The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [13]
Upstairs, we had sleeping rooms with cots and a poster in the hallway that said QUIET ZONE. The lights were always turned down low. On each cot, we placed a blanket, a pillow, a gift bag of hygiene items, and a thank-you note from a schoolchild. I worked upstairs preparing beds and tucking in tired workers, fussing to move the blankets around them as my mother had done for me as a small child and as I had done as a teenager for the elderly folks in my mother’s hospital. When the workers passed out, we slipped their shoes off and changed their socks.
The station had a dining area with free food. Many of the fancy restaurants around town sent free meals to us daily, and other businesses such as Target, Poland Springs, Hershey’s, and Coca-Cola stocked our tables with snacks and drinks. I lived on Red Bull, Snickers, Milky Ways, and peanut M&M’s, and ended up putting on about ten unwanted pounds.
All the volunteers and workers were part of a big family now. We gave one another that familiar “Ground Zero look.” It was a glance exchanged without words that said we were all in this together and somehow we would pull through. We loved one another through our souls and shared daily stories from the battlefield.
One of my favorite workers was a retired firefighter named Paul Giedal who was filled with the hope of finding his son Gary, who had been working at Rescue One on September 11. At the end of the day he would say, “We didn’t find him today, Alison, but tomorrow we will.” He worked down there every single day, digging for his son. He never did find Gary, but he channeled his grief into helping others.
Every day, the female volunteers would drive a golf cart deep into the Ground Zero pit to serve the workers freshly baked cookies and a pot of hot coffee. One day, I announced to the workers that they could have anything they wanted. An older, hefty ironworker walked over to me, picked me up and threw me over his back, and carried me off, to everyone’s howls of laughter. Another day a fireman came in with a twenty-inch dildo and an unbroken bottle of champagne they had found inside the wreckage. We all joked about the sort of party we could throw.
Everyone found great comfort in the letters from children that came flooding in from all over the world. Samantha and I would sort the letters and hang them wherever we could. We tucked them into ironworkers’ pockets and under the windshields of their cars. Hard men of steel melted into warm pools of love and tears as they quietly read these precious messages, which said things like, “Dear hero, I know how you feel. My goldfish also died that day,” or “I am so proud of you my guts hurt inside.”
One little girl wrote:
My dad was a firefighter and he was in Tower One when it collapsed, so it really means a lot to me what you are doing. If it weren’t for all of you, my dad would have had no chance of surviving at all. Even though you didn’t find him, I still appreciate what you did for everyone else who needed you too. Thank you for working so hard.
Another little girl wrote:
You are all precious people and you should smile up at them [the ones who died] once a day to tell them you are okay. Everyone here loves you and if you need me I will come and hold you. I have extra love that I can give you. Do you need it? P.S. Come to Vermont and we will show you the beauty of the world again. I have space in my bedroom.
The children’s cards were the morphine of Ground Zero, easing our pain. Then, in late September when the Anthrax scares occurred, special government agents came to the Center to warn us that poisonous powder may have been planted inside the letters. By then, Samantha and I had already opened thousands of envelopes. We stared down at our hands and began to laugh, just a bit at first, then hysterically, until tears came out of our eyes. Here we