“I have a thing for New York City. That's my other wilderness. But New York is just a place that I love. It's a wilderness in itself.”
Author Craig Childs has lived in the North Fork Valley for years, writing books about the deserts and canyons of the West. But on September 11, 2001, he was in Manhattan.
That morning, he was walking to a meeting a few blocks from the World Trade Center. He saw people coming out of a subway station ahead of him, “gripped by something they could see. … And then I came around the corner and saw it was right after the second plane had hit.”
Both towers were burning. And Childs says nobody on the street knew what was happening,
including him. So he did what he does in the backcountry. He pulled out his notebook.
“I remember writing that there were sheaves of paper flying over my head, like hundreds of
feet up. And they were on fire. Just lots of paper, burning paper. And it was blowing. I mean,
it was on fire closer to the building. And as they were blowing away, they were smoldering.
And I wrote that they looked like birds on fire, because they did. It looked like the sky was
full of burning birds,” he said.
When the first tower came down, Childs was standing on Fifth Avenue. But he wasn’t looking at the towers– he was facing north, watching the crowd.
In that moment, “everything changed.” Childs says he watched it through the eyes of the crowd. “They wanted to hold it up, or, I don't know, but that was the reaction, was hands reaching in the air,” he says.
Childs felt the second tower fall through the ground he was standing on. He went back to the
apartment he was staying in and packed a bag to walk off the island. And then he stopped.
He called NPR from a landline and went live on the air. That week, he called us here at KVNF
too, and he stayed nine days inside the barricades.
The crisis changed New York’s atmosphere instantly. He describes the sudden sense of community. “You would make eye contact with a cop. I mean, first of all, you don't make eye contact with anybody there,” he says. “And now everybody's looking at each other.”
Three years later, reflecting on the days that followed 9/11, Childs told NPR’s Morning Edition that he was afraid of one thing. It wasn't another attack. He was afraid that he would lose the connection that he felt during his time inside the barricades.
“I didn't want to lose the sharpness of my memory, the clarity of looking back up Fifth Avenue the instant the first building collapsed, seeing thousands of other people lift their hands involuntarily as if they could keep the tower from falling,” he said. “I was afraid that in a remote, small town, my sadness and hope would inevitably dwindle over time.”
He went back to the city every September for years, always visiting the memorial. But this summer, he spent 12 days in New York with one of his kids and never went back to the memorial. He says that New York is “a city again” to him.
Many of us in the KVNF listening area have never set foot in Manhattan, and maybe never will. Childs has friends here who feel good about that, and he says he understands it. Then he says, “This could take a hit, too. We could all take a hit. We all, every time something like this
happens, we take another hit. And I want us to feel it, even though it's so hard to feel
everything that's going on. Oh, my God. It's too much. That's too much humanity out there
going on. But it's important to feel as much of it as we can, even if we're not there.”
Two and a half decades later, Childs still holds onto what he learned while inside the barricades.
He says that injuries are “part of being alive,” but we can come together to heal. “Being this kind of soft, fragile thing in the world, being thrown around. We're being struck, we're being knocked over, and we're getting back up, and we're relying on each other,” he says. “And the relying on each other is such an important part of the healing, is just helping each other up and going, hey, are you okay? Because we're not. I mean, how often are we okay?”
