The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [7]
As we trudged along, Michael told me that he would catch up with me in a minute; he wanted to go back and get his oxygen tank, which he’d forgotten at St. Charlie’s. It never occurred to me that this was good-bye, but once he’d disappeared into the crowds and rubble, we lost track of each other. We didn’t see each other again until one year later, at the Ground Zero memorial ceremony.
I was still inside the Ground Zero perimeter when a random stranger offered me a piece of chicken. I thought that was a really nice thing for someone in the street to do. As I sat on the curb eating my chicken, the world fell silent. I was absolutely brain-dead and felt no emotions at all. It was as if I had been in a long dream, and while I’d been trying to wake up, something kept dragging me back in. All around me, fresh workers with shocked faces and clean uniforms were streaming into the Ground Zero area. They stared at my sooty clothes and hair and the toothbrush, scissors, and selection of first aid tools tied to my waist, and the oxygen tank slung over my back, and they tilted their heads in respect for what I must have been through.
I found my Rollerblades against the Stuyvesant School wall where I had left them five days earlier and started to Rollerblade up the West Side Highway toward my apartment on the Upper East Side. The streets were filled with thousands of New Yorkers who had lined up to show their appreciation for the workers as they left Ground Zero. They held up THANK YOU signs and red, white, and blue streamers and cheered. For the first time since I had entered Ground Zero, I burst out crying in uncontrollable tears. Embarrassed at myself, I skated home as quickly as possible, tears flooding my face, taking darker streets to hide from the light.
CHAPTER 2
I grew up in Australia. My father was an Anglican preacher and a businessman, and my mother was a nurse. They were always flying off to developing countries across the Asia-Pacific region, from the Philippines to Indonesia to Fiji, teaching about God and helping the poor. I was the youngest child of four, so my parents often took me with them on their trips to the jungle while my two brothers, Geoffrey and Stephen, who were only a few years older than me, and my elder sister, Lyndall, stayed behind in school or at work or with relatives.
On those overseas adventures, I shared my showers with frogs and great big water bugs that had eyes the size of quarters and looked like they were going to eat me alive. I ate strange foods, played with kids who didn’t speak English, and suffered through many 103-degree fevers.
When I wasn’t traveling, I still had an adventuresome childhood. My family lived in a big white house at the edge of the Australian bush. Our extensive gardens led down to a deep river, and across its banks lay one of the largest national parks in the country. My parents had bought the land for next to nothing back when nobody wanted to live out in the middle of nowhere, but soon it flourished into a beautiful estate.
There in the hot, dry Australian bush, our home was threatened by bushfires annually. When the fires started, kangaroos would swim over and come bouncing up into our backyard. My siblings, the neighborhood kids, and I would jump in our tin boats and try to put out the smaller fires on the other side of the river with wet sacks before the flames flew across to our houses.
Throughout my childhood, my strict, religious parents monitored the minds of us four kids but let our bodies run free. On the weekends, Geoffrey, Stephen, and I would canoe across the river into the bush that was our backyard. There, we would camp, climb trees, and swim in secret underground freshwater pools