It's been a long, hot summer.
Last week brought a string of scorchers, five or six days straight above 90 degrees. The air was dense and motionless, wearing the unique reek of summer's climax like a sweater. Over the weekend, that pressure cooker popped its top. Thunderstorms blew through the area, and when they had passed, I stepped outside to find it was almost twenty degrees cooler. The air had thinned out, started moving again, busily sweeping up the moisture, pushing it eastward in pursuit of the storms that had left it.
My heart raced for the invigorating change. I could sense the skulk of autumn through the late August night, even thought I felt the finest wintry tendril, still just a baby, coil around my ankle, trying to gain purchase.
This morning, post Labor Day, it was downright chilly. Not quite a freeze, but that fine wintry tendril definitely having grown four fingers and an opposable thumb to grip with. I took a walk along the river, and when the sun rose over the horizon, the light swept across the treetops, illuminating dabs of bright color where before there had been none. And the sky was smooth like glass, azure in color. Dry, cloudless.
Absolutely cloudless.
I have always loved this time of year. But the fresh, reborn air comes with a tremor now. Dismay and unease are implicit in the otherwise simple gesture of looking up.
This morning's walk took place in precisely the same conditions I awoke to nine years ago; awoke, with no clue at all that the very dynamic of my life - and every American life - was going to change forever in a matter of hours. I kept looking up repeatedly at the flat blue expanse dampened by bright sunlight, hoping against hope it would tell a different story, a better story, a less frightening story.
It didn't.
Almost a decade later, I still can't help but cringe a little. It is no longer the September sky I remember in my youth - heralding school, Halloween, a gentle reminder, even, in my overly eager child's mind, that Christmas was out there somewhere. It really isn't the "September sky" at all, now. It's the 9/11 sky, and it no longer gets me looking forward. It forces me to look back.
For the most part I've moved on, sanitized that day sufficiently, where I can live without thinking about it all the time. That wasn't always the case, but I've gotten better as the years have peeled away (time does heal all wounds, it would seem). But on mornings like this, which remind me as much of how I felt before the first airliner struck as how I felt the rest of the day, my thoughts can't help but turn plaintive:
Was there ever a time when we weren't anxious and uneasy in this country? Ever a time when we were not at war, not accustomed to heightened security and terror alerts? Were we ever not one inattentive baggage checker (in this country or abroad) away from planes being blown apart over major cities, one jihadist's inability to light the fuse correctly removed from another set of thousands dead on our streets? Were our armed forces ever not mired deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there ever a time when the music of Eminem was considered the biggest threat to the country, our President's sexual peccadilloes the country's greatest scandal and hottest topic? I want to go back there.
It's been a long, hot summer, but an even longer, hotter decade. And we are halfway to an entire generation coming of age knowing nothing BUT being at war.
The debate has been on-going for years the best way to commemorate 9/11. To tell you the truth, I don't care if it is ever commemorated in official channels. I don't need a national holiday or a monument. I don't need a day off from work or a new tower replacing the old towers to remind me of September 11th, 2001.
9/11 shows up in my mind uninvited, stays too long sometimes, like a bad guest. It replicates snapshot after postcard snapshot, clogging the hard drive of my memory with images I can't erase, like a malicious computer virus. I see towers of smoke and fire running parallel to the ground; human bodies falling a thousand feet; buildings falling a thousand feet; Olympic-sized billows of bright white dust chasing throngs of hysterical New Yorkers down streets, through cement canyons, around corners. I see heads held together with blood soaked bandages; faces covered in dust like theater performers, clumped wetly around the mouth and eyes.
I can still hear the low-slung roar of jet engines on a destructive course, the non-stop peal of sirens, a veritable chorus of shrieks and panicked (or dazed) profanity. I hear television newscasters bleating off report after report, trying to keep up - another plane down, this time in Washington, then another in Pennsylvania, then this tower fell, and that tower fell - endless speculation as to the potential death toll, the search for survivors, and who was responsible...I see myself watching the television with shocked co-workers, all of us wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling, though we were safely fifteen hundred miles away, an acrid mixture of anger and fear (maybe not so safe, after all), and worse, a real sense of the change at hand, that nothing was going to be the same, that things were going to suck for a long time afterward.
And so they have.
All of it took place under the same sky I saw this morning on my walk: post-stifling summer heat / pre-killing autumn frost. Right at the negotiations of the seasons.
I don't like to think about this time of year, and the calm, restful conditions normally associated with it, being inextricably linked with terror, but it has come to that. The first couple of years I should have expected it. But it's been almost a decade, and still:
It's supposed to be 'back to school time', but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be NFL time, but it's 9/11 time.
It's supposed to be harvest time, but it's 9/11 time.
For a full week each year, the TV flares up with a toxic prescription of specials and remembrances as exploitative as they are commemorative. The news media talking heads pinch off what they remember in two-cent portions, each year, like me, a little tireder-looking, a little grayer. The President speaks. We pray. But we don't forget. We won't forget.
We can't forget.
No matter the outcome of the War on Terror - if it ever ends or can ever be won - the terrorists scored a major victory that day. They have forever altered the way I view my world. Not 'The World' - faraway lands mired in complex geo-political machinations I only hear about on the news - but my world, my interpretation of my surroundings as I do something as routine as take a morning walk in no less a benign place than west-central Wisconsin. And one day, I will be a grizzled old man walking slowly along a shoreline somewhere, and if it's the right sky hanging above me, the September sky, I know that I will cringe then, as I cringe now.
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Sadly, it may be impossible to forget the horror completely, but it helps to remember the heroes that were made that day, the courage that got called up - from NY Port Authority workers, members of the NYPD and FDNY, first responders at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (all intrepidly rising to the call of duty), to the civilians who stepped up at both locations to help out (notable among them, Hudson River boat operators tirelessly transporting victims from the New York side the the New Jersey side), to the individuals who staged a revolt against the hijackers on Flight 93 in the sky above Pennsylvania (and likely saved countless lives in doing so), to the innumerable volunteers who from 9/12 on donated their time and money to recovery, to everyone else ceaselessly donating their thoughts and prayers.
It's comforting to know a kind of clarified heroism can arise in times of crisis. It may very well need to be called upon again one day.
