with one eye on an inferno

8/4/2019 With One Eye on an Inferno

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With One Eye on an Inferno

Carly Glazer

Shane SeelyExposition

October 30, 2006



Thousands of cans of soup, water bottles, and other food items cover the tables and floor

of a high school cafeteria as if in the aftermath of a successful food drive. A man surveys the

scene, staring in awe at the monstrosity of donations, or perhaps it is astonishment at the

knowledge of what it’s all really for. He is taking a few minutes to examine in solitude the events

of the past few days, to try to forget, just for a moment, where he is and what he is doing there:

Stuyvesant High School, the most prestigious public high school in New York, turned into a

triage center for use by emergency workers. Only four blocks from what has come to be called

“ground zero,” the building is in a perfect location and, devoid of students as it currently is,

there’s plenty of room. The man’s look is unreadable. He surveys the room around him and

imagines it as it once was, just a few days earlier, filled with high school students sharing

lunches, studying, talking. Students of all different ages and nationalities, students who believed

that they understood their world and were safe in it, students unaware of how drastically their

world was about to change.

On September 11, 2001, I, along with three thousand of my classmates attended the

fourth day of school. It was a beautiful, late summer morning. My first class of the day was AP

European History and as I made the six-block trek from the subway to school, I had European



countries and their capitals running through my head in preparation for an all class Jeopardy

competition. At 9:03 a.m., it was my turn and as I stood at the front of the room near the

window, we heard a tremendous crash. The building shook. Outside, dogs began to bark, and a

car alarm went off. No one said anything. We thought it must have been a car or a garbage truck

backing up into something. Jeopardy continued, and my team won.

Memories dip back and forth so many times that it is difficult to decipher what it is that

really happened that day. I remember getting to second period, my introduction to computer

science class. The radio was on and someone said a plane had hit the Pentagon. I’m not sure if it

was before or after that, that the principal came on the loudspeaker to tell us about the World

Trade Center. I think it was before. I’m not sure if it actually matters. I’ve struggled so many

times to establish a timeline of my memories, to figure out what happened, and when it

happened; to make some sense of the chaos. But, again, I’m not sure it matters. By the middle of

second period our naïve hopes that it was simply the work of some idiot pilots who caused an

accident were gone. This was an attack, still happening as we nervously chattered in the back of

the room. And then, the power went out. It was only for a second. The power lines shook when

the first building fell. But we didn’t yet know that was what happened. The principal came over

the loudspeaker once more and sent us all to homeroom to await further instructions. The thought

of purposely traveling from the third floor, where my class was, to the eighth where my

homeroom was seemed preposterous given the calamity of the situation. But the moves were

robotic, the thought process nonexistent. I remember telling my friends in class, “this is nuts,

there’s no way I’m coming to school tomorrow.” They all agreed. None of us had any idea that it

would be weeks before we would return to our school building.



The cafeteria is only one of numerous common rooms, hallways and classrooms that are filled

with clothes, cots, and food for the hundreds of rescue workers that have come to our building

for a few moments of solace after hours spent searching through the rubble in the hopes of

finding survivors. The school lobby, once our regal entryway used only for special occasions in

the theater and music rooms, has been transformed into a control center. Signs direct

firefighters and other volunteers to counseling rooms. A policeman in a hardhat looks out over

the scene for answers, searching for something in the mess of supplies that has consumed the

rotunda.



Up in homeroom, they told us to stay away from the windows, but no force on earth

could stop us from staring in horror. There was nowhere else to look and once you were looking,

it was impossible to look away. I saw the tower, burning orange flames growing more intense by

the second, shooting from the side of the building. The television, though static, was on. We

heard them talking about us on the news. The newscasters seemed to know more than we did

about what was going on in our school. They announced that Stuyvesant High School was being

evacuated. Moments later, the principal’s raspy voice came over the loudspeaker once more and

confirmed: “calmly make your way down to the first floor where we will be evacuating out the

north side of the building.” We all took one last look out the window before leaving homeroom.

It would be the last time any of us saw the World Trade Center standing.

We finally made it down the eight flights of stairs to the lobby where hundreds of

students crammed into that confined space of grey marble, all trying to get to the doors. But

something was wrong. The crowds weren’t moving. We tried to look out the windows of the

front entrance but they had become completely blocked by opaque, grey clouds of smoke so

thick it was impossible to see even a hint of daylight beyond. After a few minutes, the crowds

started moving again. We finally made it outside where we were told to walk north. It would be

hours before many of us made it home to see the news on television, where we’d learn that that

moment in which the crowd had stopped moving, when hundreds of high school students had

stood in eerie silence waiting for some sort of instruction, was the moment in which the second

tower fell, and our school and our city as we had always known it, ceased to exist.

My classmates and I made our way up the West Side Highway, still painfully unaware

and simultaneously shock-ridden over what we had just experienced. For blocks and blocks, all

we could do was walk, looking back every few steps, in awe at the size of the smoke cloud that



was following us uptown, and the people who had come out of their homes to photograph it. The

smoke was so thick and reached so high up, that it was impossible for us to see that the towers,

which once stood tall and proud in its midst, were gone. People with their cameras stood on piles

of trash, clicking excitedly as their eyes watched the demise in front of them. And for days I

thought back to those eager clickers in anger, unable to understand how anyone could be

watching such a scene and think only of photographs.

As we walked further and further uptown, still glancing back at the world behind us, still

trying to process what we were leaving behind, we were joined by hordes of city residents. Some



had been walking for as long as we had been; some had just joined us in midtown. We passed the

Empire State building with only one thought in mind and as we walked, a military plane flew

overhead. It was flying low, and its engine could be heard loud and daunting. Hundreds of us

stopped dead in our tracks and looked up at the sky. Time stood still. And then, the reassurance

that it was “just a military plane” came, and we all resumed walking, resumed our separate lives.

No other group of people in the world has experienced a moment like that. A moment in which

hundreds of New Yorkers stood as one, with identical thoughts, watching, waiting, in both fear

and wonder at the tenuous sky above them.

It was not until later that I was reminded that human nature calls us to document

suffering. For days I couldn’t take my eyes off the news, not sure of exactly what new

information I was looking for, but drawn to the scenes on the screen. For months I could not

force myself to look away from those photographs: the New York Times front page on September

12, showing a man jumping out of the building, and all of those pages with the missing and dead,

over and over, the dark clouds and the fires, the skeletal remains of the buildings. To look away

was to forget what was happening, and that would have been unthinkable. The editors of The

Spectator , the Stuyvesant newspaper, felt the same way when they produced a special

commemorative issue of the paper that was picked up by the New York Times and distributed

throughout the country: “We didn’t produce this issue to be sensational or to wallow in what a

mess our city has been plunged into,” they wrote. “We wrote because of who we are— students

who happened to be sitting extremely close to a pair of falling giants. We printed beautiful color

photos of heartbreakingly ugly, twisted things to ensure that ‘no one ever forgets.’ We wanted to



give everyone a view of Lower Manhattan that they might not get from the news or from front

pages on newsstands. We want you to hear the voice of youth in our own voice and images.”

Making sure that no one ever forgets is an idea that has penetrated all of us as members

of a community that experienced September 11 from such an intimate vantage point. We cannot

allow others to forget because for us, this is impossible. And so we look to people who say that

commemorating the five year anniversary is excessive already in solemn horror. And many of

them look at us and don’t understand why. It is because the events of September 11, 2001

invaded more than our school. After three weeks on a shared schedule with a school in Brooklyn,

we got back the marble lobby and the pool, the

wooden benches and freshly waxed floors. Though

still dusty from their emergency use, those pieces of

our school remained as stable and intact as ever

before, the memory of what had been there for the

three weeks in between was wiped away with the

asbestos cleaners. But the memory of that day was

everywhere.

It was there when we walked across the bridge

to our school over the West Side Highway. Built to

stop students from crossing the dangerous highway

everyday on their way to class, the eight million

dollar Tribeca Bridge leading to the second floor of

our school was our landmark. Before September 11,

we could look out from the bridge and see two similar



bridges only blocks in front of us, used to transport people from the Winter-Garden building in

Battery Park to the Marriot. But those were gone now, having collapsed from the force of smoke

and debris that hit them as the towers fell.

A barge was parked outside on the water only feet from the entrance to our school.

Throughout the course of the year, loud, crashing noises could be heard constantly outside the

windows as construction workers dumped pieces of debris to be eventually carried off to the

dump. One single debris ridden crash couldn’t occur without at least one member of a class

jumping or glancing out the window, looking perturbed, remembering all too well what

happened the last time we heard a crash outside of our school. And the planes, military planes

flying overhead all the time, instilling the sort of fear you could only imagine having actually

experienced our plight.



Fear of loud noises. Anger at a lack of commemoration. Wonder at the ease with which

others question and probe our experience, simplifying it to adjectives: “awesome” and “freaky”

and “cool.” All are effects we’ve experienced, situations we’ve come across, feelings we’ve

encountered. The shock that left many of us numb, unable to feel anger or fear on that day, has

worn off and been replaced with a panic that continues to engulf us and flashbacks that will

never go away. We’ve been probed and prodded and perturbed, placed in a pocket— the kids

from the ground zero high school. But those words, “awesome” and “freaky” and “cool,”

which once belonged in the innocence of that high school cafeteria, are no longer in our

vocabulary. Used to describe action and heroics in the innocence of youth, the words no longer

apply to us. We, who could now look out the windows of that cafeteria and continue to see smoke

and firemen and construction, now reside in a different world. And the view from that world is

bleak.

While my classmates and I would never dare to presume that our experience on

September 11 supersedes the horror of those who were actually in those buildings, or those who

lost loved ones that day, our unique perspective puts us in the rare position of having witnessed a

grave historical event. We understand, more then anyone, what it feels like to hear the words “a

plane has crashed into a building,” or, “a building has

collapsed.” More then once, we have been forced back

into our memories of that horrific day by accidents and

crimes, incidents that bring back the images and

feelings. On July 15, 2006, a building on the Upper

East Side of Manhattan “erupted in flames and



collapsed after an explosion.” More recently, and even more starkly reminiscent, on October 11,

2006, a small plane slammed into the thirtieth floor of a residential building in my neighborhood.

I got a phone call from a former Stuyvesant classmate. Now a junior at the University of

Michigan, she had heard about the accident before I did, except all she knew was that a plane had

crashed into a building on the Upper East Side. The second I heard those words an all too

familiar wave of horror and panic ripped through my body as I raced out of Whispers and, hands

shaking, attempted to dial my home phone number. I flashed back to another beautiful day in

which the blue skies quickly turned to black and the people, once jovially going about their days,

looked up to the sky in shock. The phone and e-mail chain began. Messages came in from

California, Washington DC, Amherst, and even London, all with the same questions— is

everything ok? What’s happening in New York? How many people were hurt? Is that building

going to fall? As the world around me remained calm, peacefully unaware and unaffected by the

news from New York, my classmates and I recalled a darker moment in our lives and mentally

shivered at the thought of its possible

repetition.

Past memory and present

reality are intimately connected by the

events my classmates and I

experienced on September 11.

We saw an ordinary day turn to

chaos. We saw a calm, empty street turn

to panic. We saw two iron giants turn

to dust. With that experience came



a knowledge that overpowers us, a knowledge that we can never escape. It took only minutes for

the world as we knew it to change forever. Many of us will never see a low flying airplane or

hear a loud crash again without thinking about that day. Our subconscious minds have become

cluttered beyond our control by the vision of a street on a bright sunny day without a cloud in the

sky. And an inferno looms from above.

with one eye on an inferno

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