Tessa Blake WTC Report

Tessa Blake 9/14/2001

received 9/15/2001

I spoke with the editor working on the PINK HOUSE the morning after the disaster. We thought maybe we would see about volunteering in the morning and then try and work in the afternoon. We were out of our minds. By 12pm it was obvious to us both that we had to do everything we could to help, everything we could to lessen the suffering somewhere for somebody for even a minute.

Nell (a dear friend and a brilliant writer), Ian and I met Ian's sister, Michelle at Union Square Cafe - a very chic downtown restaurant -- which had closed its door to customers, cooked every ounce of food it had in the kitchen and mobilized the volunteer staff to deliver it to people in need. We joined the effort midday and stacked hot food and boxes of Wendy's salads (earlier in the day Michelle had convinced several fast food restaurants in the area to contribute to the effort) in the back of a borrowed jeep, piled ourselves in next to it and headed to Bellevue.

Bellevue, at least in the first days of the aftermath, served as a hub for information gathering and giving. When I was walking in the door to find out where they wanted the food, I saw volunteers helping frantic families pour through the list of patients' names. Outside the next building, stood hundreds of people waiting on line to give their missing persons report to detectives. Most of them stony-faced and stunned, in a disaster purgatory, desperate for answers, miles from being able to mourn. We offered them what we could -- salads and scones. It was a pretty puerile offer but occasionally people seemed grateful or hungry or glad for a distraction.

Then we brought the hot food upstairs to the detectives who had been taking testimonies all day. And, as every inch of every building in the complex had been pressed into service, we had no choice but to walk through the middle of a NYPD briefing to deliver our calamari ragout and duck ravioli. Here we were, three blondes and the bandana boy (that would be Ian), right in the hub of the ground forces intelligence. I felt as if I had strolled through the back room of the Vatican handing out feather boas before the Stations of the Cross. As we were leaving (Ian in front, blondes trailing last), I heard a cop say in a heavy Bronx accent, "wha', are they sending models in to serve dinner now?"

Later in the afternoon, we were gearing up to bring sandwiches and drinks to a relief center downtown when we got a call that 7 WTC had just collapsed. This would be a theme throughout the day. As soon as we had the sense that we could help, we would recognize our powerlessness. As soon as we metabolized the horror and found ourselves cracking jokes, we would turn the corner and see a woman with a baby in her arms, posting a picture of her husband on telephone booth or open the paper to see the image (indelible) of a man, in a well-cut suit, diving to his death.

That night, Ian and I had dinner with Nell and her boyfriend, Jesse, who is the aviation reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The WJS offices are across the street from the WTC. Their windows were blown out and there is some question about the building's structural integrity; he, and every other reporter, was filing stories from home while the editors were/are trekking to New Brunswick, NJ but everyone survived and Jesse had incredible stories to tell about miraculous escapes, which made us feel like their had been as much triumph and good-luck as horror and evil. But then I rounded the corner to go to the bathroom and saw the news that said there was a bomb-threat in the Empire State Building and Penn Station and both had been evacuated. Bomb threats have become common place now but that was the first potentially new terrorism to surface and we all spiraled in the despair of those first hours again -- when we didn't know where anything would go or how much worse it could get.

The following day a bunch of us gathered supplies and brought them to the Salvation Army, where we spotted a few friends and pitched in unofficially for while. The word has been that New York is overrun with volunteers, everyone greedy to be helping and healing themselves and others, so no organization is giving badges. I keep feeling like the kindest offering would be a massive faux volunteer effort, so that everyone could feel as if they were contributing, participating, making things right.

After dinner, Michelle, her roommate Haley, and I wandered back to the Salvation Army to see if we could relieve the other volunteers for a little while. We were immediately helpful unloading a couple of trucks and organizing the area. Then we stood as human pylons, keeping the loading zone clear. I was on the verge of going home, having done my tiny part for the day, when a salvation army truck pulled up with a tired volunteer spilling out asking if we had badges 'cause there were two flatbeds downtown that needed unloading and he would turn right around and take us down if he could but there was no way without badges. We talked to one of the Majors about there being a need and he quickly brought us in and a a few people followed in our wake and there we were, the last people getting badges. And meant so much to us, not just because it meant access places, or because it gave us a status as an "official" helper, but because it was a symbol of our desire, or our willingness to stay late and come early, to get dirty, to get tired, to breathe in foul air, to give blood, to take extra weight, to do anything at all.

I have a lot of unresolved feelings about my own desire to be at the center of the horror -- too many to tease out here -- but suffice to say, while I am suspicious that my own propensity toward war zones might include more ego than I want to admit, I also know that I don't know how to "get on with my life" at the moment. That I am disoriented by email having to do with business as usual, with phone calls about appointments next week. I still feel like my life has changed forever. I know I will -- we all will -- and should return to the banalities that make up our American lives, but I can't yet. I am too sad. I am so, so, sad and all I want to do is help and pray and cry.

Our friendly Major pulled us aside and said that there was one last van going downtown to deliver sandwiches and that he wanted the three of us to go. I woke up understanding why he sent us as opposed to the other 38 people milling about but I had no idea that night. So we loaded up, piled in and headed down. No map, no information, no leader. Just a van, some sandwiches and our all important badges.

And there we were, at Ground Zero, in the middle of the night, staring into this gaping, aching wound in the ground. Crooked building parts, jutting into the air like broken bits of teeth. Swirling fetid air. World Trade Center stationary littering the ground. Broken glass and abandoned cars and two pulverized buildings turned into endless brown-white dust.

Walking through the streets, empty of normal life and filled with mission, the city, my city, was almost unrecognizable. And yet, somehow cliche'. Like a movie. But a movie I've never seen. Like a bad dream where things are at once familiar but cruelly changed.

I felt sickened. I don't know what else to say.

A fierce storm hit last night. I was standing at Ground Zero under a tarp with 26 police, and 7 firefighters as the rain and wind swayed the buildings around us, when one of the policemen said in a funny, kid-like voice, "I don't like this. I want to go home." And he meant it.

And then I saw a firefighter, head bowed, and it seemed like maybe he was crying. I felt almost too reverent to ask if he was okay but then I did, because if I had any real job down there this was as much a part of it as handing out ponchos and making hot coffee. And he said "It's over. The water... the rain...it's over." After a day of false hopes, retractions of reported rescues, the rain came and contributed the same weight as the rubble that had been removed, filled up air pockets that may have sustained people and everyone down there knew what that meant. No more hope. No survivors.

Nothing to work toward. Just grief.

I want to end this with something, you know, positive. I don't want to seem dour or humorless or without perspective. And I want everyone to know that I am taking comfort in friends and family, in our safety and love for each other. I started to do work again today. We are all beginning to talk about other things. I am not bleak. Weirdly, I am not afraid. I have a faith in all sorts of things -- in our collective strength, in a wisdom broader than my grasp, in the generosity of this city and this country and the world. But for now, I am sad. So deeply sad.

love, t.