Tidings
From Bowdoinham, Maine, a father reflects on the uncertainties rippling from Ground Zero
Hannah, our youngest daughter, had boarded the subway as usual on the morning of September 11, gotten out at her regular stop on Canal Street, and started walking west. At the first corner, she had seen a small knot of people standing, looking down Broadway.
She was new to the city, new to the business of being a college graduate, a commuter, a person with a serious job. But she had learned enough to know that while small gatherings of spectators are usual in New York City, they are not usual at rush hour. She got to the corner, looked, and saw what we have all now seen so many times. Seen down the canyon of a city avenue, huge buildings, like mountains, appear to be both closer and smaller than they are. When she reached her office, she found it empty. She went to the window, raised the blinds, and saw that now each tower had a black hole in it and more and more smoke billowing out of it. It still looked both closer and smaller than it was, and, in the beautiful clarity of a perfect autumn morning, egregiously unreal. The desks and computers and files; the coffee machine and cups and saucers; the memos, telephones, and framed photographs at each work station; the venetian blinds she had raised and the big plate glass window itself-all those things were real and reassuring. What she saw outside seemed in another dimension, as though the window were a flat-screened television, one with brilliant optical resolution and no sound.
Her workplace got closed down for the rest of the week, and so on Friday she came home for a long weekend. I met her at the Portland bus station. Dark was just falling by the time we turned off I-95 and onto upper Main Street, in Bowdoinham. For both of us, there was more emotion than usual about leaving the highway and entering this unselfconsciously pretty street. We drove by leafy, disheveled yards and houses that have a pleasant, unfussy, lived-in look, some occupied by people we know and the others so familiar to us that we feel almost acquainted with the strangers who inhabit them. Just before the street curves past the Church of the Nazarene and runs down hill to the village and the river, Hannah said, Oh. Look. Sitting cross-legged at the very edge of a yard were three teenaged girls. Each held a candle and huddled maternally over it, to shelter its wavering flame from the wind, the darkness, and the big world itself. We did not recognize the girls. Their anonymity linked them more
powerfully than familiarity would have to the revelation of human solidarity, human fragility, awe, and selfless grieving that is the brief, sacred aftermath of tragedy.
And so we are at war. You would expect some translation into domestic policy of the willingness, and even the yearning, to share the burden of the calamity that was so evident in this country after September 11. In the Second World War, those who did not go off to fight understood that sacrifices and inconveniences were in order. National policies created a kind of civilian morale; they insisted that we forego our luxuries and reminded us that the shadow of war, like the shadow of death, was no respecter of persons; that we were all in it together. Whatever their shortcomings, those policies did at least foster and sustain the idea of a common good and a common goal, and people who remember that time remember it with a certain pride.
We are told that the current struggle resembles the Second World War; that it is a struggle of good against evil, of civilization against barbarism. But we are also told that those of us not directly involved in military operations can best serve the nation by resolutely spending money, on both essential and inessential things. We are to act as though any reduction in our standard of living-in even the superfluous amenities enjoyed by the most fortunate among us, in even our consumption of those resources (petroleum, for example) that are most essential to our national security and our military operations-were a symptom of weakness, a partial victory for our enemies.
Over the course of my lifetime, which began in the early days of the Second World War, there has been a semantic shift that no one seems to have noticed. Through my boyhood and into my young adulthood, we who inhabit this country and elect its officials were typically described as citizens. Now we hear that term much less often, and in its place we hear ourselves described as the American taxpayer or the American consumer. "Taxpayer" suggests that we have no interest in government except the negative one of how much it costs us. "Consumer" suggests that we are addicted to acquisition, incapable of looking beyond the next trip to the mall, the next day's fix. In a time of crisis and sacrifice, our government seems intent only on deflecting the resentment of the taxpayer and perpetuating the consumer's habit.
War or no war, the duck season opened on the first of October. The moon was full on the second, and the first week of the season was fair and unseasonably mild. I went out under the big moon, motoring down to where I intended to hunt when dawn came. Motoring by moonlight on a still October night often means motoring in a silver mist, one that is sometimes thick enough to reduce you to groping around at half-throttle, hoping to find the loom of a familiar shoreline and so to get your bearings. But sometimes it means that a chilly little breeze stirs, dissipates the mist, and there is the moon above the black silhouette of the shore, its light a broad and glittering path across the water to you. The bow wake of the boat, reflecting and scattering this light across the water, is mesmerizing, and you can watch it until you feel that you are not moving at all, but are like a man seated beside a fountain, watching its spume surging and subsiding, surging and subsiding.
The old timers said that the combination of warm weather, the full moon, and an exceptionally heavy rice crop was good for the ducks and bad for the hunters. The birds fed at night, cleared out of the marshes an hour or so before sunrise, and sat out in open water, where they were safe as houses. In any event, I did not have much shooting. I had a lot of time to think, if you can call it that, about how a huge and horrific event, even while it seems in one sense unreal, nevertheless affects the reality of the scene around you. I thought of what Hannah had said about the objects in her office that morning-how their ordinary reality had been a consolation, so much so that, when the order came for the building to be evacuated, she felt a powerful reluctance to leave them behind her.
Of all the American anthems that have been played over and over this past fall, the one that sounded right to me was "America the Beautiful," with its celebration of our astonishing geography, and of the redemptive power we have so often ascribed to it. Sitting in the boat through all the moment-by-moment alterations of morning light and driftings of mist, I thought of the New England luminists, painting in the mid-nineteenth century, in the context of a country that was developing a new kind of imperial arrogance-and was pretty clearly headed toward either civil war or dissolution.
The light that suffuses their work still shines on our October mornings-serene, delicate, and, although ephemeral, suggestive of that final and enduring peace that the Koran, the Talmud, and the Christian Bible all promise to their believers. To my eye, at least, the luminists did not conceive of that light as something that lay ahead of them, "at the end of the tunnel," but as something that lay behind them, an after-glow. It is very far indeed behind us now, and our own light, however beautiful, is simply the light of another ordinary day. And suddenly we would gladly settle for that-another ordinary day. The small, familiar objects in Hannah's office were more or less the same objects that, in the World Trade Center, were hurled outward by explosion or inhaled upward by thermal convection, and that would continue for days to drift down on the city like snow or ash, fragments of transactions, records, lives, and memories.
The new war threatens all things, and so we see them in a new light. Love of country embraces many things, and often the things are not loved until they are lost. War requires sacrifices; democracy requires that those sacrifices be shared. Those of us concerned with conservation need to be more concerned than ever. It seems clear that we shall not be asked to sacrifice our SUVs but our Arctic Wildlife Refuge; to jeopardize not global capitalism but the global environment. And we will emphatically not be asked whether, given the choice, we would prefer to drill in Alaska or to tighten our belts at home, to accelerate the depletion of our natural resources or to utilize them in more thrifty and considered ways.
It is impossible for me to spend time on the bay and not feel lucky to be an American. And even now, weeks later, it is impossible for me to go down to New York and walk around lower Manhattan without feeling the same thing. That cantankerous, hyperkinetic welter of egos, cultures, neighborhoods, races, languages, and antipathies has somehow improvised an impressive human solidarity of compassion and fortitude and lit candles as far away as Bowdoinham.
We are taxpayers and consumers, an odd combination of cynical suspicion and childish gullibility. But we have from time to time been called upon to show that we are also more than that, and we have done so and can do so again.
As you motor up back up the Androscoggin after a morning of hunting, you pass Cow Island, go under the new highway bridge connecting Route 1 to I-95, and then under the old iron railway bridge, with its dark, rusting girders and its granite piers. If, in these very strange times, you are looking for a sign to guide you, you will find it here. Toward the Brunswick end of the bridge, on the downstream side, there is some lettering in white paint. It is chipped and faded, and it has been there for a long time. It seems to tell us as much as any of our officials can, and perhaps we should apply it to them, as well as to the amorphous shadows of death and danger that hang over us.
BE ADVISED, it says. Just that-nothing more.
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