After this horrifying week in the city, I needed to get away and get some perspective. So this morning I bought a roast beef sandwich, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain (and a P.G. Wodehouse book, in case I needed to cut the Merton), and took the Metro-North up the Hudson line to do a day hike on the Appalachian Trail.

I did this same hike in June, when the weather was hot, buggy, and sticky. Today was glorious early-fall weather; cool and dry, and the trees are just barely starting to turn. One of the things I like about hiking is that, unlike many workday pursuits, there's no illusion of control. The hill is just there, and it doesn't care if you climb it in ten manly minutes or fifty wimpy ones. It doesn't care if you climb it at all, in fact, and there's not even the presence of not caring; the hill just is. Usually, I like that because it's a good antidote to a "type A" New York lifestyle. Today, it was a good antidote to the horrible human calamity that's been the first thing on everyone's mind since 9AM on Tuesday morning.

Every time I do this hike there`s something to make my jaw drop. Last time, it was a green bottle fly sitting on a rock at the top of Anthony's Nose, above the Bear Mountain bridge. The sun caught it in a way that made it brilliantly, vibrantly green, as if this fly was a chunk of pure additive color.

Anyhow, this time it was a rushing sound like surf that I noticed in a field of cattails on the way to Manitou train station. The rushing sound got louder; I looked over and realized that it was a flight of thousands of tiny birds (sparrows?) wheeling and diving for insects. It sounded like a big nylon kite does on a windy day at the beach, except smoother.
posted at 8:05 PM

I started to try to work on my freelance job last night, checking in on the websites' server status. One of the boxes was running hot, trying desperately to pump out a huge backlog of mass e-mail. I tried to connect to the box, but there was a minor glitch in the terminal software. Which is when I realized that the server is located in the Puck building on Houston street, and I found out that the server farm had been evacuated.

So, wanting something to do, I talked my way through the police line around the Family Counseling Center in the Lexington Avenue Armory. The armory is on the same block as my office, sharing a wall with the building Digitas is in. I had learned some buzzwords in my Red Cross training on Tuesday, and by repeatedly stating that I was a "Red Cross LDV", "trained in Mass Care" and "ready to work the second shift", I made my way into the cavernous space.

The Lexington Avenue Armory is the site where European art was first introduced to America in 1913. The room has a colossal arched ceiling and a wooden floor; in fact, my grandfather once played polo on the dress floor. Last night, however, it had been set up with dozens of folding trestle tables, each table with a landline phone and several police officers. A group of five hundred people sat in rows of folding chairs, waiting to describe their loved ones to the officers. The officers listened, wrote the descriptions down on paper forms. So far, out of 4,700 missing people, I don't know of a single one that has been located this way.

The site was extraordinarily busy; I talked to the head Red Cross staffer, and looked around for stuff to do. My theory is that all the untrained volunteers (like me, frankly), tend to consume more resources than they contribute by needing constant managament. Ever worked with a new intern? Yeah, it's like that. So I saw a colossal pile of garbage next to the food table and started to haul it, bag by bag, to the dumpster around the corner. Fighting the glow of conscious virtue that comes from doing the "dirty" job, I walked the bags back and forth through the police cordon. I couldn't help it; I felt smug. The door was assaulted by waves of New Yorkers coming to volunteer; staffers thanked them politely and turned them away. Yet I moved trash, one of the chosen, without so much as a nifty Red Cross windbreaker or a name tag for thanks!

It was the sight of the single people on the folding chairs that really brought me down from my volunteerism high. There weren't any hysterics; just people sitting by themselves with red-rimmed eyes; people that looked dazed and desparately unhappy. It hit me how uncertain their situation was. You're a single, successful, young New Yorker living with your husband, your girlfriend, or your fiancee, the disaster happens, and...
...nothing. No uniformed officer comes to the door and takes off their hat, like in the movies; you just don't hear anything at all. So you go to a big, hot, smelly government building and fill out forms. It was utterly, utterly horrifying.

One one of my trips, one of the bags I was carrying burst, spreading dozens of half-empty Poland Spring water bottles and banana peels across the sidewalk. The mess wasn't actually all that nasty; the trash was so fresh that the water in the bottles was still cool. I was collecting the mess when I looked up and saw Governor Pataki walking into the building, surrounded by a cordon of plainclothes police. He looked like hell; like he hadn't slept in seventy-two hours, probably because he hadn't. He was tottering along in a navy-blue suit, being led by the hand by a young woman almost as tall as he was, maybe his daughter. People applauded, I think at least in part because he looked so exhausted. We want our civil leaders to look exhausted; we want to think that they're working harder than is humanly possible, doing whatever it is that they're doing to make things better.
posted at 7:35 PM

Walking home from the Lexington Avenue armory, having spent the evening moving garbage at the Red Cross and Salvation Army mass care table. The scene was gut-wrenching - the armory has been set up as the city center for families to inquire about their loved ones. The people there by themselves were the ones that got to me the most.
posted at 12:15 AM

The city is a bizarre mix of normal and catastrophic; everyone sees the pictures of the work going on in lower Manhattan, where the foot-deep drifts of concrete dust make the area look like a moonscape. From my desk at Digitas, I can clearly see the hazy plume to the south and smell the acrid, plastic-y smoke. Telephone kiosks are covered with missing person flyers. Digitas' building abuts the National Guard armory where families are trying to locate their loved ones; the streets are blocked off by troops, and Bill Clinton made an appearance outside the Staples next door, shaking hands while being trailed by television crews. At the same time, though, everything is open, subways are running, phones are working, and business is moving again. It's like the disaster hasn't stopped normal life in New York, but it's superimposed itself onto it.
posted at 6:16 PM

Telephone kiosks in the city are becoming covered with color flyers, each one carrying a color photo and asking if anyone has seen the pictured person. The people are uniformly good-looking, athletic, and in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The flyers are well-put-together, the work of educated people who have access to scanners and inkjet printers, people who have money to spend on hundreds of color copies. It's horrifying. One of the worst things about it is that it makes you realize that the tragedy is just unfolding now; that the incident wasn't over when the buildings collapsed. I have a friend who staffed the phone banks for the Red Cross last night; she said that she spent the entire day fielding questions about missing people without a single identified match. Everyone who's missing, it seems, is gone.
posted at 6:10 PM