story11035.xml
Title
story11035.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2004-09-13
911DA Story: Story
WTC - 9/12
I work for a local hospital, and spent the 11th and 12th answering phone calls from people desperately looking for their loved ones. I had the late shift on the 12th, and that was the heaviest and hardest. Only one out of 200 names could be confirmed as treated and released. The unique grief of the hospitals in the area was that we stood ready for massive casualties, and there were none. My co-worker, a young man named Chris, and I were alone in the office for six hours, taking calls from every part of the country, not able to help them. We finally got out of there at 11:15 pm. His girlfriend, Carolyn, an x-ray technician, had appeared out of nowhere, wearing a thin white sweater and green scrubs, with a very grim look on her face. "I was just there." She pointed to a building across the street. "From where we are, now, to there, there is the rubble, where the buildings used to be. But it's massive. It's so crazy. Everything is everywhere. I'm going back. They need eyewash." She said other things I can't remember, but the main thing was, she was going back. I toyed for a moment with going home and drinking myself to sleep in front of CNN, then looked at Chris and the three of us were in her Pathfinder, on our way to the ER for bottles of eyewash. Chris and I put on green scrubs and made sure our hospital badges were displayed, and we took off. It was midnight, and we were virtually alone on the road. They were in the front, talking quietly. I was in the back with my head against the cold glass window, tired, and anxious to see the destruction.
From the Verrazano Bridge, we got our first look at the massive cloud of smoke and dust, glowing white from the searchlights, spreading out into a thick gray fog. The remaining buildings were sharp, black silhouettes. We were stopped at the entrance of the Brooklyn Queens Tunnel by a police officer, who waved us through after he saw the supplies, badges and scrubs. We followed an empty flatbed through the tunnel and came out on the other side.
The Pathfinder we were in crawled knee-high through fire trucks, cranes, military vehicles and flatbed trucks, making tracks in the deep dust that covered everything and everyone. The landscape was foreign- gray and muffled. With a backdrop of a black night, reality was redefined as something hard to touch, hard to see and hard to swallow. It was the silence of an awful snowfall obliterating familiar ground. Green traffic signs hung sideways pointing down. Ghosts in colorless uniforms doing urgent jobs already routine. There was no point of reference, no relevant direction, no sense that anyone still alive had ever been there before.
?This is where I parked before. Look. There?s that infant car seat I told you about.? We parked in an empty area near a gray building with gray windows. Alone in the gray was a gray car seat on the gray ground. I stepped out of the car and onto the soft surface of a gray new world. ?Come on.?
We pulled the supplies out of the back, and followed her around the corner. Up until that point, there were glimpses, flashes of smoky light, empty spaces where I remembered walls. We turned the corner and shrank into specks of dust. The sad remains of a disturbed landscape leaned inside itself, supporting the weight of the smoke and bright lights, exposed from the inside out. Ruins and victims of violence and gravity lay mangled and random, twisted, charred, broken, betrayed, murdered and terrified, framed out by a cold night at the very edge of the ending day. Proportion was distorted by slashes across the face of a 30-story building that was left standing, cracks from sidewalk to roof. The sky was black, the smoke was gray, the twisted metal, concrete, glass, rubble, was sharpened and defined by the shadows cast by the brilliant white work-lights; no colors flowed, down through the black channels of the cracks made by the lights, through mounds, over down around, to the ground, which was covered with paper. Sheets of paper, memos, invoices, triplicate forms, records, 8 ? x 11, untorn, unclaimed, unimportant pushed-out leaves fallen from shaken trees. The sounds I heard from machines, from people, from my own throat swallowing, were secrets whispered against the night dulled with dust. To breathe meant to taste the air, the sharp, unknown smells and floating particles and atoms of people and things once whole. The pull on my senses was so complete I felt the vacuum, the lack of space that pulled my breath, my lungs, my heart and essence in and out in waves, and I was replaced to the core by the absolute immensity of the cold intention of chaos.
The triage area where the first aid was occurring was set up in the lobby of a nearby building. We were given facemasks, goggles and rubber gloves, and were told where to put the supplies. Aside from a dog that was receiving aid for a cut paw, the only other medical activity was the washing out of the eyes of the rescue workers. This was being improvised by bending the sharp end of a hypodermic needle into an ?L? shape, holding up the eyelid, and washing out the affected area. There were about a dozen volunteers walking around wearing scrubs of various colors, all from different hospitals. Among the firefighters in all their rescue gear, I felt incredibly underdressed.
Chris and I stood at the base of an escalator, looking for ways to help. We heard they needed an area cleared so that cots could be set up, so we decided to organize the space. There were large boxes of clothing, sweaters, t-shirts, socks and underwear, which had been piled up, unneeded, in the middle of the floor. There were blankets, toothbrushes, mouthwash, band-aids, half-eaten lunches and half-dozen stacks of Poland Spring bottled water scattered, gray and untouched. There were three or four unrecognizable gray mounds on the floor, which I thought were blankets but turned out to be sleeping firefighters.
Carolyn said ?Come on,? again, and we followed her up the unmoving escalator. ?They told me about this.? She led us to jagged-edged opening in a gray wall, and we looked down. From that view we could see the entire rescue effort taking place. If God and Creation are painted on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel, this is the scene of Destruction Michelangelo would paint on the floors of Hell. Clusters of teams of firefighters, dogs, jackhammers, welders, flashlights, paramedics, crawling over the rubble of smoking, twisted-metal mounds, looking for signs of life, finding only bloody pieces of it.
We had to keep moving. No one stands in one place too long, especially to stare. All grief was in another gray pile somewhere, under some wall or stairway, not yet needed.
At one point we became part of a river of firefighters heading towards a point in the rubble where someone had been found. To my knowledge no one had said anything, yet they all moved as a single unit. We stood at the very edge of destruction, trying to see what they were seeing. Behind us a ten-story crane was pulling a mangled steel I-beam out of the ground and placing it on a truck. In front of us, firefighters were watching and waiting. Then, quite suddenly, as if released from a single string, they dispersed, going back to their tasks once again. Two of them came out of the debris, each with the handle of an orange body bag in hand. It was sagging very unnaturally in the middle. That was all. That was it. A piece at a time.
At 3 am, September 13, they gave the word to move the triage, and I heard the word ?recovery? replace the word ?rescue? - a significant change. We decided to go home. Our green scrubs were gray. My skin was gray. My thoughts? We retraced our steps, stepped around the gray car seat, got into the Pathfinder, followed a flatbed into the tunnel, and got stuck behind a slow-moving sanitation truck, which was spraying water down, to wash away the dust, before it escaped into the night.
We drove back across the bridge, looking back, always looking back. I sat in the back with the window down. The black cold night air washed out our lungs. My eyelids were heavy from the dust. We were there for three hours. There were people there spending a season in that Hell. God help them.
Vincent Vok
voksongs@aol.com
I work for a local hospital, and spent the 11th and 12th answering phone calls from people desperately looking for their loved ones. I had the late shift on the 12th, and that was the heaviest and hardest. Only one out of 200 names could be confirmed as treated and released. The unique grief of the hospitals in the area was that we stood ready for massive casualties, and there were none. My co-worker, a young man named Chris, and I were alone in the office for six hours, taking calls from every part of the country, not able to help them. We finally got out of there at 11:15 pm. His girlfriend, Carolyn, an x-ray technician, had appeared out of nowhere, wearing a thin white sweater and green scrubs, with a very grim look on her face. "I was just there." She pointed to a building across the street. "From where we are, now, to there, there is the rubble, where the buildings used to be. But it's massive. It's so crazy. Everything is everywhere. I'm going back. They need eyewash." She said other things I can't remember, but the main thing was, she was going back. I toyed for a moment with going home and drinking myself to sleep in front of CNN, then looked at Chris and the three of us were in her Pathfinder, on our way to the ER for bottles of eyewash. Chris and I put on green scrubs and made sure our hospital badges were displayed, and we took off. It was midnight, and we were virtually alone on the road. They were in the front, talking quietly. I was in the back with my head against the cold glass window, tired, and anxious to see the destruction.
From the Verrazano Bridge, we got our first look at the massive cloud of smoke and dust, glowing white from the searchlights, spreading out into a thick gray fog. The remaining buildings were sharp, black silhouettes. We were stopped at the entrance of the Brooklyn Queens Tunnel by a police officer, who waved us through after he saw the supplies, badges and scrubs. We followed an empty flatbed through the tunnel and came out on the other side.
The Pathfinder we were in crawled knee-high through fire trucks, cranes, military vehicles and flatbed trucks, making tracks in the deep dust that covered everything and everyone. The landscape was foreign- gray and muffled. With a backdrop of a black night, reality was redefined as something hard to touch, hard to see and hard to swallow. It was the silence of an awful snowfall obliterating familiar ground. Green traffic signs hung sideways pointing down. Ghosts in colorless uniforms doing urgent jobs already routine. There was no point of reference, no relevant direction, no sense that anyone still alive had ever been there before.
?This is where I parked before. Look. There?s that infant car seat I told you about.? We parked in an empty area near a gray building with gray windows. Alone in the gray was a gray car seat on the gray ground. I stepped out of the car and onto the soft surface of a gray new world. ?Come on.?
We pulled the supplies out of the back, and followed her around the corner. Up until that point, there were glimpses, flashes of smoky light, empty spaces where I remembered walls. We turned the corner and shrank into specks of dust. The sad remains of a disturbed landscape leaned inside itself, supporting the weight of the smoke and bright lights, exposed from the inside out. Ruins and victims of violence and gravity lay mangled and random, twisted, charred, broken, betrayed, murdered and terrified, framed out by a cold night at the very edge of the ending day. Proportion was distorted by slashes across the face of a 30-story building that was left standing, cracks from sidewalk to roof. The sky was black, the smoke was gray, the twisted metal, concrete, glass, rubble, was sharpened and defined by the shadows cast by the brilliant white work-lights; no colors flowed, down through the black channels of the cracks made by the lights, through mounds, over down around, to the ground, which was covered with paper. Sheets of paper, memos, invoices, triplicate forms, records, 8 ? x 11, untorn, unclaimed, unimportant pushed-out leaves fallen from shaken trees. The sounds I heard from machines, from people, from my own throat swallowing, were secrets whispered against the night dulled with dust. To breathe meant to taste the air, the sharp, unknown smells and floating particles and atoms of people and things once whole. The pull on my senses was so complete I felt the vacuum, the lack of space that pulled my breath, my lungs, my heart and essence in and out in waves, and I was replaced to the core by the absolute immensity of the cold intention of chaos.
The triage area where the first aid was occurring was set up in the lobby of a nearby building. We were given facemasks, goggles and rubber gloves, and were told where to put the supplies. Aside from a dog that was receiving aid for a cut paw, the only other medical activity was the washing out of the eyes of the rescue workers. This was being improvised by bending the sharp end of a hypodermic needle into an ?L? shape, holding up the eyelid, and washing out the affected area. There were about a dozen volunteers walking around wearing scrubs of various colors, all from different hospitals. Among the firefighters in all their rescue gear, I felt incredibly underdressed.
Chris and I stood at the base of an escalator, looking for ways to help. We heard they needed an area cleared so that cots could be set up, so we decided to organize the space. There were large boxes of clothing, sweaters, t-shirts, socks and underwear, which had been piled up, unneeded, in the middle of the floor. There were blankets, toothbrushes, mouthwash, band-aids, half-eaten lunches and half-dozen stacks of Poland Spring bottled water scattered, gray and untouched. There were three or four unrecognizable gray mounds on the floor, which I thought were blankets but turned out to be sleeping firefighters.
Carolyn said ?Come on,? again, and we followed her up the unmoving escalator. ?They told me about this.? She led us to jagged-edged opening in a gray wall, and we looked down. From that view we could see the entire rescue effort taking place. If God and Creation are painted on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel, this is the scene of Destruction Michelangelo would paint on the floors of Hell. Clusters of teams of firefighters, dogs, jackhammers, welders, flashlights, paramedics, crawling over the rubble of smoking, twisted-metal mounds, looking for signs of life, finding only bloody pieces of it.
We had to keep moving. No one stands in one place too long, especially to stare. All grief was in another gray pile somewhere, under some wall or stairway, not yet needed.
At one point we became part of a river of firefighters heading towards a point in the rubble where someone had been found. To my knowledge no one had said anything, yet they all moved as a single unit. We stood at the very edge of destruction, trying to see what they were seeing. Behind us a ten-story crane was pulling a mangled steel I-beam out of the ground and placing it on a truck. In front of us, firefighters were watching and waiting. Then, quite suddenly, as if released from a single string, they dispersed, going back to their tasks once again. Two of them came out of the debris, each with the handle of an orange body bag in hand. It was sagging very unnaturally in the middle. That was all. That was it. A piece at a time.
At 3 am, September 13, they gave the word to move the triage, and I heard the word ?recovery? replace the word ?rescue? - a significant change. We decided to go home. Our green scrubs were gray. My skin was gray. My thoughts? We retraced our steps, stepped around the gray car seat, got into the Pathfinder, followed a flatbed into the tunnel, and got stuck behind a slow-moving sanitation truck, which was spraying water down, to wash away the dust, before it escaped into the night.
We drove back across the bridge, looking back, always looking back. I sat in the back with the window down. The black cold night air washed out our lungs. My eyelids were heavy from the dust. We were there for three hours. There were people there spending a season in that Hell. God help them.
Vincent Vok
voksongs@aol.com
Collection
Citation
“story11035.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 10, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/10041.