Monday, January 14, 2002

My favorite part

What I used to love about flying into New York was the last ten minutes or so before landing at LaGuardia Airport.

For almost a decade, I made the trip three or four times each year, long weekends or more packed with theatre, shopping and giddy walks in Central Park with native friends and newfound lovers. Every time, I looked forward to my first glimpse of the city by air, to picking out familiar landmarks and trying to mentally trace a route from the Battery as far uptown as I could see before the aircraft banked and began its landing approach.

In recent years, I've come to New York far less frequently. No reason, really. I took a break when Jess moved to Los Angeles and I couldn't justify an expensive three-hour flight without romance on the other end. And then I began having trouble justifying romance at all, and New York City became a temporarily unnecessary notion.

I came to New York last October, my first visit in nearly a year and a half. Too long. But after the World Trade Center towers fell in September, I needed to be there, to see and, more importantly, to hold some friends about whom I had been urgently worried.

As the plane tilted and turned on that crisp autumn, the pilot announced from the cockpit that our approach would take us along the river and "you should have a good view of downtown from the right side of the cabin." (This is pilot-speak for "We're passing over the place Where It Happened.") This was the signal for nearly everyone on the half-empty flight to unbuckle their seatbelts and hunch down across the aisle, pressing their faces against the windows to see Where It Happened. A guy from St. Louis who I know but don't much like glanced back to notice I remained seated. "Don't you want to see Ground Zero?" he asked.

No, I said. No, I don't care to.

Actually, I did want to see the area but certainly not from the air. Not from an altitude at which it would call to mind devastating descriptors to go along with the ominous "Ground Zero" name it has been assigned: phrases such as "blast radius", "collateral damage", "mounting casualties".

I did not care to go to the right of the plane. I did not care to see that. Most of all, I did not care for the name "Ground Zero". I don't know where I first heard it or how it was justified as a shorthand for the place where the World Trade towers used to be. What I do know is that I almost instantly refused the think in the terms "Ground Zero" brought to mind.

"Ground Zero" to me, and to thousands from my generation who saw The Day After at an impressionable age or were otherwise traumatized by cold war propaganda, is the place where a nuclear bomb lands. It is a place where all life ceases to exist. It is a once fertile area that will be uninhabitable for generations. It is the starting point of a journey that leads to something soothingly called "mutually assured destuction."

I needed to believe that there was still life and the possibility of it in downtown New York. I needed to believe that loved ones I'd hold close were healed or healing. I wanted to hope that the destruction, mutually assured or otherwise, was over. And what I really wanted was my favorite view of the city back.

Four months have passed and this time, when the pilot announces we'll have "a great view of the financial district" (Pilot-speak for "Ground Zero") on our approach, I press my nose to the glass and don't look away until we land. I can see familiar buildings, pick out major thoroughfares and, yes, I can see Where It Happened.

In these four months, "It" has become something of an abstraction here, not entirely by any stretch, but the memories and emotions of my friends who experienced it seem to have softened a bit. In October, it was practically all we could talk about as we comforted each other; today, I can count only two conversations during my visit that even touched on the attacks or the consequences of September 11, 2001.

So too have the edges of the site where the towers used to stand softened and begun to blend with their surroundings. From several thousand feet above, the site looks more like a scar than a wound. How long before the scar becomes a blemish, and then fades to become almost imperceptable?

I don't care how long it takes, but I look forward to the day when my favorite part of flying into New York is again the last ten minutes or so before landing at LaGuardia Airport.