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By Root 766 0

in Britain. Eventually, the authorities decided to remove a section of the railing, thereby encouraging visitors to leave even more tributes. This means that everyone is now free to walk among the chairs, so I had a wander between them, reading the names and the short biographies as I went. Names like Katherine Louise Cregan, who was sixty years old and died in the Social Security offices on the first floor. Or, on one of the smaller chairs, Ashley Megan Eckles, who was only four years old. She also died on the first floor. Walking between the chairs was a deeply moving experience. It had a kind of Stonehenge feel to it. I wondered who these people were – Mary Anne Fritzler, Laura Jane Garrison, and Gabreon D.L. Bruce, who was only three months old. What lives they might have led if it hadn’t been for that lunatic McVeigh.

On the north side of the memorial stands one of the most extraordinary things about the whole place. In an orchard, one tree is much older than all the others. This American elm, now known as the Survivor Tree, was the only tree that threw any shade across the parking lot outside the Alfred Murrah Building. Commuters would arrive early to secure one of the prime parking spots shaded by its branches, but otherwise it was largely taken for granted. When the bomb exploded, the tree, which is now about a hundred years old, was one of the few things left standing. However, it was heavily damaged by the bomb, with most of the branches ripped off the central trunk. Later, it was nearly chopped down as investigators recovered evidence hanging from its few remaining branches and embedded in its bark. The trunk itself was heavily scarred and blackened by the heat of the blazing cars that had been parked beneath it. Few thought it would survive.

But then, a year after the bombing, when victims’ relatives, survivors and rescue workers gathered for a memorial ceremony by the tree, they noticed it was starting to bloom. The Survivor Tree became a symbol of defiance against the fools who perpetrate acts of extreme violence against society, and it is thriving again. The authorities now go to great lengths to protect it. For instance, when they were constructing the memorial and needed to build a wall close to the tree, one of its roots was placed inside a large pipe so that it could reach the soil beyond the wall without being damaged. They’ve even dug an underground space beneath it so that workers can monitor its health and maintain its very deep roots. On a wall around the Survivor Tree, an inscription reads, ‘The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us.’

That tree was a lone witness to what happened on the morning of 19 April 1995, and I found it particularly moving. Every year, hundreds of its seeds are incubated, and the resultant saplings are distributed around the country and planted on the anniversary of the bombing, so there are now thousands of Survivor Trees growing all over America.

I found the memorial even more powerful than I thought it would be. It provided another example of people at their best – creating something wonderful out of something really horrific and terrible. For some reason, I felt particularly sorry for the five victims who were outside the Alfred Murrah Building that morning. There was an awful feeling of really bad luck – of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other victims had no choice – they were in the building because that’s where their jobs required them to be – but the five outside would have evaded the blast if they’d arrived five minutes later or left five minutes earlier.

Beside the memorial there is a small museum. One of its most extraordinary exhibits is a tape of a meeting that was taking place in a nearby building when the explosion occurred. You could listen to people doing business, then whoomph – the bomb went off. But I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it. I didn’t want to experience that.

I was very glad I made the effort to visit the memorial. I almost didn’t go, because storms were forecast