The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [6]
That afternoon, the firemen brought in an ironworker who had temporarily lost his mind. He had been digging for four days straight without sleep and was overcome with demonic emotions. A psychologist from the FBI tried to speak with him, and then many other doctors and priests tried to calm him down, but without any success.
A nurse and I laid him down. We started smoothing his hair as we held his hands. We listened to him rant until he fell into a gentle sleep. We sat next to him for a few hours, watching over him. When he woke up, it was as if nothing had ever happened. He went quietly back to work on the pile. Like everyone else, he didn’t want to leave; the job wasn’t finished yet.
There were bankers, waiters, lawyers, animators, actors, mums, ad execs, plumbers, singers, and students—people from all walks of life working together. No job was beneath us.
During the first few days, a successful lawyer took charge of cleaning the only functional restroom facilities that I knew of at Ground Zero, located in the makeshift morgue at the American Express building. The bathroom consisted of just six toilets, but was visited regularly by hundreds of workers. He kept it working manually by carrying buckets of water back and forth from the Hudson River. He burned scented candles around the floor so people could see their way in to pee at night. He was there twenty-four hours a day, and he was a true hero. There were many others like him.
One night, I found an old lady pushing a tea trolley around the broken streets. I inquired as to how she had made her way into Ground Zero. She said that as soon as she had seen the incident on television, she had packed up her car with tea and driven from Chicago. She had told the perimeter guard, “Step aside, sonny,” and he had done exactly that. She was eighty-eight years old and she knew that she was needed.
A quiet teenager ran around with sweat dripping from his face, delivering large bottles of water to everyone. His sister had been an illegal immigrant working as a cleaning lady in the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He said helping took his mind off her.
The rescue dogs lived in the room next to St. Charlie’s bar. Their owners lowered them down into the holes of “the pile” each day to sniff for survivors. They would come back with burned feet and singed tongues, but they, too, always put forth a herculean effort.
It was moments like those, witnessing the actions of the everyday folks on the ground, that melted my soul. They showed that humanity was alive with goodness and that we weren’t going to let the terrorists win.
By September 15, we were exhausted and had nothing left to give. But we still had one more thing left to do. All week we had heard rumors of firefighters’ body parts yet to be retrieved from the top floors of the Sheraton hotel located across the road from the World Trade Center. So Michael and I and a few other adventurers decided to climb the stairs up to the roof to take care of the issue. Fifty-five haunted floors later, we collapsed, out of breath, wondering how the firemen had done this while loaded down with hundreds of pounds of equipment and breathing smoke.
Stepping to the edge of the roof, we leaned over the railing and found ourselves gazing down into the under-gloom of the gates of hell. I saw a great black pit, as though Satan had risen up out of the earth and scorched everything in his path. Fire and steam came spewing forth from the nostrils of crushed steel, which had the greenish color of bile. Everything was imprisoned in a metal dungeon. I closed my eyes and listened to the cries of a thousand innocent voices. I thought of a quote from Dante’s Inferno: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’intrate: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
The gates of hell at Ground Zero
The final shutdown