The Long Way to the Towers

The bus I didn’t catch

I could have taken the bus. I want that on the record before we go any further, because what follows involves a good deal of me being cold, wet and quietly cross with myself, and none of it was compulsory. It was February, on my second or third visit to New York… I honestly can’t tell you which, because the early trips have folded into one another the way good memories tend to… and the city was doing what it does in winter. The snow arrives white and cinematic, and within the hour it has been churned into a grey slush that finds its way into every seam of every shoe you own.

A bus would have taken me down to the Twin Towers warm, dry and in a fraction of the time, because back then, on those first few visits, they were simply there. They were part of the skyline the way the Humber is part of Hull… you didn’t think about them, you just knew where they were. Sensible people were presumably sitting on that bus with the heater on, watching the snow through steamed-up windows and congratulating themselves on their life choices. I was not one of them.

I walked. Down through Manhattan, along what the Americans call a sidewalk and I stubbornly kept calling a path, as though a bit of British vocabulary might keep my feet dry. It didn’t. I couldn’t have told you at the time why I was doing it, and I’m only half sure now. Something drew me to make that journey on foot, to arrive rather than simply turn up. Years in the RAF Police teach you that you never really know a place until you’ve walked its approaches and felt them in your knees… although I suspect that’s me dressing up a whim as tradecraft after the fact. Mostly, I think, I wanted to earn it.

Coffee, puddles and second thoughts

The walk turned into a pilgrimage of coffee bars. Every few blocks the path would do its up-and-down routine… kerbs buried under ridges of ploughed snow, crossings that had become small brown lakes, the odd patch of ice lying in wait for a visiting Englishman… and I’d duck into the next warm doorway that smelled of roasted beans. I got quite good at it. Find the seat nearest the heater, angle your feet towards it like a man drying his socks at a campfire, wrap both hands round the biggest cup they’ll sell you and let the steam do its work on your face. A modest puddle would gather under my chair while my shoes made a half-hearted effort at drying out. Nobody seemed to mind. New Yorkers have seen far stranger things than a damp Brit nursing a coffee for rather longer than the coffee strictly justified.

Then back out into it. Each time, the cold found me again within a block, and each time the same question tagged along beside me… had I made the right decision? Somewhere around the halfway mark, with my socks well past the point of no return, I’d have struggled to argue the case. You start doing the arithmetic. How far left, how wet, how easy it would be to hop on the next bus and pretend this had been the plan all along. Pride is a terrible navigator, but it makes an excellent pair of legs, and so I kept going.

And then I was there. I’m not going to pretend I can describe it better than I felt it, but I remember standing at the foot of those towers with my neck craned back, snow coming down out of a sky they seemed to be holding up, and every wet, aching, grumbling step suddenly making perfect sense. You can see a building from a bus window. You can’t arrive at one. I had made the right decision, and I knew it the way you know very few things in life… immediately, completely, and without needing anyone else to agree.

A Tuesday in September

Ironically… and life does love its irony… the next time those towers took hold of me, I was about as far from snow as a man can get. September 2001, the coast of Spain, a hotel with a pool and a beach on the doorstep, and my then wife, my second, stretched out beside me. We’d done the full holiday programme that day. Sun, sea, a little light reading that never got past the same page, and eventually that moment every Brit abroad knows well, when you look at your forearms and decide that enough beach exposure is enough. Back to the room, then. Cool down, sort out the skin care, a bit of downtime before we got ourselves ready for the evening.

It’s strange what you remember. I remember the walk from the pool to the room as entirely unremarkable, which is precisely the point. A few minutes of flip-flops on warm tiles, a key in a door, the blessed cool of the air conditioning. She went into the shower. I did what you do on holiday when you’re waiting for the bathroom… I popped the television on, mostly for the noise, half expecting some Spanish game show or a dubbed American sitcom to keep me company while I hunted for a clean shirt.

What I got was an aircraft flying into the Twin Towers. In New York it was a Tuesday morning, one of those clear, blue, innocent mornings, and the city had been going about its breakfast while we were shaking the sand out of our towels. I stood there in that hotel room and I genuinely couldn’t get my head around what I was looking at. My first instinct was that it couldn’t be real, that I’d landed on a film, that some channel was showing something in very poor taste. Then the caption, then the replay, then the second plane, and the slow, sick understanding that nobody had written this.

The shower was still running

I didn’t call her straight away. I’ve turned that over many times since, and I’m still not entirely sure why. Part of it, I think, was that I didn’t believe it yet, and you don’t summon someone out of the shower to look at something you haven’t believed yourself. Part of it, if I’m being kind to myself, was that I wanted to give her a few more minutes in the world as it had been when she stepped under the water. And part of it, if I’m being honest rather than kind, was simply that I couldn’t move. I stood in front of that screen with the water running in the next room, and the two sounds didn’t belong in the same place.

When I did call her through, the room changed. Saying it out loud to another person made it real in a way that watching it alone hadn’t, and that’s when it struck properly… the reality first, and then something underneath it that I can only call trauma, deep and unquestionable. These weren’t abstract buildings on a news bulletin. I had stood at the bottom of them, soaked to the skin, craning my neck. I had sat in coffee bars a few blocks away, dripping onto the floor, being treated kindly by strangers. Somewhere in that smoke were people who might have poured my coffee, or held a door, or walked past me on that path without a second glance.

The evening we’d planned simply evaporated. Nobody said “let’s cancel”, there was no discussion, it just stopped being a thing that was going to happen. And what stayed with me most, then and now, was the arithmetic of it. The whole world had changed in the few minutes it took us to walk from the hotel pool to our room, in readiness for an evening of relaxation and calm. We’d left the pool in one world and arrived at the door in another, and the only thing we’d done in between was look for a room key.

The grief of an outsider

I’m not a New Yorker. I’ve never pretended to be, and I’d be the first to wince at anyone who claimed a tragedy that wasn’t theirs. I was a visitor, a tourist with wet shoes and a funny way of saying “path”. And yet what I felt in that hotel room, and have felt in quieter ways ever since, wasn’t the polite sorrow you feel watching a disaster unfold somewhere you’ve never been. It was closer than that. It was the feeling of a place you visited as an outsider being attacked, and discovering in that moment that you’d been more connected to its society than you’d ever realised. You don’t know you’ve been let in until someone tries to burn the door down.

There was the terrorism of it, too, and that sat heavily with someone of my background. I’d spent a good part of my working life thinking about threats for a living, in uniform and out of it, imagining the worst so that other people didn’t have to. And I had never once imagined this. Nobody had, or if they had, nobody had been listening. It was an attack in a way you simply couldn’t comprehend, not because the people behind it were cleverer than everyone else, but because they were willing to do something the rest of us had quietly assumed no one would. That’s a hard lesson to take when your whole professional instinct is built on anticipating the next move.

I’ve been back to New York several times since. The walk ends differently now. Where the towers stood there are two great square voids with water pouring endlessly down into them, and the names of the dead cut into the bronze around the edges. I’ve stood there in all weathers, and I’ll admit I’ve looked for the spot where I once stood in the snow with my neck craned, as though it might still be there. And I carry it with me in a more permanent way, too. I have a 9/11 tattoo, in commemoration. People sometimes ask why a British bloke living in a cave in Spain would have that inked into his skin, and I’ve never found a short answer that does it justice. This, I suppose, is the long one.

The right decision

I think about that February walk more than I probably should. At the time it felt like a small act of stubbornness, the sort of thing you laugh about over a pint… the idiot Englishman who walked half of Manhattan in the snow when there was a perfectly good bus. Now it feels like something else entirely. I didn’t know I was saying goodbye. None of us ever do. But I’m glad, more glad than I can easily put into words, that I didn’t see those towers through a steamed-up bus window. I saw them the long way, cold and wet and full of doubt, and when I got there they were worth every step.

What I still haven’t worked out, all these years and one tattoo later, is what an outsider is supposed to do with a grief like this. It isn’t mine, not really. I didn’t lose anyone in those towers. I didn’t breathe the dust or wait by a phone that never rang. I was in a hotel room in Spain with my shower running and my evening plans in pieces, and the people who truly earned the right to that grief would have every reason to look at me sideways for claiming any of it. And yet it’s there, deep and unquestionable, and it doesn’t seem to care whether I’ve earned it.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe a place lets you in without asking, while you’re busy drying your socks in its coffee bars, and you only find out how far in you were when it’s wounded. Or maybe I’m just an old man trying to make sense of a walk he took a long time ago, in weather he should have avoided, towards something that isn’t there any more. I asked myself that February whether I’d made the right decision. I knew the answer the moment I arrived. I’m still not sure I know the answer to the question that came afterwards.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham