The Oculus was open by then, that enormous white bird skeleton full of shoppers, which I have complicated feelings about and will keep to myself. I went back to the museum, and this time I photographed the daylights out of it.

Not because I had gotten over anything. Because Zach had never been. He kept coming back here year after year and never once got inside the museum, because he was always working, which is the story of every trip we ever took to New York. So I went for both of us and brought back pictures the way you bring somebody a plate from a dinner they had to miss.

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That’s the closest I can get you to the room. Small things in a case, behind glass, under a light. Somebody’s keys.

Twenty-five years

There are grown adults walking around right now with jobs and mortgages and opinions who have no memory of September 11th, some because they were not yet born. Everyone under twenty-five. For my generation it’s the coordinate everything else gets measured from; for them it’s a chapter, and one that got taught in school – badly as often as not.

I’m not mad about it. That is just what time does, and it will happen to whatever undoes them, too.

And my own memory, the one I am so sure of, is leaves on the ground, a television on a cart, my husband saying oh shit four times into a cell phone. A website gone to plain text. Secondhand, every bit of it, and demonstrably unreliable in the details, and it still shaped twenty-five years of my life, and I still cannot be in that city without walking down there.

That particular job ended and Zach moved to different clients and we stopped going to New York. I’d like to go back someday, the two of us, as nothing but tourists, with nowhere to be and no one expecting him at a desk.

I’d like him to see it himself. I’ve been carrying the pictures around for ten years and they’re not the same thing and I know it.

P.S. If you have never been, go. Not on the anniversary, when it is crowded and televised, but on some ordinary Tuesday when it is mostly just you and the room. And then leave the rest of the day empty. No dinner reservation, no show, no meeting, nothing you have to be pleasant for. I didn’t know to do that the first time and I was no use to anybody for hours. Go find a bench by the water and sit on it a while. There’s no prize for powering through.

P.P.S. My side business is working with a non-profit that supports first responders, which is a large part of why the chirping has been in my head more this year than any other.