The hills are alive... with fire

From my home in Pasadena, I can stand in my back yard and look at the Eagle Rock. Over the past few days, I have watched the giant pyrocumulous clouds blossoming from behind the surrounding mountains. The air is thick with dust and ash, and this morning my car and basil plants were covered. After much hand wringing while listening to my favorite radio station personalities, it seems that Mount Wilson, the observatory and the broadcast towers for the majority of LA's radio stations will now be saved, where yesterday they were anticipating being off the air at any moment.

As I look at the ash and fear for my lungs, this situation reminds me of the ash and dust of another September eight years ago when I lived near and worked in New York. Then dust and ash coated everything and everyone. The day after, I could smell it where I lived an hour away in NJ. The mass of associations aroused from that time by these new fires overwhelms me in its scope, variety and quantity.

I am easily lost in these recollections. My boyfriend often bears the brunt of my ramblings and tends to go silent when I fall into stories and legends of that disaster. These memories are important to me and not something that I share lightly or with people I do not know well. Whatever degree or amount of truth I have retained are illustrative of my own history and perspective as well as the actual event.

For a while I hated to hear most other people talk about what happened in NYC. They seemed to me to fall into three categories: the opportunists, the justifiers and sentimental wallowers who wished to use the tragedy as a cloak to give their own actions some greater meaning.

The most prominent opportunists in my mind were at my place of work in lower Manhattan. They had been there and certainly knew what they were talking about. At first they had to talk about it. This was dealing with life, it was catharsis, it was a means of healing a community directly effected. As the one year anniversary passed and beyond, it seemed to me to become something else. The leadership so enjoyed the notoriety and status that came from their extreme proximity to the event that they seemed unable to let it go. Every sermon had some mention of the towers that were no more. The first "dust, dust, everywhere dust" text, became a mantra substituted for meaning. Their overall corporation seemed to profit by the disaster, and they were even accused of price gouging by the New York Times in the immediate aftermath.

The justifiers are those who sins are now recounted daily by the same news media that turned a blatant blind eye to their crimes when they began. The justifiers wrapped themselves in false cloaks of righteousness and patriotism with the ash of the towers as their own jet fuel to decimate and steal from populations on the other side of the globe who possessed what they desired.

In dealing with members of my third group through the years, the sentimental wallowers, I simply go silent. Maybe their gestures really are well meaning, but they always ring untrue in my ears. Examples include people, years later, dedicating bad pieces of music to the memory of those lost in hopes that such a dedication might win them favor or get their mediocre compositions a bit more attention. Most are people who seem to have no connection to New York, the east, or anyone who was lost or even there, people who sanctimoniously pay homage in public.

In thinking about my lover's silence, I wonder if he sees me as a number three; someone searching to make up for my own lack by piggybacking on a tragedy experienced primarily by others. I don't think that I belong to this group. Though thankfully I was not so affected as many people I knew were, I too have lists of stories and vivid things all tied into that time, things that have been brought to the surface eight years later by only a large quantity of pollutants in the air and waking up to find my plants lightly covered in ash.

Is a blog a place to let all of that out? All of the first hand experiences and stories of others, descriptions of sights and smells, feelings of failure when I might have better handled a young student who had just lost her father, other students taking a hiatus from music lessons to go to grief counseling, the sights on a Sunday morning in lower Manhattan before we were allowed back into our proper church, the smells, the view from the ferry, peoples faces on a silent train as most of us traveled back into the city for the first time since the loss of its tallest towers, battery park dwellers returning home on the subway with Siamese cats in boxes.

This is the tip of a personal iceberg of memory, an iceberg that these horribly destructive fires have inadvertently triggered in this misplaced east coast transplant.