NYC has a flexible attitude toward holidays. The mail and the Stock Exchange may close for a day, but people go to work anyway. Parking regulations are suspended for an astounding list of celebrations, including (as of a few years ago) Muslim holy days. Groups of Jewish friends get together to see movies and order Chinese on Christmas. The Italians have Columbus Day, the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day, and everyone is at least aware of Jewish holy days.
So while today is Veteran’s Day, large numbers of us are going to work as usual. This year’s change is that most people are using the day — formerly first on the “So why exactly is this still a holiday?” list — for its original purpose. We reflect on what the service of veterans means, on the value of their sacrifices of time, injury and life, and on the importance of our communities and country.
New York is always expanding, embracing and including both new immigrants and shifting social groups. So “veterans” clearly now encompasses the veterans of 9/11. The FDNY, NYPD, uniformed and volunteer services, even the ash-covered workers who streamed from the wreckage are all veterans of a different kind of conflict.
I find it hard to describe properly the mood in NYC. And of course, there’s not just one. The rare moment of common shock, solidarity, mutual support is waning slowly. The city is back to being its faceted self, a collection of millions of people, dreams, goals, struggles and moments.
The best approximations seem particularly zen: Two-sidedness, irreconcilable contradiction, cognitive dissonance, yin and yang, all and nothing at the same time.
Ever resilient, vast and deep enough to survive far worse events, New York has returned to more or less itself in the two months and a day since 9/11. Social history points out that major traumas, short of complete annihilation, have surprisingly little effect on a city’s viability. Scar tissue forms. Our mental maps are redrawn. Life moves on. We have passed through the prevoiusly unthinkable weeks of anthrax, and are now “over” the idea of anthrax. We have a new mayor, and will plunge with him into a future of deficits, cutbacks, hard choices and stringency unthought of just two years ago.
The subways are almost entirely back. A stub end of one line, the West Side IRT, will be out of service for years, its tunnels collapsed for a thousand feet. Two other lines have a single station closed. But for travel within NYC, the system is back. All through service has returned. Unexplained delays are common, and tolerated. Businesses have adapted to the reality. “The Brooklyn train just stopped for half an hour” is now known to be true, not an invented excuse for lateness.
Commutes into the city are more challenging. PATH trains from New Jersey no longer cross under the Hudson to downtown; the tunnels have been plugged with concrete to prevent the system flooding if the Trade Center site (half of it in former Hudson riverbed) should leak. Again, commuters adapt. Ferry ridership has doubled. Bicycle commuting has risen 50%, to 150,000 trips a day. Meetings get rescheduled, workers leave earlier, more people make more cellphone calls more often.
Friends discuss the waning of discussions. For many, a landmark is the first business meeting that doesn’t include a “Where were you?” or “Did you know anyone?” discussion. For me, getting together over beer and burgers with former colleagues now scattered to a variety of new jobs, it was a great relief to realize that it took me until the end of the gathering to *notice* that we hadn’t discussed it.
And yet, at the same time, in a thousand little ways, it is always with us. We still use many terms — “it”, the events, 9/11 — to refer to everything that happened, then and since. It becomes background, synthesized into our shared language.
Walking out of my building in the morning, if the wind is blowing uptown, I sometimes smell the acrid odor from Ground Zero, still burning after two months. Cars sport American flags on their aerials, though fewer these days. An occasional “missing” poster, now faded and creased, remains on a wall or mailbox or in a window. And shining silver airplanes, flying south high over Manhattan, still make my stomach flip-flop.
While the boundaries have been pulled inward, Ground Zero is still both construction site and pilgrimage. The grinding physical and emotional toll of the work led to fistfights between firemen and police officers over police efforts to contain a protest by firefighters angry that their numbers were being reduced to shift the effort from recovery to removal of wreckage. “Bravest v. Finest,” blared the NY Post headline.
Those closest are most directly affected. The smell, the noise, the 24-hour spotlights on the site, and ongoing cleanup efforts all replay the tapes we still carry in our heads. One Battery Park City apartment building is still uninhabitable even as the park has been cleaned, buildings and streets pressure-washed, tunnels reopened, and desperate ad campaigns undertaken to bring tourists, locals, anyone with money to spend back to New York, Manhattan, lower Manhattan, the financial district.
And yet. And yet.
A sunset silhouette of the Manhattan skyline, viewed past the George Washington Bridge from aboard a southbound train around Tarrytown, encompassed both the loss of the Twin Towers and the permanence of nature’s beauty. The Hudson Line from Albany to NYC is one of the very oldest rail routes in the country; almost unnoticed, it celebrated 150 years of continuous operation along the banks of the Hudson last month.
The rider passes stored sites in American history and culture. The crenellated ruins of Bannerman Arsenal on its island … majestic Storm King Mountain … the site where revolutionary patriots drew a submerged chain across the Hudson to prevent British ships from progressing up to Kingston … West Point … Sing Sing prison … the George Washington Bridge, the metal latticework of its towers, originally meant to be clad in classic stone, left proudly bare.
An infinite palette of rich greys and blues after sunset bring home the beauty of the Hudson Valley, central to an expanding nation’s vision of itself a century and a half ago. Railcars and attire might change, but thundering toward NYC, I reflected that I was part of six or seven generations of travelers viewing this valley, watching the waves on the river, overtaking a perfectly horizontal egret in flight, calmed by the granite mountains and rolling hills that will not be moved during our lifetime.
So at the same time that everything has changed, not so much has changed. That is part of recovery, I think. And it is reassuring.
love, jv.
Author’s note: Once again, I am honored and humbled by the reaction to my continuing letters since 9/11. They have been redistributed multiple times; I’ve received dozens of responses from around the world. Each e-mail helped connect me to caring people and friends, and I thank you all. As always, feel free to pass this along to anyone you think might want to read it — especially outside NYC.