The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [14]
I could sense when the workers had recovered a lot of bodies. The air would thicken like concrete. On those days, we’d quietly fuss over the workers even more than usual, making an extra effort to smile and find them special sweets.
On one particularly heavy day, the ironworkers finally made it to the ground floor of one of the towers, which had been pushed eight stories underground. There they found twenty bodies. The scratch marks on the walls clearly showed that the trapped people had tried desperately to dig their way out by hand.
On November 4, 2001, the New York Yankees were up against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series. If there had ever been a year for the Yankees to win the baseball pennant, then this was the one. It was probably the first time in history when fans outside of New York were rooting for the Yankees, hoping that the win would lift the spirits of a city in mourning. Nobody worked on the pile that night. Everyone huddled around the televisions set up at Ground Zero. The series was tied at three games apiece, setting up a seven-inning pitching duel between the Yankees’ Roger Clemens and the Diamondbacks’ Curt Schilling.
In the ninth inning, the Yankees seemed poised to capture their fourth straight World Series title. But then Arizona tied the game, and at the last pitch, Luis Gonzalez looped Rivera’s famous cut fastball just over the head of shortstop Derek Jeter. The ball barely reached the outfield grass, but counted for a single and sent Cummings safely to home plate. The game was over. The Diamondbacks had won the World Series. New York grieved with all the pent-up emotions of the past month. What had once been a room filled with excitement fell silent. Grown men cried. Somehow we’d all thought that this win would symbolize great hope for New York. A dark gloom fell over Ground Zero once more.
Romances sprang up between Ground Zero workers. On the third floor of our Red Cross building, a makeshift “hook-up room” even came into existence—a small, quiet space where couples would go to hang out privately and have sex. Every now and then, I would see a couple emerge from the room, switching the light back on, on their way out. We turned a blind eye because we knew that people needed the release. This was still New York City, after all, and hormones, as usual, were raging in full force.
The last thing on my mind, however, was sex; the experience was just too horrific for me. I couldn’t look at anyone in a romantic way. It’s true that I was wearing more Chanel No. 5 than usual, but it was only to cover up the smell of death, which filled every membrane of my body. I focused on connecting to others through the unconditional love my mother had always shown to me and to her hospital patients.
When the American Red Cross building shut down its services in the Red Zone in March of 2002, Samantha and I were not ready to stop working, so we simply moved across the road to volunteer in the Salvation Army’s 35,000-square-foot tent at West and Vesey Streets. Ground Zero was our home, and it felt healing to be there. We felt like the nurses in an old war movie. Our mission was clear: to stand by our brothers to the end.
And so Samantha and I continued on, handing out children’s cards and sitting for long hours with the workers, listening to their pain and crying with them. Each night when I traveled back uptown, I observed that New Yorkers were a gentler people now. The car horns hadn’t yet started blasting again. Through my own eyes on this tragedy, I glimpsed an inspiring vision of humanity, one filled with hope.
Around that time, the tribute of lights was created. It had eighty-eight mega-bulbs that formed two commemorative fingers of light resembling the Twin Towers, which beamed seven miles into the sky above Manhattan. One night, I stood right in the middle of the base of those powerful lights and looked up to see a real jet plane flying through them. This time, the towers were invincible.
On May 30, 2002, the night before the closing ceremony