Post 185 - September 12, 2020

Day 185…

Yesterday afternoon, we all went our separate ways for a change.

I was determined to walk across the Provincetown Causeway to see the Wood End Light House out on Long Point. The others were equally determined not to.

If Cape Cod is the flexed arm coming out of the shoulder of Massachusetts as a whole, then Long Point is the very tip of its longest finger. Ever since I first saw the lighthouse in the distance years ago, I’ve wanted to walk out to see it. Mainly, I think, because it didn’t look easy to get to.

During much of the first half of the 19th century, there was actually a whole fishing village out on Long Point. There was a post office, a schoolhouse, six windmills for salt production and 38 homes.

By the early 1850’s the people living out there decided that it was too difficult to maintain the buildings on the narrow sandy spit of land in the harsh marine weather, so they all moved back to the village proper. Instead of leaving their buildings behind, they just floated them across the bay and set them up in various places around the town. Many of them are still standing in Provincetown to this day. They are easy to find as they are each marked by a blue and white enamel plaque with a picture of a floating house on it.

The only building that was left out on Long Point was the Long Point Lighthouse which was situated right out on the very tip of the entire peninsula. The original building was replaced by the current one which was put up in 1875. The Wood End Lighthouse, less than a mile down the beach from that one, was built three years earlier. It was to that one that I walked yesterday.

The causeway out to it was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1911. Before that, the only real way to get out there was by boat. At low tide you can walk much of the way over there, but when the tide comes in, the marshy ground fills with sea water so it’s the breakwater or a boat to get there.

The breakwater stretches out from the extreme west end of town across the water to Long Point. It is basically a jumble of gigantic vaguely rectangular boulders. The top stones in the center more or less form a walkable path. More or less. There are places where they’ve slipped or fallen, and a certain amount of climbing is required at those points. Walking the causeway is a commitment because it’s fully a mile long. The whole way is over those mostly flat but uneven rocks.

Nineteen years ago, to the day yesterday, my ex and I were out at the house we owned on the Delaware river in Milford, PA.  It was early in the morning and we were getting ready to head back into the city.

The TV was on and we were watching a news report about a fire in the World Trade Center. One of the newscasters said there was a report that a plane had hit the building, but nobody could confirm what was going on. As we watched the broadcast, smoke billowing out of one of the towers, a second plane, in real time, flew right across the live television shot directly into the other tower.

We couldn’t believe what we had just seen.

Over the next few days, we watched that same footage over and over again. We watched it from different angles. We couldn’t stop watching it.

A couple of weeks ago, on my way home from my road trip to North Dakota, I stopped at the Flight 93 Memorial in western Pennsylvania. That footage was playing in one of the rooms, and I stood there in front of it for a long time, watching it again. Over and over again. It pulled me right back to that day.

At some point during that terrible morning, we called my mother and asked her if she had heard from my father. She said no and asked why we were asking. Had we seen the news?

We said were asking because he worked right across the street from the twin towers.

Oh.

We didn’t hear from him until after noon that day. When we finally did hear from him, he told us what had happened to him that day. That morning, he had gone into the city as usual and, again as usual, had picked up a cup of coffee in the arcade below the World Trade Center. He figured that he was in there at about 7:45am.

He worked on the 30th floor of an office building directly across from one of the towers. He had been in that building for some years and had always worried that something bad would happen down there.

On February 26, 1993, a few years before my father had gotten there, a truck bomb was detonated by terrorists beneath the north tower. They intended to destroy the building, but they failed to do that. Even so, seven people, including an unborn child perished and over 1,000 people were injured. When my father took the job there, he often said that he thought that it was just a matter of time before someone tried something like that again.

When he heard the first explosion at 8:46am, about an hour after he’d picked up his coffee, he was startled but not all that surprised. He’d been expecting it for years. After the shock, he along with everyone else in his office were told to evacuate and leave by the stairs. It’s worth noting that in September of 2001, my father was already 78 years old.

He walked down the thirty flights of stairs and when he got to the bottom, somebody down there with a clipboard and a megaphone was yelling that it was OK, the fire was under control and that everybody could go back to their offices. He decided that he’d had enough for the day and, instead, headed to the ferry to go home. As he walked towards the Hudson river, at 9:03am, the second plane flew directly over his head into the South Tower - just 17 minutes after the first one hit.

The one thing that my father always said about that experience was that it felt like being back in the war.

My father was in the infantry during World War II and fought in Europe in the Battle of the Bulge. The sound of the 747-jet flying overhead reminded him of the fighter planes in battle because, like them then, it was going full speed when it passed over him. 

If you go to an airport and a plane coming in for a landing flies over you, it’s slowing down. It isn’t going at full speed. The planes that went into the Twin Towers did not slow down. They were not braking. The sound they made was very different.

There are horrific stories about people who chose to jump to their deaths that day rather than be burned alive by the fires. My father always claimed that while he couldn’t see that happening, the people he was with, could. He claimed that he’d left his glasses back in his office. I’ve never fully believed that. I honestly think that he saw all of it.

He made it onto the very last ferry that day and got across the Hudson to New Jersey. By about 12:30pm he found a working phone to call my mother who then called us. Those were not an easy four hours, but we did not lose my father that day so I will forever be grateful. I know people who lost family members that day. As much as the rest of us may feel something on the anniversary of September 11, it pales in comparison to what they must feel on this particular day every single year.

I thought about my Dad yesterday as I clambered over the stones towards the lighthouse.

Some of the big, broad stones were covered in broken clam shells. I couldn’t figure out why until I saw a sea gull hovering above me, drop a fresh clam onto one of the stones. The gull then swooped down, picked it back up and dropped it again until the shell broke and it could eat what was inside.

It was amazing to watch. Only a few of the boulders were covered with shells. The gulls obviously knew which ones worked the best. Many of the ones that they used had depressions in the middle so that the clam was less likely to bounce off back into the ocean. There were a couple of boulders that looked like great potential clamming stones to me, but they were completely clear of shells. Maybe the angle was off or maybe it was a different kind of stone and not as hard. The gulls certainly knew which ones they wanted to use.

He would have been as fascinated watching them do this as I was. He also would have loved hearing about the houses being floated over the water into town.

The events of September 11, 2001 brought us together as a nation.

Policemen and Firemen were heralded as heroes.

Even Rudy Giuliani who was the Mayor of New York at the time fully stepped up and led our city through that crisis. The President at the time, George W. Bush, didn’t. He was very slow to respond to the nation. Giuliani filled that void when we really needed it. It is painful to see just how far he has fallen since.

The Treasury Department has officially just labeled a man named Andriyi Derkach as an active Russian agent who has been operating in the United States for over a decade. He has been found to have strong ties to Russian Intelligence Services.

Rudy Giuliani has been working with this guy for MONTHS.

“I have no reason to believe he is a Russian agent. There is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all. How the hell would I know?”

Rudy Giuliani was working with this Russian spy to come up with something the President could use to smear Joe Biden with.

George Bush used the events of 9/11 to create anxiety in the US population in order to justify taking unnecessary military action. Our current President is downplaying what is happening in regard to this pandemic to justify doing nothing. It’s hard to say which of them is doing a worse job, but I am guessing given the mounting death toll, that the guy in charge now definitely has the edge.

Our country was attacked from without on September 11, 2001. Nineteen years later, it is being attacked from within.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, we deserve better.

My father didn’t fight the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge just so that we could just create a new generation of them inside our own country.

We must pull together now the same way that we did nineteen years ago. We are strong. The man in the White House and the sycophants who are supporting him in the Senate know that and they are scared of it. Over the next few months, they are going to do everything in their power to scare us into believing that we are weak.

Don’t believe it. We are not weak.

We survived World War II.

We survived 9/11.

And we have more than enough strength to survive this, too.