Shoes. Closed-toe. Soles with suitable traction for running over possibly hot debris.

Pants, even though it's too hot for them. You don't know how long or in what conditions you will be wearing them. Rubble could cut you. It could get cold; the smoke might block out the sun.

A shirt and bra comfortable enough to sleep in, if need be. Who knows when it will be safe to go home.

Bandanna or dust mask to breathe through.

Flashlight. Bicycle. Portable food. Is there a supply of bottled water in the house? Should I run some into the tub? What exactly do you do to prepare for anthrax attacks and planes falling from the sky?

Once I was actually awake and aware; once the first tower had fallen on TV, breaking the flaming buildings' awful spell and propelling me out of the house to find friends, these were the thoughts on my mind. Earthquake thoughts and protest thoughts.

* * *

For days after the World Trade Center disaster, I struggled to write about it. Blogging wasn't foremost on my mind. At that point I was unemployed and in a more for-profit mode with my writing, so I tried to come up with a pitch. Making a buck on the disaster would have been callous at best; fortunately, that was not my (first) motive, but the feeling I was acting on wasn't appreciably more honorable. I felt the need to have an impact on a large scale more strongly than usual; a bigger forum would be better. (I also felt like a real dupe for sitting petrified in my desk chair in Queens while other writers and photographers rushed south of 14th street for interviews.) I felt small, and helpless, and useless. The call for blood donations was eventually rescinded, and the area was sealed off to everyone but emergency personnel.

Writing draft upon draft, I found myself completely unable to struggle out of the timing and particulars of my experience of the event. One of my files is labeled "awful first page about soy milk": convinced I was lactose intolerant, I had grimly told myself that I would start drinking soy milk that Tuesday. There was a carton of the foul brown stuff waiting for me in the fridge. I was thunderstruck by how trivial my thoughts had been up to that point, and couldn't bring myself to take the soy milk anecdote out of the blow-by-blow account of my feelings and all the conversations I had on September 11th and on subsequent days. Even now I feel compelled to highlight pieces which I can't fit into a narrative: how a number of friends of James's, who I didn't know at the time but have since become friendly with, were unaccounted for and supposed to be in that area, and what I would have missed if we had lost them. How passionately angry my sister Sylvie got, calling for the as-yet unknown murderers to face their own mothers, and the mothers of those they killed. How another, more curmudgeonly relative surprising me by saying the mass deaths caused by the buildings falling were a result of people going to "unnatural, illogical extremes" for commerce... "no good reason for concentrating that many people in that small a space... too many rats in the cage."

In retrospect I am able to arrange a few coherent lines through my tiny fragment of this story; they are about earthquakes and protests.

The horrible slowness of the way the events of September 11th unfolded frightened me particularly, and I wonder if it also did to other transplanted Californians who went through this. California disasters have an identifiable trajectory. Earthquakes and aftershocks generally last a few minutes at most; fires are contained; the OJ Simpson trial can only go on so long before Ito hands down a verdict. The first time I watched the concrete of the driveway flap like a shaken rag while the neighbor's dog tried to chew through the fence in terror, I was completely unhinged, but I've gotten used to the routine enough to quietly jump into the doorway when the ground starts to move. (Minor setback in my progress -- the very mild 4.7 centered in Yorba Linda last week had me shrieking as I rolled out of bed. I'm too tense. I blame Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and that goddamned safety alert system.)

The media coverage of disasters also has its trajectory. When the shaking stops, the anchors climb out from under the reporting booth; stations drop their ads and truck down to Caltech for interviews with Lucy or Kerry. Within 24 hours the magnitude of the quake has been revised, damages are assessed, and the dead and injured are tallied. The reporters wrap the late-night news with a promise they'll drop whatever else they're doing if there's new developments.

When, by midday, reporters were still unable to deliver any figures on casualties, and there were still no commercials being run, I knew this was going to be substantially larger than any disaster I'd ever lived through. Panic set in.

Hanging around with seismologists enough has gotten me seeing mountains and hills as the records of earthquakes. Knowing that brush fires happen even when people aren't there to be careless with their campfires makes hillsides of scorched stumps a somewhat less frightening landscape. I trust the earth. It does what it has to do, and like the wood-frame house, I bend with it. The troubling thing is trying to stay sane without the belief that strategic deterrence is as absolute a mandate as seismic pressure.

Many Americans doubtless looked at the burning towers without any comprehension of why someone would attack them. For me, the meaning was instantly clear. The tallest symbols of capitalism were being brought low. Symbolic play is familiar to me. I have seen Michael Moore take a gay men's chorus to Pat Buchanan's house. I have seen a Vieques activist dangling from the crown of the Statue of Liberty, hanging a Puerto Rican flag. I have seen an American flag, its stars replaced with corporate logos, hung over Times Square. If I had wanted to make a statement about injustices perpetrated by corporations for the sake of profit with the help of the government, I might also have chosen to play off the World Trade Center. I just would not have killed or hurt anyone.

It is the shudder of recognition I felt on the day of Septemeber 11th that I have had the hardest time explaining. It is even harder coming back to it a year later, knowing that activists I walked alongside last January are now being held as terrorists.

The tactics of the terrorists looked more like those of my protesting friends than those of the government they sought to attack. They did not mobilize troops publically; rather, they organized cells much like our affinity groups (though more impermeable to infiltration). They did not attack with fighter planes. Instead, they misused what came to hand. They grabbed a passenger plane; the black bloc grabbed fire extinguishers, pieces of fencing. And, like the black bloc's smashing of windows, their attack can be seen as defensive if put in context. I don't mean to portray Al Qaeda as rational representatives of Islam or the Arab world. However, knowing that Iraqi children are dying of malnutrition as a result of sanctions and fallout from the use of depleted uranium by the U.S.; knowing that Palestinians are being beaten and denied medical treatment and killed by Israeli soldiers armed and supported by the U.S.; and knowing that the U.S. actively squashed a burgeoning democracy in Iran in the 1950s for the sake of keeping the region "stable," not to mention U.S. arming of the Taliban back in the day -- knowing all that, it's not surprising that the terrorists were mad enough to do it.

This is what I wrote a few weeks later:

ultimately, we wanted to stop the killing in their country, too.The difference is that none among their number are pacifists, while almost all of us are.

...My immediate thought was this: My friends in the anti-globalization movement have been working for years to cause a ruckus this big. Would this be what it took to bring commerce and government to its knees?

If that was what it was going to take, I didn't want any part of it.

I wrote that last line in horror at myself, trying to pull back from some precipice. Now?... I am even more aghast than ever at the U.S. government and the horrible things a small handful of people have been able to wreak using its powers.

I read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and found it the only thing that could soothe me, the only context in which the Bush presidency and the current militancy make sense. (Now I'm thinking it's time to break out the really strong stuff, the Twain.) Americans voted for Nixon even though they knew about Watergate, strung along by the man's promises that the end of the Vietnam War was near. Now people are supporting the war in Iraq, giving in to the Department of Homeland Security, turning in neighbors and friends and strangers.

There is no hope. America is huge and torpid. No amount of prodding or screaming or fiery revelations will do anything to rouse it.

I spent a few months trying to work with a group of educators teaching about the war in schools and eventually... just gave up. Dropped out of the movement entirely. Told myself, I guess, that I was doing plenty at work. I Gave At The Office. And I was doing some, but nothing challenging to me or to anything or anyone else. I did join up with I-Witness Video, shot some video of the WTO and ALF-ELF marches. Happily, some of my footage of an arrest is apparently being used in an ALF-ELF marcher's trial. But this is passive stuff, shooting for I-Witness; much self-effacement, not the active involvement in information dissemination and planning I'm used to.

By now I've completely lost my compass. I feel a mild compulsion to help people, which is manifesting in a feint towards an advanced degree in education, but I'm ambivalent about activism. We will never make the kind of news the terrorists did. If we do, the politicians and media will lie about our motives as much as they do about anyone's.

One thing did become completely clear that day. I had always said I'd never have kids, that there's too many of them out there already, I had too much else I wanted to do and I didn't think I'd make a good mother. September 11th, walking back through the smoky alleys from Kim's, I knew I wanted to have kids. Not right away, of course, but someday. This was not because of values; it just struck me as the saddest thing in the world not to have someone worrying whether you were OK that day, and also not to have someone to worry about. Maybe it makes it easier, but who wants that kind of easy?

* * *

This September 11th I begged off work and gave into an instinct I have been fretting with all year: I ran away, out Long Island. No sense to it, aside from the fact that Long Island is the only place you can run miles away to without going through a major transit hub first. I was actually afraid the terrorists would strike again. I go through periods like this. I'm a fool enough to believe the fscking terror alerts.

So I got up long before I normally would -- before rush hour -- and boarded the Long Island Railroad away from the city, blinking my malfunctioning eyes against the early sun. I thought I'd go all the way out to the end of the island, but I was remembering a song on a Tito Puente album I have and so I got off at a ferry stop for Fire Island.

There was nobody waiting for the ferry yet. The pier stank of bathroom cleaner. A voice was droning names.

Two TV sets were on. Hillary Clinton was calling out the names of the dead. She was on C.

I walked out to the parking lot and started crying. Running away did nothing. It was all still there. I walked around and around listening to the birds and the wind, kicking at the gravel.

When I got back, there were more people on the pier. The TV was calling out the Gs. In a moment of frustrated snobbery I hated them for not doing it right. They weren't calling out "Presente" after every name the way they do when they recite the names of the Disappeared at the School of the Americas protest. It was like they didn't care none of those people were there.

When I got to a store on Fire Island and bought lunch, they were calling out Sanchez, Sanchez. I wished people would just turn the damn TV off. Some of us were out there to get away from the coverage. If they cared so damn much why weren't they in the city visiting that giant smoking crater?

Wind was strong from the northwest that day. On the windward side, the waves spat foam into the air and slopped great hanks of weed onto the docks. I walked among the empty summer cottages out to the leeward beach. The wind was so mighty the waves were atomized at their tips. The sand dunes blew into my hair as I tucked up against their slopes. Down the shore, a group of people threw long-stemmed roses into the tide one by one. I didn't want to know why. Maybe it was a wedding. I found sodden petals on the beach later; also my first starfish, which I gave away, thinking about how the whole of it was a skeleton.

I spent most of the afternoon nursing a single iced tea in a cafe that boomed with wind, trying to make fiction out of stories from my family. Once or twice I managed to forget what day it was. Posted by Gus at September 11, 2002 11:11 PM | TrackBack