By Eric Basart
Other Voices
“I’m not complaining. I mean, at least I’m not dead like my neighbor, but this has to be the worst day for traffic.” This is what passes for normal conversation around my Manhattan office in the weeks after Sept. 11.
I can’t even turn on the television anymore. It’s not the images that cut my heart out. It’s the sickening idea that life goes on; that what was the most arresting moment of my life managed to become, within hours, a set of clichés about ground zero and tired expressions of how we will somberly prevail as a nation united.
One minute I was thoughtlessly walking to work; the next, I stood still on Fifth Avenue which stared down in an unbroken line at the twin towers. Flames and smoke poured off the top. Even four miles away, the towers consumed the skyline. It was like watching a mountain on fire. As if one day you stared up from walking your dog and saw Mount Hamilton or Montebello Ridge ringed in a crown of burning blackness.
The police were evacuating nearby buildings; but people had nowhere to go, so the streets outside were filled to the brim with people standing and staring at the sky. Car traffic disappeared and sirens were everywhere. Police cars, fire trucks and black suburbans with smoked windows swept by the crowds with sirens blazing.
It was a beautiful clear day without a single cloud in the sky. I will never forget walking down the middle of Fifh Avenue around the massive security cordon surrounding the Empire State Building at the height of the afternoon. Fighter jets flew combat patrol over the street every five minutes while the huge gray and black and yellow cloud continued to rise and eat away at the horizon to the south.
When I finally reached my home in Brooklyn Heights that night, south and across the East River, it was much worse than anything I saw in the city. My apartment is a little over a mile from the World Trade Center across the East River. The first thing you noticed was the smell: the heat and dust, mixed with the plastic laminates of thousands of office desks, computers, pens, reading glasses and shoes.
Life here will never be the same again. When the wind shifts the right way, I can still smell it when I go out for lunch in the afternoon. The pictures of the missing, who everyone knows are dead, stare out at me from their family photos.
The world is changed, proclaims every talking head on the nightly news. There is no doubt in my mind that everyone in America is going to find out firsthand.
Eric Basart grew up in Los Altos and worked as an editor on the Los Altos High School Talon before his graduation in 1997. Last May he received his bachelor’s from New York University and while he visits Los Altos often, Eric currently lives and works in New York City and has no plans of leaving any time soon.
