A Ten Years' September Rambling Aside

It's a chill day in Vermont after a week of tropical storms, wash-outs, rain fronts and blah. Have the hummingbirds gone, or are they just laying low?

We're coming up on the tenth anniversary of "9/11," and this week has been full of hubbub about that day in 2001.

I care little for the "where I was then" stories, or even the "what has happened to us since" stories. I know where I was; I can re-feel the tilting of the world when the second plane hit the towers. And no one needs to be reminded of the mess that has been made of the aftermath.

But today I listened to a 9/11/2001 audio assemblage courtesy of the New York Times--radio dispatches from air traffic control, the military, etc., recorded as the events unfolded--and I found it chilling. When she saw the the audio link, Lauren announced, "I don't want to listen to any radio recordings."

I get what she is saying. But I think I am looking for something I'm not getting elsewhere. I don't want the  commentary, parsing, and wistful nostalgia. I want actual reportage. Or not even reportage. I just want to understand--or really just experience--the unfolding of events, the artifacts of that day. I want the radio chatter, always a half a step behind, or the intimate cell phone dialogs laid out on a timeline. Even, yes, the images of the jumpers.

I half-remember them from live TV that day, the jumpers and fallers. They haunt me, maybe, more than anything else from that day.  I'm not the only one, of course. But from time to time I've even searched the web for images of their falling, never finding significant results. It's as if those images have been blocked somehow, unsearchable--out of consideration for the families or for the nation as a whole.

There is this one, now easily found, of the one so-called Falling Man. But the images I see in my mind are blurrier than this, almost incidental--ghostly monochromatic figures, suspended high in the air where people shouldn't be. These blurry pictures could just be my imagination, or a false memory. But for me, to see them would represent something concrete and necessary, something that cannot be provided by thoughtful commentary or ground-zero waterfalls. Maybe the events of 2001 can only be analyzed and rediscovered, not really understood. It's in the memory-images, and a few of the photographs. And in the mumbled words of Mohammed Atta saying "We have some planes," or the flat affect of all the flight controllers and other workers trying to understand the scope of the problem (and in the brief moments when you can tell they do).

Maybe we as a country still don't understand the scope of the problem--or, really, what the true problem ever was, or is.