9/11

Lynna Howard's daughter, the "Baby Girl," on her wedding day at Berlin's Love Parade. Krystl Hall is a New Yorker of long standing. She lives near what used to be the World Trade Center.

See story below. Copyright 2005, all rights reserved.

Today I envy the horses cropping grass in the pasture beyond my backyard in rural Idaho. The horses go calmly about the business of feeding their sleek bodies, not knowing that terrorists have split the skin of the nation and that we humans are experiencing a strange mixture of disbelief, suffering and anger.

In one way, I'm far away from the scenes of disaster in Washington and in New York City, but in another way I'm all too close. This is the second time that terrorists have almost ended my daughter's life.

Cities are an alien landscape to me even when they're not being devastated by the actions of people who have mistaken the will of madmen for the will of God. I can accept and plan for the risks of meeting grizzly bears on wilderness trails, for flash floods in canyons, or for lightening strikes on alpine ridges--but how do you deal with irrational humans? Whenever I visited New York City in the past, my daughter would take care of me in a touching role reversal, shepherding me past or away from all kinds of threats I couldn't see. I did the same for her here in the "wild west," but I'm helpless when it comes to explosions over the Baby Girl's head in Manhattan's financial district.

The Baby Girl is now 31 years old, having recently celebrated her birthday on September 1st, and she's lived in NYC since her days as a student at NYU. Krystl loves New York City, and she loved her "village" within that city, Battery Park. It took a lot of flatland hiking on my part through the streets of Manhattan before I finally absorbed by osmosis the concept of neighborhoods and villages within the great metropolis. At first, I thought the neighborhood concept and people's attachments to their neighborhoods was just a conceit or an oddity, something akin to the way river runners insist on naming every rapid in a river. But I came to appreciate the difference between Chinatown and Little Italy, between Hell's Kitchen and Spanish Harlem.

Krystl's neighborhood is gone now. The little grocery store across from the plaza of the twin towers where she and her husband, Doug, always shopped is not just diminished or changed, but vanished. The plaza, the fountains, the walkways, Krystl's daily walk through the World Trade Center and its magnificent lobby, the route she took from her apartment to the subway station-that's all gone. It was a blow to both of us when a truck bomb had damaged the lower section an hour after Krystl had walked through there at her fast, New Yorker's clip years before. But this latest terrorist attack was different. Krystl was still alive, but the world around her had fallen into some sort of nightmare. She said it was a cliché, but her view of the world had changed on all levels, from the physical world that she could see, right to the marrow of her bones.

Yes, my sweet, sharply intelligent, beautiful Baby Girl is okay. She thinks fast and she's fast on her feet. She called me after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, knowing that the news would hit the media and I would worry. She was only a block away from the building, but on the other side of it, when the first plane hit. She heard the sound and turned with a group of other New Yorkers on their way to work to see flaming debris falling from the sky. At that time, she didn't know the source of the trouble, but without hesitation she dove for the subway entrance and was in the subway before the ash started to fall. I tuned my radio to National Public Radio news, but they were covering mundane and ordinary news of the day. About thirty seconds later, they broke in to announce the story of a plane smashing into one of the towers. As a private pilot, I could not imagine such a thing, not in good weather anyway. I had such a bad feeling about it that a metallic taste, like copper, invaded the back of my mouth.

Krystl took the subway to her work office immediately, figuring that the transport system could soon be shut down and that she shouldn't turn around and go home to her apartment near the WTC. The second plane struck the south tower while she was riding the subway to her office. Now she was stuck in her office as New York traffic came to a standstill except for emergency vehicles. With her boss in L.A., Krystl turned out to be the ranking officer, so to speak, with the job of organizing the departure of her co-workers and closing the office. She used to be able to see the tops of the twin towers of the World Trade Center from her office window but the towers disappeared as she worked. Luckily, she still had a phone connection to Doug, so she knew that her apartment building was still standing-so far. With the office closed down, Krystl walked to a friend's place, a one-room apartment, one of those mini-spaces in NYC that strike me as too cramped for human habitation, especially when I compare them to the fact that many westerners think a neighbor you can see is too close. More people worked in those ruined towers than live in my small town and all the surrounding area combined. Space is relative.

From her friend's apartment, Krystl operated like a switchboard for friends and family. Her husband was trapped in their apartment, on the 35th floor of a building at Liberty Court, with a ringside seat for the worst show on earth. The apartment filled up with the smell of smoke and then with dust as the towers collapsed. Doug said the streets below the apartment building looked like a scene from Pompeii. One of their cats freaked out and hid under the bed.

Krystl and I had once walked through the tower's lower levels on a cold morning. We watched our reflections approach the glass, and we paused to look up with a swift shiver of pleasing vertigo, with the same dizzy awe you get when you stand at the base of a cliff in Zion National Park, or when you look up to see how far you have yet to climb to top the Continental Divide. Then we entered the World Trade Center. Whoever cleaned that building must have loved it because it was spotless inside, cleaned with the attention that only someone who cared could have given it. I don't think you can pay people enough to show that kind of attention to detail, they have to take pride in it on their own. Public spaces soared high enough to accommodate full-grown palm trees. Orchids, shops, and architectural details are all a blur in my mind now, but the ache of beauty remains. I was, briefly, proud to be human, to be of the race that could build such a thing. And I finally understood how these landmark buildings could be like distinctive mountain peaks are for those of us who live along the Rocky Mountains. More than a physical presence, more than named topography in the landscape, the buildings become that gesture toward heaven or that reach towards greatness that temporarily takes us beyond our normal boundaries.

After the towers collapsed, Doug was swiftly evacuated from the apartment building, and taken across the Hudson River by boat to New Jersey, along with all the other Battery Park refugees. There was no time to save the cats. I would have grabbed a backpack with survival gear, but then my pack is always ready because that's my lifestyle, so much of it spent out of doors that when I come home I have to remind myself that I can extend the day with electric lights. Doug left with nothing but twenty dollars in his pocket, and in New York, twenty dollars is nothing. He and the other refugees were unceremoniously dumped in New Jersey. Doug called Krystl from a pay phone next to a building that was being cleared for use as a temporary morgue.

Now Krystl began to feel the pangs that come from being separated from loved ones. No matter how great the tragedy is you mostly want one simple thing, to hold the hands of the people close to you. For Krystl, there was no way out of Manhattan, so she engineered a rescue for Doug, sending relatives to the Sheraton Hotel, where he sat like a piece of flotsam from a great storm, washed up on the Jersey shore and now in everybody's way in the staff area of the hotel. Gridlocked traffic kept his rescuers on the road until 11:30 PM. Once Doug was safe, Krystl had to look for a place to sleep. I would have given whatever I have to help her then, as she walked around the city with it's unsettling and macabre change of personality, looking for shelter. There was nothing for it but to walk, first to 14th street where she got close but not quite to a friend's house who would have had enough room to put her up. At the police lines, she turned and headed back uptown to another friend's house--a self-reliant New Yorker, hoofing it around the city, and uncomplaining when it counts.

When I was last in Manhattan, I went to the tops of the some the taller buildings just to get my bearings, feeling secure in my sense of direction only when I could see the shape of the island and the rivers embracing it. But after several days of wandering the streets, I started to sight off the buildings, especially at night, watching for the distinctive lights of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings, the impossible height of the World Trade Center. I realized that even seasoned New Yorkers did the same. The buildings are part of their compass, an internal feeling of being anchored in the world as well as an external confirmation of where you are. Krystl would have been wandering her changed landscape without those beacons.

Succored at last at another friend's house, she slept a few hours and woke up determined to join her husband. A bomb scare in the subway sent her back to the streets to hike to Penn Station. Why is every disaster followed by a flurry of bomb threats? It's as if some people wake up in an imaginary land, one that matches their dreams perhaps, and they act on a sick impulse to prolong the terror, to keep that adrenaline rush going. Long distance trekking in entirely different wild lands seems to run in the family, so hiking all over Manhattan didn't faze Krystl. She caught a train (all the rides were free) to New Jersey and collected all the hugs that had been saved for her.

Her father drove her and Doug to Connecticut where they could stay with relatives for a few days. The last time I talked to her, she was doing only one thing, sitting on the shore of a lake, looking at the water. Just looking.

I see Krystl's apartment building in the news photos. So far it's still standing. Liberty Court was festooned with stretchers and victims in one photo, with the pretty brickwork of the courtyard and the blue river as a background for blood. That must have been when the wind was blowing north, taking the cloud of ash with it. In other photos survivors are covered with ash--everyone is the same color, the same race.

Who knows what Krystl's two cats can see now? Maybe they're both under the bed. Krystl hopes she can get back in to feed them before they too have to be added to the victim list. It's too much for me to think of cats or of other mothers whose Baby Girls were not so lucky. I'm going to go sit by the Snake River and look at a Monet of clouds riding the river's dark current.
--Lynna Prue Howard, September, 2001

Krystl's website blog: http://oniwaban.typepad.com/cloud_city/

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