nine years later

I had not been paying attention to the date, nor the news, so when the offer came to go out to Damariscove Island to do some shore clean-up, I jumped at the chance. Damariscove is one of those places where people of European and native American descent have been visiting for over 400 years, and you can feel it. It belongs now to the Boothbay Region Land Trust; lobstermen love it that it's mostly public and they can use it as they always have.

Rusty Brewer took the Browns, the Palmers and Al Strauss and me out, and helped us haul over 40 smashed traps off the north shore of the island, off the beach where I went swimming nearly 50 years ago. Later, the traps were piled on the pier to wait for a rubbish barge coming on Tuesday.

And then I realized it was 9/11.

A bonfire had been built to take care of the wood and other burnable trash. Larry Brown and some others had found an old, torn up US flag, and decided we should burn it - the way you should when a flag is old and worn out. So a number of us stood around the bonfire, and shared where we were - nine years ago. Al Johnson and Dick Palmer had gone kayaking out to Damariscove, and hadn't known what happened until they saw their wives waving at them from the shore at Grimes Cove. Others had been glued to the TV, even at their jobs. I was glued, too, while I tried calling and calling my daughter-in-law, a 5th grade teacher at PS 234, the school right next to the Trade Center.

Her husband, Ben, was doing a medical internship in Farmington, NM, and not home in NYC on 9/11. So he'd called right away to me in California when he could not reach his wife, Torrey. We finally got through to her late that day when the computers got going again. Later that year, after many moves with her 5th grade class, she commented that in their writings, the dominant memory these 9 and 10 year olds had, was the sight and sound of the bodies falling from the sky.

Today, these young people are 19 and 20 year olds. I wish that I thought that we as a people could honor their memories in a better way than to fight endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No amount of rational terror - like a vengeful war - can erase the sight and sounds of those bodies falling from the sky.