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Ron Stepneski's News & Views
Ron Stepneski's
News & Views
There is only one way to climb Africa’s tallest mountain -- one step at a time as the air becomes painfully thin and you fight for every inch. Click here.
HIV/AIDS
rips Africa
Nearly 30 million Africans have the potentially deadly HIV virus or AIDS -- the largest infected population on earth. They desperately need help. Click here.
Finding solace
at Ground Zero
Where heroes fought,
innocents died and
patriots were born
NEW YORK, Sept. 8, 2002 --  I doubt I would have visited the site of the World Trade Center if it hadn’t been for my girlfriend Sandy. Just before the first anniversary of the Twin Towers’ collapse, she said she'd always wanted to see it. I had no idea.
So on a bright and clear Saturday morning -- four days before the first anniversary of the tragedy -- we drove across the George Washington Bridge, down the West Side Highway, past the large vacant area where the Twin Towers used to stand and parked at the tip of lower Manhattan.

Parking: $30 for two hours or more.  Welcome to New York.

It wasn’t crowded yet. Still early on a weekend morning. Maybe everyone else who wanted to see the site in person had come and done that, I thought. Perhaps we were the last.

We walked hand in hand from the parking lot near Battery Park, nodding to the police directing traffic. I felt the new civility, the new friendliness, the new respect that many feel toward civil servants since the towers were destroyed and some 3,000 lives were lost, police and firemen included. They were heroes with more guts than I could ever hope to have.

In a few blocks, we quietly came upon the site we had seen on television so often – a full city-block where the 110-story Twin Towers had majestically stretched to the heavens for some 30 years – empty now.

I remembered the times I had visited Windows on the World, a restaurant high atop one of the Twin Towers and looking down at the view in awe. I remember wondering what would happen if the tower snapped in half and laughing nervously at my stupid worry.

The site was well cleaned up, compared to the pile of rubble and horror we witnessed on our screens at home right after it happened and for months afterward. All the debris, metal shards, standing walls and – God help us! — bodies of the victims had been hauled out.

We stared silently through the metal mesh fence at this giant hole in the ground not knowing what to say.

I had been there a week before the tragedy, riding in on the Path train with thousands of others from Hoboken, riding the escalators up from the subway rails deep in the bowels of the buildings to the retail mall stores that led to the street. I remember thinking I should stop for a loaf of bread at Au Bon Pain but worried I’d miss my appointment. How lucky I was I hadn’t come a week later.

There were still men working at the bottom of the site, doing who knows what? Probably preparing it for anniversary in a few days or possibly working to restore the subway tunnel and platform down there somewhere.

All of the visitors walked back and forth surveying the site in near quiet, holding cameras. It was as if we were visiting a church or a graveyard and paying our respects.

That’s what it was -- a gigantic horrible graveyard where thousands of people died one morning in a terrible twisted act that stunned and staggered the world.

It was the worst God-awful tragedy the United States had ever seen on its soil and the worst I’d ever seen in my half century of life.

It happened right before my eyes as I watched on TV and from parts of my New Jersey hometown miles away and no matter how long I live I will never forget it.

We took a couple of pictures of the site like everyone else and walked up to a nearby church where expressions of sympathy from all over the world hung on a wrought iron fence and hawkers quietly sold souvenirs from tables on the sidewalk.

Then we walked back. It looked like a construction site, prepared for the erection of a new building or buildings. Like a fresh table set for a new dinner.

There ought to be a memorial, I thought, perhaps a five-story museum inside one of the three or four tall buildings I want to replace the towers -- something that remembers both the heroes and the victims, the hard-working people who were struck down while providing for the families they loved.

I am sure we’ll put that up someday when the pain has passed, when the hurt starts to heal and the grief ebbs. Most of us will experience that in our own time. Some who lost loved ones might never get there.

The rest of us cut by the flight of those planes must also do what it takes to defend liberty and protect the nation against additional threats. That’s what the people who died in those buildings would have wanted. We owe it to them and ourselves.

Sandy and I left as it started to get crowded. I asked her if she was okay. “Yes,” she said. “It was just something I had to see.”

I squeezed her hand and knew what she meant. It will always be hard to believe. There were no other words to say.

 

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