4: March 2002 Archives
The son of God threatens to rush the pitcher's mound.
Emmanuel plays "keep-away."
The Everlasting Light and the Quarterback Sneak.
Christ hooking.
The Prince of Peace kicks a girl in the shin.
The Root of Jesse swipes the baton from an unsuspecting kid.
It's been six months since the most recent of the events which have changed my life indelibly. I spent the next several days wondering how people could do the menial, meaningless tasks they always did, in the face of such tragedy. Last night, with a good deal of trepidation, I watched the 9/11 documentary on CBS, and then I understood it better than I did at the time.
With the last six months have come changes, to the way we view the world, to the way we travel, to our sense of invincibility. Closure is a myth. Retaliation is a hollow gesture. I will never be the same person I was before the attacks of September 11th, but I'm able to go about my daily life as I'm expected to -- as every one of us is expected to. I can't ask for much more than that.
These are the words I wrote that day:
11 September, 2001
I don't even know where to start.
It was a beautiful day when I left the house this morning, and it looked to be a good and productive day. I got to work at 7:30am, or just slightly before the first plane wracked the World Trade Center. When some of my coworkers arrived, they told the few of us already there that a plane had hit the tower. We all thought it was an accident.
All the news sites were so hard-hit by people looking for information that I couldn't find anything except a preliminary picture of the building burning. I got updates from friends and acquaintances on the internet, who had access to television broadcasts. We were all in shock. After several tries, I managed to get an internet feed to NPR and listened to the news from there. I took the headphones from my computer so my officemates could hear the news as well.
Bit by bit, the news rolled in, one unbelievable headline after another. Two planes, two towers, intentionally crashed. The Pentagon. The towers collapsed, one by one. All those people... all the terror...
I can't comprehend it all. I can't imagine what it must've been like to be inside that building. I refuse to try.
I've never ever felt so small and insignificant. I've never felt so very vulnerable. We watched the reports from a broadcast downstairs, saw the video, the unbelievable videos. These things don't happen. Everything was so... normal...
It's as if I were raped today, my innocence permanently lost. The brutality of these attacks, the graphic vividness of even the videos -- I've never seen anything remotely like it.
We were sent home finally, those of us who are rather unnecessary to the functioning of the university. The tower was flanked with metal detectors, and my keys beeped as I left. I made the hike to my car, the sun shining brightly. All around me, people talked on their cell phones. "...World Trade Center..." "...Pentagon..." "...hijacked..." No one spoke of anything else.
I got to my car, closed the door, turned it on... on the radio, Bono sang, "It's a Beautiful Day..." It was sick in an ironic, horrible way.
And, I mean, it was a beautiful day, yet this horrible, unthinkable act happened. It seemed such a juxtaposition, the dark cloud hovering over my mood while the sun shone brilliantly outside. I kept thinking it looked like some Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; I don't know when it will fully sink in that it was real.
I came home and turned on the news, watched the reports for a couple of hours, then went to take a nap, my head pounding. I slept restlessly, dreaming of doom -- not first-hand doom in my dreams, thankfully, but that feeling that something horrible had happened. When I woke up, it was as if it had happened again.
Listening to people speculate is so frustrating. They talk about "acts of war," "collateral damage," they make assumptions that might or might not be true. On television, the members of Congress all stood together and sang "God Bless America." It was such a strange moment -- it looked like artifice, yet it was spontaneous, and seemingly genuine. Squibnocket says the rules changed today. Perhaps that's true. I fear learning the new rules...
I want to wake up from this horrible dream.
I want to tell you about the sea turtles.
I was going to tell you about the vice president who leaned back in his chair for an entire meeting with his hands behind his head and talked and talked and said nothing at all. I was going to tell you about how I spent the last twenty minutes of the meeting feeling the underside of the fine conference table at which we sat, trying to divine whether it was made of real wood or formica. I was going to tell you that he never remembers anyone's name aside from his own staff, no matter how much or how closely he's worked with a person -- how he introduces himself every time he sees someone. But that's all I feel like saying about that.
I want to tell you about the sea turtles, and how, when I was eighteen, I had the chance of a lifetime to go see them.
My senior year of high school, my chemistry/physics teacher sponsored a project where we tracked sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. Each turtle was fitted with a radio transmittor tracking device, and we received data from a satellite that told us the coordinates of the turtle, as well as the depths it dove and the lengths of time it stayed underwater.
Our primary interest was in the Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the smallest of the sea turtle species, and the most endangered. They nest occasionally on Padre Island, but their primary nesting ground is still the playa at Rancho Nuevo, in Mexico. In the 1940s, a camera captured tens of thousands of these turtles nesting on the beach. They were so densely packed that you couldn't cross the beach without stepping on a shell.
And yet, over the next several years, the species was brought nearly to extinction. Locals stole the eggs from the nests because they believed eating raw sea turtle eggs would increase their virility. Shrimpers inadvertantly caught the turtles in their nets and left them with no way to surface, causing them to drown.
...which is all really just a long aside.
So I participated in this research project, tracked some turtles and their migration patterns, and was the only student to stick with the project until the end of the school year. Imagine my excitement when my teacher offered to take me to Mexico to see Rancho Nuevo for myself.
We left in June of that year, just after my high school graduation, and went into Mexico with a scientific caravan of sorts from the local university. It took a day and a half, but we drove to Rancho Nuevo. The route we took traveled through the Mexican countryside, dry and desolate and brushy like the ranches of southwest Texas. When we stopped for gas, children clamored on the front of the van, vying for the opportunity to clean our windshields, hoping for tips. And though they told me we were approaching Rancho Nuevo, I couldn't believe it until we crossed the final hill that overlooked the beach.
We camped out on the beach for a few days. I shared a tent with a graduate student who taught me about sargassum and saw more sunrises over the ocean than I'd seen previously in my entire life. And at the sunrise each morning, we'd crawl out of bed and climb on all-terrain vehicles to patrol the beaches. The time was called arribada -- roughly, arrival -- and the turtles were coming ashore in larger numbers as they nested. To protect the nesting turtles from poachers, Mexican soldiers patrolled on horseback, armed with huge rifles or machine guns.
We scanned the beach before us for turtle tracks to guide us to newly planted nests, and each nest we found, we painstakingly dug up, collecting the eggs in burlap sacks to be re-buried inside a fenced enclosure to protect from predators, human and natural.
And then, several times a day, we'd take a walk around the enclosure, inspecting the corralitos for signs that the eggs had begun to hatch. As the turtles broke out of their leathery shells, the fluid inside the egg would seep into the sand, reducing the volume of the eggs inside the hole. We could see it by the indentation in the sand, and we'd then help dig up the baby turtles and keep them in a tank for a few days, feeding them and allowing them to gain their strength.
And then, when they were prepared for their journey to the ocean, we'd wait for a clear night with a bright moon, gather them up, and carefully scatter them along the beach. Each hatchling, no bigger than a silver dollar, was pointed toward the waves. Some had a harder time finding their way. They'd turn and crawl in the wrong direction, only to have to be turned back around. Some made it into the surf -- a few never did.
Each one paddled mightily for such small creatures, struggling to overcome the force of the waves as they rolled upon the shore. Each one followed the light of the moon.
