The Third Wave (5 page)

The American Red Cross is a traditional organization. They generally gave women the roles of caregivers, while asking male volunteers to load trucks, stock supplies, and do the more “manly” jobs.

I was based at Respite One in the hot zone of Ground Zero, below the National Guard checkpoint at St. John’s University on Warren Street. The female Red Cross volunteers there provided comfort—our job was to smile and keep the workers’ spirits high. We looked after all the workers involved in the massive cleanup of Ground Zero. Most of them refused to take breaks even to sleep and eat. We would gently insist on feeding them, clothing them, and getting them to sleep on the stretchers we had prepared. Our station was open twenty-four hours a day. It had a television room with couches, Internet-equipped computers, and phones to call home, since many of the ironworkers had traveled here from hundreds of miles away. It also had shower rooms. We gave out all sorts of supplies, from hard hats to gloves, socks, pants, shirts, and toiletries.

Upstairs, we had sleeping rooms with cots and a poster in the hallway that said
QUIET ZONE
. The lights were always turned down low. On each cot, we placed a blanket, a pillow, a gift bag of hygiene items, and a thank-you note from a schoolchild. I worked upstairs preparing beds and tucking in tired workers, fussing to move the blankets around them as my mother had done for me as a small child and as I had done as a teenager for the elderly folks in my mother’s hospital. When the workers passed out, we slipped their shoes off and changed their socks.

The station had a dining area with free food. Many of the fancy restaurants around town sent free meals to us daily, and other
businesses such as Target, Poland Springs, Hershey’s, and Coca-Cola stocked our tables with snacks and drinks. I lived on Red Bull, Snickers, Milky Ways, and peanut M&M’s, and ended up putting on about ten unwanted pounds.

All the volunteers and workers were part of a big family now. We gave one another that familiar “Ground Zero look.” It was a glance exchanged without words that said we were all in this together and somehow we would pull through. We loved one another through our souls and shared daily stories from the battlefield.

One of my favorite workers was a retired firefighter named Paul Giedal who was filled with the hope of finding his son Gary, who had been working at Rescue One on September 11. At the end of the day he would say, “We didn’t find him today, Alison, but tomorrow we will.” He worked down there every single day, digging for his son. He never did find Gary, but he channeled his grief into helping others.

Every day, the female volunteers would drive a golf cart deep into the Ground Zero pit to serve the workers freshly baked cookies and a pot of hot coffee. One day, I announced to the workers that they could have anything they wanted. An older, hefty ironworker walked over to me, picked me up and threw me over his back, and carried me off, to everyone’s howls of laughter. Another day a fireman came in with a twenty-inch dildo and an unbroken bottle of champagne they had found inside the wreckage. We all joked about the sort of party we could throw.

Everyone found great comfort in the letters from children that came flooding in from all over the world. Samantha and I would
sort the letters and hang them wherever we could. We tucked them into ironworkers’ pockets and under the windshields of their cars. Hard men of steel melted into warm pools of love and tears as they quietly read these precious messages, which said things like, “Dear hero, I know how you feel. My goldfish also died that day,” or “I am so proud of you my guts hurt inside.”

One little girl wrote:

Another little girl wrote:

The children’s cards were the morphine of Ground Zero, easing our pain. Then, in late September when the Anthrax scares occurred, special government agents came to the Center to warn us that poisonous powder may have been planted inside the letters. By then, Samantha and I had already opened thousands of envelopes. We stared down at our hands and began to laugh, just
a bit at first, then hysterically, until tears came out of our eyes. Here we’d thought we had the safest job at Ground Zero!

I could sense when the workers had recovered a lot of bodies. The air would thicken like concrete. On those days, we’d quietly fuss over the workers even more than usual, making an extra effort to smile and find them special sweets.

On one particularly heavy day, the ironworkers finally made it to the ground floor of one of the towers, which had been pushed eight stories underground. There they found twenty bodies. The scratch marks on the walls clearly showed that the trapped people had tried desperately to dig their way out by hand.

On November 4, 2001, the New York Yankees were up against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series. If there had ever been a year for the Yankees to win the baseball pennant, then this was the one. It was probably the first time in history when fans outside of New York were rooting for the Yankees, hoping that the win would lift the spirits of a city in mourning. Nobody worked on the pile that night. Everyone huddled around the televisions set up at Ground Zero. The series was tied at three games apiece, setting up a seven-inning pitching duel between the Yankees’ Roger Clemens and the Diamondbacks’ Curt Schilling.

In the ninth inning, the Yankees seemed poised to capture their fourth straight World Series title. But then Arizona tied the game, and at the last pitch, Luis Gonzalez looped Rivera’s famous cut fastball just over the head of shortstop Derek Jeter. The ball barely reached the outfield grass, but counted for a single and sent Cummings safely to home plate. The game was over. The Diamondbacks had won the World Series. New York grieved with all the pent-up emotions of the past month. What had once been a
room filled with excitement fell silent. Grown men cried. Somehow we’d all thought that this win would symbolize great hope for New York. A dark gloom fell over Ground Zero once more.

Romances sprang up between Ground Zero workers. On the third floor of our Red Cross building, a makeshift “hook-up room” even came into existence—a small, quiet space where couples would go to hang out privately and have sex. Every now and then, I would see a couple emerge from the room, switching the light back on, on their way out. We turned a blind eye because we knew that people needed the release. This was still New York City, after all, and hormones, as usual, were raging in full force.

The last thing on my mind, however, was sex; the experience was just too horrific for me. I couldn’t look at anyone in a romantic way. It’s true that I was wearing more Chanel No. 5 than usual, but it was only to cover up the smell of death, which filled every membrane of my body. I focused on connecting to others through the unconditional love my mother had always shown to me and to her hospital patients.

When the American Red Cross building shut down its services in the Red Zone in March of 2002, Samantha and I were not ready to stop working, so we simply moved across the road to volunteer in the Salvation Army’s 35,000-square-foot tent at West and Vesey Streets. Ground Zero was our home, and it felt healing to be there. We felt like the nurses in an old war movie. Our mission was clear: to stand by our brothers to the end.

And so Samantha and I continued on, handing out children’s cards and sitting for long hours with the workers, listening to
their pain and crying with them. Each night when I traveled back uptown, I observed that New Yorkers were a gentler people now. The car horns hadn’t yet started blasting again. Through my own eyes on this tragedy, I glimpsed an inspiring vision of humanity, one filled with hope.

Around that time, the tribute of lights was created. It had eighty-eight mega-bulbs that formed two commemorative fingers of light resembling the Twin Towers, which beamed seven miles into the sky above Manhattan. One night, I stood right in the middle of the base of those powerful lights and looked up to see a real jet plane flying through them. This time, the towers were invincible.

On May 30, 2002, the night before the closing ceremony at Ground Zero, Samantha and I walked down into the pit one last time to share a quiet moment writing messages on the only remaining steel beam, which would be removed as part of the celebration the following day. All the other debris had already been cleared and the site was ready for rebuilding. A priest and a rabbi prayed near us, and at that very second a white speckled pigeon flew over and sat on top of the beam. It was the first sign of wildlife I had seen at Ground Zero in the nine long months I’d worked there. I had been looking for the signs, yet not even one creepy cockroach had wandered into the area until that night.

The next day was the closing ceremony. I woke up at 5 a.m. to meet the other Salvation Army volunteer women on the corner of Murray Street. We walked over to where an unfamiliar SWAT agent clad in black ninja-like fatigues blocked our entrance to Ground Zero. He held up his M-16 automatic weapon and refused us entry. We tried other entrances, but everywhere we went, the Secret Service shut us out. They explained that it was a
ceremony only for “the heroes of Ground Zero,” and so the firemen and policemen were the only ones allowed entry. We tried to explain that we had also worked down there, but our protests fell on protocol-stuffed ears.

We walked back up the street, elephant heads slung low, miserable at being shut out from the much-needed closing ritual. Half a mile up the street, we found some portable toilets and climbed on top of them for better viewing, but we could only imagine what was going on at the ceremonies down the road.

When the service was over, we were delighted to see the police and fire departments marching in full armor up the long street toward us. We jumped to our feet on top of the port-a-potties and started cheering wildly as the parade sailed by us. I waved to my old friend Paul, and he smiled and motioned for the other firefighters to look our way.

It was a magical moment. As if on cue in a Hollywood film, the entire fire department turned and saluted us with their white gloves. They gave us that “Ground Zero look” that had bonded us all together for so long. Then they tossed their hats in the air and tears flowed from our eyes.

Volunteering at Ground Zero was the first time I had worked alone on a mission of my own choosing. Throughout my childhood and young adult years, I had participated in projects that my parents or friends had created. But helping out with the post-9/11 rebuilding efforts in New York City had been my idea and my solo effort. It also showed me that everyone—from an old lady with a tea cart, to a middle-aged lawyer willing to clean toilets, to children with love in their hearts—is needed.

After having come so close to death during the cricket bus accident in Australia, I found that I was able to push the boundaries in my life. I discovered that I had a powerful ability to move on and not dwell on the past. I became more adventurous. My heart was a lot tougher, and I became determined never to give up at anything.

After leaving Australia, I’d moved to New York and decided to make Manhattan my home. I started my new life with barely anything, so the only direction I had to go was up. New York was a competitive town, with the best of the best from around the world all aiming to be top-notch at what they did, and I loved that energy. I was there for the thrill, and I was moving at a different pace than I ever had before. My intellect was stimulated. I felt happy to be alive.

I found a cheap room to rent from an eighty-eight-year-old man who owned a large apartment on the Upper West Side. He treated me like his granddaughter and reminded me of my childhood friends at my mother’s hospital for the elderly. Every morning,
I would lead him through a modified exercise class in his living room, instructing him to lift his arms and legs as he sat in a chair. He had no family, so when he was sick, I took him to the doctor and the dentist. It was a wonderful situation.

Then I started noticing signs of early stage Alzheimer’s, which I recognized from my nursing days. I ignored them until I arrived home one day to find that the old man had changed the front door locks. I couldn’t get into my apartment. The doorman acknowledged to the police that I had been living there, so they allowed me to enter in order to retrieve my clothes and few belongings. But once I got inside, I saw that there were no signs of my ever having existed. All my possessions were gone. The man had forgotten who I was and had thrown everything out.