Day 8: Somewhere you've travelled to

This isn't so much a place I've travelled to, as it is a site within one of my trips that I'd like to tell you about. My school trip to NYC was planned for October 2001. Needless to say, it was post-poned, but only for another year. Though I have no pictures, the images of post-9/11, just one year later, are forever ingrained in my head.

I thought back to this specific part of my trip just recently when I saw what Louisina looks like years after a hurricane hit and the government did little to help them. NYC, in my opinion, was very much the same. There's a lot of arguing going on right now about what should be done with the site. I'm not from there, nor is anyone I really know personally. That doesn't mean I don't want something done. Citizens and family members alike need to be able to move on. They do not deserve to see a giant hole in the ground ten years later.

You might think I'm exaggerating when I say "giant hole in the ground." Here's hoping that's not what it looks like now, but that's exactly what it was then. I didn't know if I'd get to see where those two towers stood. Obviously that wasn't on our agenda. It's not a tourist spot. It's not a happy place. Walking down Wall Street on crutches (I went with a broken knee) was a difficult enough task. We literally held hands getting through the swarms of people in black suits wearing black shades, holding black suit cases, and walking at the speed of light. I remember thinking "I can't imagine people living here." There was just so much hubbub. It was painfully loud, with people yelling and horns honking. There was just too much going on.

And then there was silence. I didn't know what we had come to until the crowd ahead of me dispersed. And there was a giant hole in the ground, surrounded by just a chain link fence. This whole was hundreds of feet long, wide, and deep. Construction workers filled the site with dump trucks and back hoes. On said fence were stone monuments filled with names of those who had died, from workers, to police officers, to fire fighters...the list goes on. As we all stood in silence, feeling awkwardly out of place, I took a look around me and it finally sunk in. There were buildings with scaffolding on them. Some buildings were set to be torn down. There was a stair case to know where, that once led to one of hundreds of other floors.

Watching what had happened just one year prior didn't do it justice. As I stood there on the sidewalk beside a silently greaving woman, and a man crying about losing his son, it finally sank in. It was eerily silent, juxtaposed by the chaos and noise of Wall Street. Not one of us spoke to another. What was there to say? Some debated as to whether or not it would be right to take pictures. It's not something we wanted to forget, but it is a place of mourning. I don't think we needed cameras to remember this day.