And yet there would be an earthquake in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. I learned last night that when the South Tower of the World Trade Center fell, it registered on seismographs as far away as Maine. When I was standing five years ago in a beautiful meadow in Greenfield, NH photographing men and women working at a community home and farm for the disabled, I was under the mere but nonetheless serious impression that the only news was that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. I did not think to pay heed to the earth trembling under my feet when both buildings collapsed; I had no idea that the Pentagon had been hit or the sylvan land of William Penn had been pierced by a crashed jetliner in Pennsylvania. While working that morning, I had been worried for a few hours. By lunchtime, I would be horrified. (I did not watch the videos of Ground Zero for months afterwards, for I could not allow myself to see those towers topple.)
There was another thing I did not know when I stood in that great pasture on that lovely farm. I did not know that the sky was empty and silent for the very first time in my life.
***
I remember sitting on a ridge on Mount Monadnock probably 22 years ago. I was camping (illegally) on that fine peak with a friend. I was restless in the middle of the night, so I rose and went out of the tent and sat under the stars. The air was utterly still; I heard nothing but my own breathing. Then, suddenly coming from my right, the southeast, I could hear a distant roar, a trembling rush of mechanical power. Though I was 60 miles northwest of Boston, I could hear one lone jet rumble down the runway at Logan Airport. It startled me at how loud it actually was; I marveled at how the brain edits the every day noises that, if I just took a moment to notice, are indeed louder than I would have imagined.As I sat there listening, I recall getting angry at this nasty intrusion into my silence; well, not my silence, but the very silence of the cosmos. I had first felt in that clear moonless night a tranquility that rose straight up toward the infinite other over my head; now I could feel a tremor in the very rock beneath my hand. The roar of the jet grew more intense, sharper even, as it came close to my spot on the ridge. Though it was perhaps tens of thousands of feet over my head when it passed, I could hear it with a clarity that bordered on pain. And I sat there and listened until it flew over the far western horizon; I could still hear it after its blinking lights had long disappeared, its engines echoing off the very atmosphere around me. Then, just as it slipped to the very edges of audibility, I could hear another jet on the distant runway, and I cursed the engines again and again. I remember wishing I could just once hear a silent sky.
For several days in 2001 my wish was granted, and I could not find the beauty. All air travel was suspended. The weather remained spectacular for days and days after New York was attacked. But for the few days when air travel ceased, I would, at night, go out into our meadow to hear this new silence; and I could not help but feel like I could hear a hum coming from Manhattan 250 miles away. I felt like I could even see Manhattan as I looked, southwest over the shoulders of Mount Monadnock; suddenly the city seemed ever so close, as if I could walk there. It felt like I could hear the whispers of caregivers and rescuers; I felt like I could hear the chatter of radios and the humming of generators; there was something like a gasp trembling the night air.
But the fact is I could hear nothing. The silence was deafening. And I found myself longing for the sounds overhead I had once hated, the roaring sounds that had become the very sounds of peace.
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
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