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Almost close enough to touch
A few weeks ago I took a week off and drove down to New Jersey on my way to West Virginia. I spent much of that trip taking a lot of pictures of nothing, occasionally questioning it but generally following the urge to the detriment of any kind of timely travel. It's what I do when I drive -- I stop and waste film. When I left from Boston on the morning of Sunday, August 12, my first stop was the Jersey Shore, but with time to kill I took a long route around New York, over the Whitestone Bridge, down the BQE, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and rounding the tip of Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel. Almost as soon as I got onto West St., I stopped at a traffic light at the corner of Liberty. I leaned way over my dashboard and looked up. The World Trade Center, its top obscured in the low clouds, loomed just a few feet away. I thought back to a week earlier when my friend Bill had called me at work from this very spot. "Hold on," he said, followed by the sound of a hand knocking on metal. "Hear that? That's the World Trade Center." I stared for a second, thought for another, and fumbled for my camera.
I was self-conscious doing it. I don't like acting like a tourist in New York. I expected that the people around me would look at my Mass. plates and blast me with their horns when the light changed. Besides, I thought, I really didn't need yet another picture of the World Trade Center. I'd been from the rooftop to six stories below ground and already taken too many pictures in between. I leaned up under the windshield at a contorted angle again and struggled to get the whole huge bulk of the building in. My left eye would occasionally glance over at that light. I was certain it was about to change. It was difficult to frame the picture in that ridiculous position at the top edge of the windshield, and I was very uncomfortable reaching it. I almost couldn't get the camera to stop moving, it was so awkward. And I dared not make eye contact with the guy in the car next to me. He could assume what he wanted about my pose. If I stopped to think about it I was going to miss the shot. And then it fell into place. The shot lined up, and I clicked the shutter an instant before the light changed. Two weeks later I got my pictures developed and flipped through shots of such memorable scenes as a lime-green motel, several restaurants I ate at, a bridge I drove across, and a beer bottle two stories high. I drove two thousand miles on that trip, and part of me was actually a little disappointed that my favorite picture among them was just the familiar old World Trade Center. No exotic artful shot of Pittsburgh or Ohio or anything. Two weeks after that my legs were cramping and I was beginning to feel nauseous. I had been standing motionless in one spot in my living room for fifteen minutes, watching the unreal. Fire pouring from the World Trade Center. Smoke enveloping New York. So I went and got out the picture I had been carrying around with me that week, and stared at it. It's many days later and I still stare at it, trying to trace back my thoughts to the moment I took it, to where the decision came from, what twisted little whim was suddenly sparked, to whether I should follow more urges to take pictures of things -- just in case. But mainly I'm thinking back to what it was like to stare at a real World Trade Center. The more I look, the less I can remember. It was the capital of New York, as far as I was concerned. The very essence of the greatest place in the world. And that, I guess, is why I took yet another picture. It's as if
a letter has been removed from the alphabet, or the moon
itself has been taken from the sky.
September 14, 2001 |
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