SEPTEMBER 11, 2011

TEN YEARS LATER

An essay by Northwest author Jess Walter
Five days after the attacks, the World Trade Center was a nightmare landscape: 50-foot hills of smoking rubble, groves of twisted I-beams and skeletal trusses, snowbanks of singed paper. Nearby businesses testified to the tender banality of life before that morning: coffee cups on smoked-glass tables, day planners open on desks, dust-covered dresses hanging on sale racks, a parking ticket flapping on a crumpled car. The scale of destruction defied comprehension: seven buildings, 300 stories, 10 million square feet blasted and pancaked onto 16 acres the equivalent of every bit of retail space in downtown Seattle being burned and dropped onto Safeco Field. Stoic cops and firefighters sifted the pile in bucket brigades. Billeted rescue workers rappelled into fissures and air pockets in a last, desperate search for survivors. There would be none. Every survivor 20 in all had been rescued in the first 27 hours. All that was left of those 2,750 missing people was remains, pieces mostly, and maddeningly few of those. Still, every few hours, word would come down the line that some remains had been found and an agonizing ritual would be repeated. The bucket brigades stopped. Machinery was shut off. A flag was produced. Hats came off. The remains were taken away. And the work started up again. Five days after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Ground Zero was a wrenching place an incomprehensible mix of graveyard, memorial and construction site. Ten years later, it still is.
See > ESSAY, A10

TO OUR READERS: To mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, The Seattle Times sought out two Northwest artists who have created works shaped by those events. The essay is by Jess Walter, a Spokane author whose novel about 9/11, The Zero, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The photo is of sculptures of the World Trade Center towers created in 2002 by Mercer Island artist Ingrid Lahti. The 13-foot-high structures are covered by nearly 3,000 medallions that bear the names of the victims.

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