The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [1]
It was 10:27 a.m. on September 11, 2001, and something even bigger was about to happen.
I felt the ground moving beneath me and looked up to see the World Trade Center’s nearby north tower tumbling toward me like a stack of cards. I sprinted away, frantically attempting to outskate the avalanche that was trying to eat me alive, but then gave up and dove under a parked UPS truck.
Twenty bucket-loads of prayers later, I crawled out into the now even denser fog of sooty darkness. I saw pieces of bodies scattered about like roadkill and collected them into a pile. I counted five legs, three arms, two torsos, and half a head. All the other stuff was unrecognizable. Inside a computer monitor I saw someone’s charred skull.
I found some trash bags in a destroyed shop nearby. Even though I had worked for eight years as a nurse’s aide in my mother’s hospital when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I had always been squeamish at the sight of blood. I felt queasy as I stuffed the torn flesh into the bags. My thoughts froze and my nose wrinkled up as I readied myself to perform the task at hand.
Then I remembered what I’d placed in my bag at the last minute, and took out my precious bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume. I dabbed a little bit under my nose to mask the smell of burned bodies, and it worked. I continued shuffling around like an astronaut on my first moon landing, looking for more signs of life.
Staring into the raging fires in the surrounding buildings, I thought about my friend Jonathon Connors, who worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center at Cantor Fitzgerald. I prayed he had gotten out. He was a good friend who worked hard to provide for his children and his wife, who had been living with a life-threatening disease. He had always secretly wanted to be an actor, so he had invested in my first film, and to thank him I’d chosen him as an extra in one of the scenes. He had been very supportive of my career and always visited me on set.
With Jonathon in mind, I pulled my old 8mm camera out of my backpack and started shooting quick, shaky images. The clicking noise of the worn film canister disturbed me. I suddenly felt guilty taking images, so I threw the camera back into my pack. I felt that if someone saw me capturing pictures of this horrific event, they would think it was a shameful thing to do. I suppressed my filmmaker instincts and didn’t shoot anymore the entire time I was on-site at Ground Zero.
When I ran across survivors, they walked past me with blank stares on their faces like zombies in a silent horror movie. Occasionally I stumbled upon other ordinary folks doing what I was doing—trying desperately to find people still alive among the wreckage and ripping down the wood pylons that were mounted on surrounding buildings to create makeshift stretchers for the injured.
An hour later, policemen started screaming for everyone to move away from the World Trade Center area. Reluctantly, I obeyed their commands, but I knew I wasn’t done yet.
It became too difficult to navigate on skates, but in my mad rush to get to the disaster area as quickly as possible, I had forgotten to pack shoes. So I left my Rollerblades beside the Stuyvesant School wall just off the West Side Highway and quickly walked in my socks to a nearby pet store. In a Schwarzenegger-movie moment of grandiosity, I announced in my most assertive voice, “I am a nurse and I have no shoes. I need to go in and help people, so I need your shoes now!” The stunned Asian man at the checkout counter balked at first, throwing me a suspicious look. He then revealed his feet, probably hoping I’d pass on the thin, open-toed flaps of plastic he wore. But they were good enough for me. I took his