A question for you...
Feb. 6th, 2002 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynDoes it count as courage if you never thought there was anything to be afraid of?
I was at the comic book store today, looking for whatever the newest stuff to come down the pike might be. Unfortunately, I arrived on my lunch break, while they were still getting the Wednesday shipments in. Wound up roaming through the store looking at other things, more out of curiosity than intent to buy - I'd found my comics already. I ran across the two volumes of '9/11', and thumbed through a few of the stories inside.
A lot of my character soundtracks include the song "The Impression That I Get", by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. This is partly because the characters often come to a crisis occasion in their lives that provokes the sentiments you hear in the song, but also partly because I wonder about the questions there myself. If I remember right, the lyrics run something like this:
Have you ever been close to tragedy, or been close to folks who have?
Have you ever felt the pain so powerful, so heavy you'd collapse?
...
Have you ever had the odds stacked up so high, you need a strength most don't possess?
Or has it ever come down to 'do or die'- you've got to rise above the rest?
...
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested -
I'd like to think that if I was, I would pass.
Look at the tested and think 'there but for the grace go I'
Might be a coward - I'm afraid of what I might find out...
Those of you who know me, know that I was in Manhattan on 11 and 12 September, 2001. I'm a paid employee of the American Red Cross. I'm a computer weenie, not a disaster department employee, but the Red Cross employee handbook indicates that in time of disaster anybody who works for the Chapter can be asked to do volunteer duty. I'd thrown my disaster services shirt (we have to be visually identifiable) in the car that morning, along with the grey-and-white vest you see in a lot of news footage. After the initial shock and fit of telephoning everyone I knew, telling them to turn on the TV because both towers had been hit, I got the shirt and vest out of the car and got changed. Someone else got the vest. We were into the city by eleven, I think. . .
At the time I remember wondering why everyone I spoke to on the phone was telling me to be careful. I knew they were saying this had been terrorists, but wasn't New York crawling with soldiers? Hadn't they grounded every plane in the sky? What else could happen? The buildings were already down, and nobody could get in without passing the police and the soldiers and the Air Force. What was there to be careful about? It wasn't like I was going into a part of the city that had a lot of people, they'd evacuated everyone. What was there to be careful about?
There was asbestos in the air and God knows what else; I knew that much. I mean, the place smelled like airbag, like someone'd rammed their car into a stone wall and the charges had gone off - it was the only thing that smelled even remotely similar. I didn't have a mask, but I figured a few days of exposure couldn't do much in the way of harm. I'd lived in New York next to a major highway under an airport flight path for the first eleven years of my life. If those pollutants hadn't killed me, what could a couple days' worth of asbestos exposure do?
One of the other Trade Center buildings collapsed while I was trying to raise Cadhla on one of the two last working phones north of the site. I looked up and saw people yelling 'Run!' and holding up their arms to protect their faces, but nobody was running. When I walked away from the phone, I saw a new pillar of smoke and an empty space where a building had blocked the sky. But that was blocks away. What was there to be afraid of?
Towards the end of our shift - something like 11:30 that night - Derek, who'd driven the truck into the city, came up from the site and grabbed me by the arm. He said I had to see it, and he walked me down there. I remember being worried because I was wearing office shoes. I'd wanted to stop somewhere and buy shoes, even if it had meant writing out a check and leaving it for the store owner, but that hadn't happened. Office shoes aren't much good at protecting your feet, but. . . they were all I had and I had to see. So I went, and I saw. I've still got the shoes. I remember worrying that my feet would sprout skin cancers somewhere down the line, but after the initial puddle of grey water soaked into my shoes, there really wasn't much point in worrying further. I got my first breathing mask down there from a man in surgical scrubs and a white coat and a NIOSH particulate respirator that covered nearly all of his face. Same sort of mask he had. I put that on and figured I'd be okay, there was nothing to worry about, beyond possibly stepping on. . . well. . . somebody. But Derek and I saw, right from there.
I remember thinking of a line I'd read in the most recent issue of Marvel's "Exiles" comic book: "God's a long way from here today, Cal." And then I thought no, he was there, he was hauling loads and carrying hoses with the rest of us. . .
The second day that I was there, we were stationed on the next block from where the towers had been. We did a lot of feeding that day. ANd watering. The firefighters almost all just wanted water. They didn't even have time to eat granola bars. They just wanted the water, sometimes the fruit, so we gave it to them. (Bananas and oranges. We had to throw out the apples. There was asbestos in the air, which meant asbestos on the fruit skins.) The cops got food more often than the firefighters did. So did the soldiers. My parents had told me to be careful again, so I'd said okay, but - well - the buildings were down, and I was Red Cross, and I was surrounded by soldiers and there were F-15's crossing the skies and what else could go wrong? What was there to be scared of? There were protectors, and all the bad things had already happened. . .
At one point during the day I was left alone with the truck, while Derek and Werner went off to the impromptu morgue that had been established under one of the buildings. I was trying not to fall asleep, because if I did I'd miss it if someone needed food or wanted to ask what Mayor Giuliani had said over the radio. I got out of the truck at one point to have a look around, and that was when the men in blue hard hats came charging up the alley. They were screaming 'run! run!', they were pointing and yelling and everything, I couldn't make out what they were saying - then one of them said #1 Liberty Plaza was bulging and gonna collapse. I started towards the truck. They screamed at me to keep running, leave the truck. So I ran. Someone was yelling to just keep running and not stop until I hit the ferry. There were cops in the street, five of them, blue mirrored sunglasses, standing with their arms folded over their chests and their feet apart, looking like a row of ninjas in the street in front of Trinity Church.
But I didn't feel afraid. I stopped when I got as far as the ninjas. If they weren't running, why should I? What was there to be afraid of? I mean - they wouldn't just be STANDING there if there was real danger, right? They'd be moving. Either away, like everyone else, or into the danger, to rescue people. They were just standing. What was there to fear? So I stopped, and then I realized that I'd left my notes on the day's events in the truck. If the building collapsed the Chapter would be short a truck, and I could've saved the truck. I'd lose my notes, and no one would know what'd been seen that day. I was honestly more worried that I'd lose my notes than that I'd lose the truck, and more worried that I'd lose the truck than that I'd get hurt.
That was when I remembered that Werner was in the morgue. And the morgue was under #1 Liberty Plaza. That got me yelling.
Werner turned up a couple minutes later, driving the truck. Someone started yelling again and we had to all load into the truck and get away, but they couldn't get everyone in through the front door in time, and they couldn't get the back door open at all. I grabbed one of the handles and jumped up on the bumper, and rode the back of the truck as far as the Stock Exchange. I remember thinking this was the coolest thing I had ever done. But I still wasn't afraid.
Later that day I was with a woman in scrubs who told me she was terrified, that she didn't know how I could be so calm. I remember thinking that she was wearing emergency room ID - how could someone who worked in a situation where they faced trauma day in and day out be scared of something like this? Weren't they in danger every day? - but telling her that as long as I had that shirt on I wasn't allowed to be afraid. Technically that's not true, there's nothing in the employee handbook that says that, but. . . well, I didn't think it would look good for the Red Cross to be afraid. I'd seen the symbol's power that morning. People saw me in the shirt and came up to ask what to do or where to give blood. They didn't see me. They saw the symbol. They saw the Red Cross. If I showed fear, that would mean the Red Cross was afraid. So I wasn't allowed to be afraid. . . but the truth was that I didn't feel afraid anyway. I was more worried that we'd run out of food for the soldiers and cops and everyone else, or that the crap in the air would do evil things to my skin, or that giving a box lunch to the homeless guy in Battery Park would cost someone else their food. (It didn't.) The idea that there might be danger beyond that of breathing in weird crap simply didn't compute. There was nothing left that was tall enough to hit me from that many blocks away. There was no way anything evil would come out of the sky and hurt us, because the pilots would shoot it down. No one was even allowed into that part of the island; how could there be anything to be afraid of? I told the woman I would be allowed to be afraid when I walked through my own door and handed the keys to someone else, but even when that happened. . . well, I was tired and shaken, but I don't remember afraid. Because I honestly couldn't think of anything there was that might warrant being afraid.
Elizabeth Moon, in the book Oath of Gold, has the Kuakgan say to Paksenarrion that liking danger and having a taste for excitement is not courage; it is in the same category as having a taste for mushrooms, or liking the colour yellow. Courage, he says, lies in the going on - in being afraid as the everyday, common farmer faced with the unknown thing, but taking up torch and quarterstaff and going out to face it anyway. I have always agreed with him. Courage lies in seeing danger and saying 'yes, it is bad, but I will face it anyway; yes, it is something terrible and horrible and awful and it could destroy me, but I will face it anyway'.
I never saw, nor felt, nor thought of anything that might be worth being afraid of that day. Not other than the crap in the air and the water puddling up on the street from the firefighter's hoses. I never saw danger. I never felt worried. I never thought there was any risk to my life. Even when I saw the pigeon with half its feathers burnt off and the buildings with ash stuck to them twenty stories high, there was nothing that made me feel actively afraid.
I don't think that counts as courage. Duty, maybe. Rising to the occasion, maybe. But more likely it was that I was too stupid to be afraid. The saying is 'if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you don't understand the situation'. I wasn't brave. I just. . . wasn't afraid. Too bloody stupid to be afraid.
I was at the comic book store today, looking for whatever the newest stuff to come down the pike might be. Unfortunately, I arrived on my lunch break, while they were still getting the Wednesday shipments in. Wound up roaming through the store looking at other things, more out of curiosity than intent to buy - I'd found my comics already. I ran across the two volumes of '9/11', and thumbed through a few of the stories inside.
A lot of my character soundtracks include the song "The Impression That I Get", by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. This is partly because the characters often come to a crisis occasion in their lives that provokes the sentiments you hear in the song, but also partly because I wonder about the questions there myself. If I remember right, the lyrics run something like this:
Have you ever been close to tragedy, or been close to folks who have?
Have you ever felt the pain so powerful, so heavy you'd collapse?
...
Have you ever had the odds stacked up so high, you need a strength most don't possess?
Or has it ever come down to 'do or die'- you've got to rise above the rest?
...
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested -
I'd like to think that if I was, I would pass.
Look at the tested and think 'there but for the grace go I'
Might be a coward - I'm afraid of what I might find out...
Those of you who know me, know that I was in Manhattan on 11 and 12 September, 2001. I'm a paid employee of the American Red Cross. I'm a computer weenie, not a disaster department employee, but the Red Cross employee handbook indicates that in time of disaster anybody who works for the Chapter can be asked to do volunteer duty. I'd thrown my disaster services shirt (we have to be visually identifiable) in the car that morning, along with the grey-and-white vest you see in a lot of news footage. After the initial shock and fit of telephoning everyone I knew, telling them to turn on the TV because both towers had been hit, I got the shirt and vest out of the car and got changed. Someone else got the vest. We were into the city by eleven, I think. . .
At the time I remember wondering why everyone I spoke to on the phone was telling me to be careful. I knew they were saying this had been terrorists, but wasn't New York crawling with soldiers? Hadn't they grounded every plane in the sky? What else could happen? The buildings were already down, and nobody could get in without passing the police and the soldiers and the Air Force. What was there to be careful about? It wasn't like I was going into a part of the city that had a lot of people, they'd evacuated everyone. What was there to be careful about?
There was asbestos in the air and God knows what else; I knew that much. I mean, the place smelled like airbag, like someone'd rammed their car into a stone wall and the charges had gone off - it was the only thing that smelled even remotely similar. I didn't have a mask, but I figured a few days of exposure couldn't do much in the way of harm. I'd lived in New York next to a major highway under an airport flight path for the first eleven years of my life. If those pollutants hadn't killed me, what could a couple days' worth of asbestos exposure do?
One of the other Trade Center buildings collapsed while I was trying to raise Cadhla on one of the two last working phones north of the site. I looked up and saw people yelling 'Run!' and holding up their arms to protect their faces, but nobody was running. When I walked away from the phone, I saw a new pillar of smoke and an empty space where a building had blocked the sky. But that was blocks away. What was there to be afraid of?
Towards the end of our shift - something like 11:30 that night - Derek, who'd driven the truck into the city, came up from the site and grabbed me by the arm. He said I had to see it, and he walked me down there. I remember being worried because I was wearing office shoes. I'd wanted to stop somewhere and buy shoes, even if it had meant writing out a check and leaving it for the store owner, but that hadn't happened. Office shoes aren't much good at protecting your feet, but. . . they were all I had and I had to see. So I went, and I saw. I've still got the shoes. I remember worrying that my feet would sprout skin cancers somewhere down the line, but after the initial puddle of grey water soaked into my shoes, there really wasn't much point in worrying further. I got my first breathing mask down there from a man in surgical scrubs and a white coat and a NIOSH particulate respirator that covered nearly all of his face. Same sort of mask he had. I put that on and figured I'd be okay, there was nothing to worry about, beyond possibly stepping on. . . well. . . somebody. But Derek and I saw, right from there.
I remember thinking of a line I'd read in the most recent issue of Marvel's "Exiles" comic book: "God's a long way from here today, Cal." And then I thought no, he was there, he was hauling loads and carrying hoses with the rest of us. . .
The second day that I was there, we were stationed on the next block from where the towers had been. We did a lot of feeding that day. ANd watering. The firefighters almost all just wanted water. They didn't even have time to eat granola bars. They just wanted the water, sometimes the fruit, so we gave it to them. (Bananas and oranges. We had to throw out the apples. There was asbestos in the air, which meant asbestos on the fruit skins.) The cops got food more often than the firefighters did. So did the soldiers. My parents had told me to be careful again, so I'd said okay, but - well - the buildings were down, and I was Red Cross, and I was surrounded by soldiers and there were F-15's crossing the skies and what else could go wrong? What was there to be scared of? There were protectors, and all the bad things had already happened. . .
At one point during the day I was left alone with the truck, while Derek and Werner went off to the impromptu morgue that had been established under one of the buildings. I was trying not to fall asleep, because if I did I'd miss it if someone needed food or wanted to ask what Mayor Giuliani had said over the radio. I got out of the truck at one point to have a look around, and that was when the men in blue hard hats came charging up the alley. They were screaming 'run! run!', they were pointing and yelling and everything, I couldn't make out what they were saying - then one of them said #1 Liberty Plaza was bulging and gonna collapse. I started towards the truck. They screamed at me to keep running, leave the truck. So I ran. Someone was yelling to just keep running and not stop until I hit the ferry. There were cops in the street, five of them, blue mirrored sunglasses, standing with their arms folded over their chests and their feet apart, looking like a row of ninjas in the street in front of Trinity Church.
But I didn't feel afraid. I stopped when I got as far as the ninjas. If they weren't running, why should I? What was there to be afraid of? I mean - they wouldn't just be STANDING there if there was real danger, right? They'd be moving. Either away, like everyone else, or into the danger, to rescue people. They were just standing. What was there to fear? So I stopped, and then I realized that I'd left my notes on the day's events in the truck. If the building collapsed the Chapter would be short a truck, and I could've saved the truck. I'd lose my notes, and no one would know what'd been seen that day. I was honestly more worried that I'd lose my notes than that I'd lose the truck, and more worried that I'd lose the truck than that I'd get hurt.
That was when I remembered that Werner was in the morgue. And the morgue was under #1 Liberty Plaza. That got me yelling.
Werner turned up a couple minutes later, driving the truck. Someone started yelling again and we had to all load into the truck and get away, but they couldn't get everyone in through the front door in time, and they couldn't get the back door open at all. I grabbed one of the handles and jumped up on the bumper, and rode the back of the truck as far as the Stock Exchange. I remember thinking this was the coolest thing I had ever done. But I still wasn't afraid.
Later that day I was with a woman in scrubs who told me she was terrified, that she didn't know how I could be so calm. I remember thinking that she was wearing emergency room ID - how could someone who worked in a situation where they faced trauma day in and day out be scared of something like this? Weren't they in danger every day? - but telling her that as long as I had that shirt on I wasn't allowed to be afraid. Technically that's not true, there's nothing in the employee handbook that says that, but. . . well, I didn't think it would look good for the Red Cross to be afraid. I'd seen the symbol's power that morning. People saw me in the shirt and came up to ask what to do or where to give blood. They didn't see me. They saw the symbol. They saw the Red Cross. If I showed fear, that would mean the Red Cross was afraid. So I wasn't allowed to be afraid. . . but the truth was that I didn't feel afraid anyway. I was more worried that we'd run out of food for the soldiers and cops and everyone else, or that the crap in the air would do evil things to my skin, or that giving a box lunch to the homeless guy in Battery Park would cost someone else their food. (It didn't.) The idea that there might be danger beyond that of breathing in weird crap simply didn't compute. There was nothing left that was tall enough to hit me from that many blocks away. There was no way anything evil would come out of the sky and hurt us, because the pilots would shoot it down. No one was even allowed into that part of the island; how could there be anything to be afraid of? I told the woman I would be allowed to be afraid when I walked through my own door and handed the keys to someone else, but even when that happened. . . well, I was tired and shaken, but I don't remember afraid. Because I honestly couldn't think of anything there was that might warrant being afraid.
Elizabeth Moon, in the book Oath of Gold, has the Kuakgan say to Paksenarrion that liking danger and having a taste for excitement is not courage; it is in the same category as having a taste for mushrooms, or liking the colour yellow. Courage, he says, lies in the going on - in being afraid as the everyday, common farmer faced with the unknown thing, but taking up torch and quarterstaff and going out to face it anyway. I have always agreed with him. Courage lies in seeing danger and saying 'yes, it is bad, but I will face it anyway; yes, it is something terrible and horrible and awful and it could destroy me, but I will face it anyway'.
I never saw, nor felt, nor thought of anything that might be worth being afraid of that day. Not other than the crap in the air and the water puddling up on the street from the firefighter's hoses. I never saw danger. I never felt worried. I never thought there was any risk to my life. Even when I saw the pigeon with half its feathers burnt off and the buildings with ash stuck to them twenty stories high, there was nothing that made me feel actively afraid.
I don't think that counts as courage. Duty, maybe. Rising to the occasion, maybe. But more likely it was that I was too stupid to be afraid. The saying is 'if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you don't understand the situation'. I wasn't brave. I just. . . wasn't afraid. Too bloody stupid to be afraid.
