When Tourists Meet an Open Grave

By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet. Posted October 11, 2001.

There are many reasons we say we come. To pay respects. To understand. If we are from out of state, to support New York.

It is said that it's not real until you see it for yourself. Congressmen, Manhattanites and random celebrities exclaim that its full magnitude and terror can't be known unless you see it first-hand. That, unlike popular mythology, the camera doesn't make it larger than life.

I was hoping they were right. I never bought the other common saying that it was like a movie. It wasn't a movie at all. Not at all. The soundtrack was too dead still and the aesthetics were all wrong. But neither did it feel real.

Like most people in this country, I watched that crumbling tower obsessively; again and again until its images took on pornographic dimensions: the shock value numbed me like the nudity of escort ads. I watched and watched until everything about it seemed as cheap as Hollywood gimmick. Flags waved from antennas, networks and Burger Kings like the latest fad, the new Macarena. Violins played to two minute stories of unimaginable tragedy and I gagged. I shut my mouth, disgusted by own apathy and thought: Soon, New York. I was on the road and would be there in two weeks. I may be emotionally distant, media-saturated and jaded, but wait 'till I see it for real.

Two weeks later, and here I am. Walking down the length of the island, I feel too weird to ask the best way to get there. Hell, I don't know what to call it. Ground Zero? Too much network dramatism. Saying the Trade Center feels kinda cruel. So far, "Down There" seems the most popular. It makes reference to both its Manhattan location and its Hades-like imagery. Though even in its subtlety, "there" is said like a whisper, like the superstitious whisper of "cancer." So I don't say it at all. I just go where I think is south and follow those who are bold enough to pull out the maps. There are many on this pilgrimage less shamed by their voyeurism than I.

From uptown, things really didn't seem that slow. After the small towns I've been in on the road, NYC looks pretty damn happening. As I walk south, I find occasional ghost streets between where the traffic is cut off and the people have filled in. Once I arrive at the closest open subway stop, however, the sidewalks writhe with movement. Lines like ants wind around barricades and mass congested at red lights. Stands of flags, ribbons and commemorative WTC postcards wait in even paces from the next. New York's yellow taxis are replaced with the NYPD's blue-lined cop cars, their drivers standing behind barricades in starched navies.

Unlike its images on TV, the actual object of my pilgrimage is not much to see. A brown smog. A distant pile of dust. A piece of equipment that rises up like a mast. An emergency vehicle and space in the skyline. Instead, the crowd stares at an absence; an absence where so many of us were never even familiar with a presence.

Yes, there are many reasons we say we come, but it doesn't feel that complex when I'm here, standing in a chorus of snapping cameras. It feels like I am at a tourist site. Plain and simple. And like most roadside attractions, it is impossible to divorce the experience of seeing the thing with the experience of being surrounded by a hundred other people seeing the thing. You can angle in and take a picture that does not show the mass of other cameras, but that shot will not show what it is like to actually be there.

I did not bring a camera. I thought about it. I had it in my hand my when I first went out the door, but the same self-consciousness that refused a map went back and left it behind. So without a shot to frame, I stand staring. Waiting for something -- just what I can't say. I stand with others paused in this gaping limbo: the crack of lightening seen, we wait here to feel the thunder.

One of the others is a professional photographer from 15 blocks up. He has been here many times, and has yet to take a single shot of the wreckage. He claims a purity in this; of taking photos of those on the margins rather than the nucleus they circle. I agree, I guess. But I also wonder if it's because the shots accessible are still two blocks away.

So while its true that it's nothing like it is on TV, it's not in the way I expected. There the screen was only as far as the living room's width. Even from the southern side, where instead of a mass of beige, you can see floors and twists of metal, it seems so remote. That's horrible to say, I know. This is an open grave and wanting to get closer is sick and selfish and disrespectful.

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