Banner Grief :

Today We Are All Americans

                                            Today We Are All Americans

            That was the headline on the front page of Le Monde on the day after the attack. So unbelievable and unlikely a statement from the French newspaper of record as late as Tuesday morning.

            The Star Spangled Banner replaced God Save the Queen at the changing of the guard in London . Also an unbelievable and unlikely notion last week while the West was still basking in the afterglow of Cold War supremacy and while most of us were still splashing about in the shallow end of the post-Cold War economic boom.

            All those mind-blowing headlines and rumors I’d absorbed with all the pain of their grim details, headlines I jotted down in this journal from occasional media reports we happened across in our travels in the days following the attacks or that we read in newspapers and news magazines we bought on the street. Disturbingly powerful bits of information blaring occasionally from television sets we crossed paths with and from the pages of the International Herald-Tribune, the international edition of USA Today, the Lawrence Journal-World website, the European editions of Time and Newsweek, the London Times, the Irish Times, and Le Monde. [1]

 

                   Headline News*
                        Sept. 12-16, 2001

                        ___________________

 

                        *  Terror Strikes America

                        *  Hijacked Jets Hit Trade Towers in NY and Plow into Pentagon

                        *  Both Skyscrapers Collapse; Huge Causalities Feared

                        *  Death Grips the Heart of Lower Manhattan

                        *  Many Jumped to Their Death

                        *  Couple Held Hands as They Fell to Their Deaths

                        *  Blast From Crash at Pentagon Sends Washington Reeling

                        *  Near Towers, Scenes of Chaos and Fear

                        *  Hijackers Wore Red Bandannas:

                             Armed with Just Knives

                        *  Crashed Plane Commandeered by Passengers?

                        *  Amid Horror and Disbelief, a Nation Shuts Down.

                        *  Multiple Terrorist Cells Participated

                        *  World Air Traffic Turns Chaotic

                        *  Last Calls From Victims Haunts Tragedy  

 

                        *  America Unites in Wake of Terror

                        *  NY Missing Toll Climbs to 5000; Pentagon Near 200

                        * Victim Families Searching NY with Flyers for Loved Ones

                        *  Attack Broke Deeply Imbedded Illusion That America Safe

                        *  Amid the Rubble, Firefighters Grieve for Lost Brothers

                        *  Three Jets Carried 5 Hijackers, Jet that Crashed Carried 4

                        *  Best Friends Die on Different Flights to LA

                        *  Foreign Nationals Missing or Dead:

                             Toll Under Rubble Grows

                        *  Europe Rallies to America’s Side for Long Joint Struggle

                        *  Eiffel Tower Closed to Public Until Further Notice

                        *  5 Firefighters Found Alive in SUV

                        *  Hopes Diminish for NY Survivors

                        *  Companies Rush to Account for Staff

                        *  World Leaders Unite in Condemnation of Terror Attack

                        *  A Global Outpouring of Grief and Solidarity

                        *  Palestinians, Iraqis, Pakistanis Celebrate NY Carnage

                        *  Bush Vows to Hunt Down Terrorists

                        *  Bush Assails ‘Act of War’: Early Clues Point to bin Laden

                        *  Bush Denounces ‘Cowardly Act,’ Vows to ‘Lead World to Victory’

                        *  Amid Chaos, Wall Street Journal Published

                        *  Sustained Fight Against Terrorism Promised

                        *  Taliban Say World Court Should Deal with bin Laden

                        *  UN Evacuating Staff From Afghanistan

 

                        *  Families Begin Burying Dead

                        *  NATO Commits to Retaliatory Strikes

                        *  Bush Issues Call to Arms;

                             We’re at War, Tells Troops, Get Ready

                        *  Allies Declare Support: Attack Directed at All of Us

                        *  America in For Long Fight After Delusion of Invincibility

                        *  US Pitted Against Stateless Enemy in ‘Gray War’

                   

                        *  Hunt For Conspirators Widens

                        *  Armed Forces Enlistments Jump:

                             Option for Young and Angry to Get Involved

                        *  US Muslims Hope they Are Not Blamed

                        *  Among American Muslims, Outrage Mingles With Fear

                        *  Pakistan Gives Anti-Terror Backing:

                               Despite 80-percent Pakistani Approval of Taliban

                        *  US Reopens its Skies

                        *  Airspace in US Closed Again; Threat Proves Vague

                        *  FBI Targets Terror Suspects

                        *  Extreme Heat, ‘Pancaking’ Doomed Towers

                        *  US Deploys Warships and Planes, Calls up Reserves

                        *  NFL Games Called Off

                        *  Sports World on Hold; Salt Lake Security Will be Reviewed

 

                        *  Remembrance Ceremonies Held in All 15 EU Capitals

                        *  On A Day of Tribute in Europe, National Difference Fades

                        *  European Soccer Tries to Understand;

                             Keeps Playing Games, Then Stops

                        *  International Airlines Resume Flights to US

                        *  From Afar, US Expatriates Try to Sort Out Tragedy

                        *  Shuttle Astronauts Watched WTC Attack from Space

                        *  Afghanistan Refuses to Give bin Laden Up

                        *  Bush Mobilizes 50,000 Troops

                        *  Afghans Brace for US Attack

                        *  US Markets to Resume Trading Monday

                        *  Diverted Passengers Left in a Daze

 

 

 

*Amsterdam Aftermath:      
 Diverted Passengers Left in a Daze;

    A Gathering Wave of Global Unity   

 

 

The world will see that the strength of this nation is found
in the character and courage of (its) everyday citizens

  

                                                                     American President George W. Bush

 

                       I spent the first few days after the attacks contributing to a worldwide funk. Like everyone else, we spent awful hours each day out in public piecing together and processing the information that was fed to us over the 24-hour airwaves we came in contact with and in newspapers and news magazines we read and in rumors we heard by word of mouth on the streets of Amsterdam. All of us there helpless on the passive receiver sides of our CNN Breaking News Boxes. Frustrated and helpless news sponges --- out of the loop and peeking in at the grim evolving toll produced for us by the media from the broadcast sides of their TV news screens.

            Defenseless riders on a horrible-TV-terror-war bus driven by preposterous politics and unimaginable violence. News bulletins sent over the airwaves and injected into the numbed funk of everyone’s battered brain matter. Brain matter like mine, that thought it had seen it all, that thought it had thoroughly trained itself to be cynical enough to stay safely outside the pain and suffering of any political-TV horror show.

            Yet those of us stranded in places like Amsterdam --- on the faraway overseas receiver sides of our 24-hour CNN Breaking News Screens --- remained as personally involved as anyone else on the planet. Remote but not removed. Transfixed to the media, mourning the dead, and suffering the loss of security. Fitting our old lives and beliefs around the new world we’d all just been sucker-punched into.

            Trying to figure out what this all meant for us.

            What this all meant for Janet and me.

            We were stranded in Amsterdam on the European front of a brand new terror war, and like everyone else -- especially vulnerably stranded Americans -- we were nervous.

                Because dear God, what could possibly happen next?

 

 

*Breakfast Headlines & Hugs on the Street

 

                        Everyone I encountered on this Western theater (aside from that Thumb-Pumping Angel-With-Oversized-Muscles Punk at the Down Under during the attack on Tuesday) was in a similar funk as Janet and I were. It didn’t matter which of the many nationalities I encountered (in this most international of cities), no one seemed anything but trampled by what had occurred across the sea.

            Even the nastiest Amsterdam beggars, the ones who operate at the tram station at Rembrandtplein, were far less hostile at being stiffed, and seemed to ignore Americans altogether just after the attack. They couldn’t bare any bitter eye contact with a species of customer (an American mark) that might look back at them with the pain of Tuesday in their eyes and whom might illicit more sympathy in the beggars than the beggars could elicit from them. An altogether unacceptable role-flipping notion in the professional sympathy racket.

            Because even the nasty beggars of the Rembrandtplein tram station saw September 11 on their CNN Breaking News Boxes and even they wanted to help out the poor Americans. So much so, that last week they found it nearly impossible to draw attention to their own panhandler plights.

            Street vendors announced their sympathies in embarrassing fashion, especially for sophisticated Europeans. The umbrella vendor in the red light district stopped me on the street as I stumbled past his stand. He left his stock of umbrellas, crossed the brick street and gently pinched my elbow between his index finger and thumb and whispered, “I’m sorry what they did to you. You didn’t deserve that. Those people must now pay for what they did.”

             I noticed that the umbrella vendor --- usually a surly sort who’d typically not even notice you unless it was raining and you needed an umbrella, and hardly even then --- didn’t end his compassion as a question. He ended it in a firm tone that led me to believe that he wanted to make the terrorists pay for what they did on Tuesday all by himself --- with his own two hands. And as he spoke to me he gently squeezed my elbow and patted me on my back with those same two big hands.

            It was obvious to me that he thought that my stumbling misery was his stumbling misery too. That my bitter anger was his. That his resolve --- Those people must now pay --- was now supposed to be my resolve too. He hardly knew me but because he knew I was an American and part-time Amsterdamer, he’d left his shop and crossed the street to do what he could do. To buck me up. And lord knows, as a stranded American, I needed that.

            “Yes indeed, I said to him, those people must now pay...”  

           The clerk on the Damrak who sells me my newspapers every morning when I’m in Amsterdam apologized on Wednesday for not having a USA Today in stock to sell to me, but it was really the International Herald-Tribune I was after anyway. He took my money for the newspaper and he told me how sorry he felt that, “We’ve been unjustly attacked in such cowardly fashion.” He’d referred to the attack as an attack on both of us, and he let me know that he was feeling a pain as grave as mine. That we were in this thing together.

             We shook hands. The kind of meaningful handshake that binds brothers together. Not a casual greeting among acquaintances, but a firm look-em’-in-the-eye bond at a heightened moment in world history and in the lives of men.

            Only later at Ricky’s breakfast cafe when I’d read the latest news he’d sold me did I understand the depth of that bond, and the breadth of the camaraderie I’d been sharing with all the people I’d run across on the streets of Amsterdam . The body count in New York , Washington , and Pennsylvania was rising and it was reported that more than 60 and perhaps as many as 90 countries of the world had lost civilians to the attack. Including scores of Dutch, French, English, and Germans.

            We ate breakfast every weekday morning for those next few days outside at Ricky’s breakfast cafe along the canal at Oudezijds Voorburgwal, and every morning the proprietors, Ben and Ricky, let us know how much they shared our trouble. You could see heartfelt strain in both their faces as they popped in and out of their cafe to fill our sidewalk table with Amsterdam ’s best Dutch breakfast.

            We sat at that table in open air along the canal at Ricky’s all those awful mornings after, eating breakfast and flipping through the grisly pages of the morning newspapers, measuring the depth of our sadness in facts from the aftermath of our trauma as we chowed down our food. [2]

           

      A hard-boiled egg presented on a silver hard-boiled egg holder; NY Missing Toll Climbs to 5000, Pentagon Near 200;  four pieces of fresh bread; Bush Mobilizes 50,000 Troops; (two of them white, two whole wheat); Hijackers Armed with Just Knives; butter and jam; Three Jets Carried 5 Hijackers, Jet that Crashed Carried 4; good strong Dutch coffee; Remembrance Ceremonies Held in All 15 EU Capitals; fresh-squeezed orange juice!; Many Jumped to Their Deaths; Gouda cheese; Best Friends Die on Different Flights from Boston to LA; plus a piece of breakfast ham; Multiple Terrorist Cells Participated; and really fresh tomatoes; World Air Traffic Turns Chaotic, Strands Thousands Overseas.

 

  

*Cafe Chaos

 

                        On Wednesday afternoon we wandered around the Jordaan (Amsterdam’s pub and garden district) and we ended up popping into a beer bar near the Leidseplein along the Lijnbaansgracht (canal) called Cafe Chaos, aptly named for the out-of-control state of mind our whole new world had put us all in.

            Cafe Chaos was empty and the woman behind the bar took our drink and sandwich order and insisted on turning off the music and turning on the CNN Breaking News Box for us instead. We told her that wasn’t necessary, but she could tell we were just being polite and she insisted.

            “I want to catch up on the latest myself anyway,” she said as she put the sandwiches and beverages down at our table under the hanging television set in the corner.

            “I’m  so very sorry for what they did to you.”

            “I’m so angry and I feel so sad for all those people. I don’t know what to do these days except to just watch the television and cry,” she said, as tears welled up in her bloodshot eyes.

 

 

  

*Not A Lot of Blabber

 

                         The TV at Cafe Chaos was the same as it was everywhere else we went in Amsterdam in the days following the Tuesday attack on Washington DC and New York City --- now referred to by the media, politicians, and people on the street alike as simply September 11 or 9/11.

            It was day after day after day of uncontrollable staring at a CNN screen full of grim developments, more grim facts, and multiplying grim bits of factual minutia. I knew that pretty soon all we’d be getting from that TV screen would be repetitive talking heads and babbling media pundits rehashing the same facts they were giving us now in real time, over and over and over again.

            And here and there we’ll get a tiny bit of fresh news.

            But there wasn’t a lot of repetitive blabber on the airwaves right now. Because right now fresh events full of fresh grim facts were coming in thick and furious across the ocean by satellite on whatever 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box receiver we’d run across while cafe hopping about Amsterdam in our fog.

            Hearing the sinister details about how cunning and wicked the attackers were. How the terrorists had picked four aircraft to hijack within a short time of each other to ensure a greater surprise factor and how the four planes were all bi-coastal flights, thereby insuring that they’d all be loaded down with fuel. How they used box cutters that were easy to smuggle onto the airplanes to menace or kill flight attendants as a despicable way to lure the flight crews out of their cockpits. How four cells acting independently of each other each had a trained pilot aboard, and how they’d all learned to turn off their transponders in order to avoid detection.

            Hearing about false terror alarms in America and around the world as everyone on Earth --- according to the TV people --- freaked out. The rising fire department and police force death toll at the World Trade Center , reported to me on the run as I popped into a shop for some smokes. Another account of another soul-stomping final cell phone call from the brink, heard while sitting around at Rick’s talking to Mark and others about the mounting toll.

            All of it so grim and much too clear and present to ignore.

            The smoking post-apocalyptic ruins of the World Trade Center sticking up out of the grave of perhaps as many as 10,000 innocent souls up on the TV screen. Firemen praying over and carrying flag-draped coffins of comrades out of the smoke. Still photographs of people jumping to their deaths. Memorial candles. Grisly reports of body parts scattered in the street where so many jumpers hit the ground. Missing-person flyers multiplying everywhere, taped up on almost every wall and post between Battery Park and Washington Square . Copy-sized  8-1/2 by 11-inch appeals screaming to frantically find pictured loved ones now presumed dead in the rubble of World War III.

            Stories about box cutters, slit throats, and valor in the sky. Stories about people trapped, people on fire, people vaporized. About fighter jets patrolling Manhattan airspace.

            More sad stories about final phone calls home.

            The shock on the faces of everyone around you wherever you went who you were compelled to interact with outside your own miserable funk. They too measuring the depths of their own hangovers with all the grim new numbers they too read in the newspapers, or heard over the radio, or heard on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box, or heard on the streets --- in whichever form the bad news took.

            An American man (also stranded in Amsterdam ) came into Cafe Chaos while we were there (a man about 55 or 60 years old) and he told us, “I’m too old or I’d like to help go get those bastards. If I still could, I’d sign up for another tour of duty right now. I’d like to be there when they get him...”

            The International Herald-Tribune newspaper speculated that about 10,000 people had been killed and the guy on CNN wasn’t sure if the lack of injured treated immediately after the attack was a good sign or a bad sign. More than 350 police officers and firemen were missing and the Mayor of New York had begun wearing a memorial FDNY baseball cap at his news conferences from a place the media’s begun calling Ground Zero.

            All professional baseball and football games have been canceled in America until further notice, we heard over the news.

            Canceled because of the funk.

            The Eiffel Tower and most other landmarks in Europe have been closed down until further notice, we read in a newspaper. Closed out of anxiety and fear.

            Obvious targets closed to the public and events canceled because of the over-powering misery and omnipresent mourning and the absorption of all the depressing minutia in all our daily newspapers and 24-hours a day on all those television sets all over town. Canceled and closed down due to public grief and loss of public appetite for fun and fantasy. And because gathering 65,000 people together in one place until our funk fades away enough to properly secure such a crowd in this new all-out/no-holds-barred terror war world (enough to keep it safe from the sleeper cell mad dogs reputedly in our midst’s) would be imprudent.

            Eventually the hangover will go away enough for us to all get on with it. But damn, it’ll probably take a long while for that. And damn if were not going to actually be forced into dealing with this mess whether we want to or not. Even those of us who thought all these years that we’d properly prepared ourselves with an adequate armor of cynical indifference.

            I-used-to-be-disgusted/now-I’m-just-amused Americans are now going to be forced by circumstances (just like everyone else) to work collectively at healing, when just a few days ago we’d been contentedly focused on our own selfish heres and nows.

            So horrible and intrusive this thing is.

            So overwhelming in all regard for fair-weather Americans and fair-weather allies alike ...

 

 

*Why Us ?

 

                        In Shanksville, Pennsylvania recovery crews stood at the still-smoking crater in the ground to recover the bodies of the four terrorists and the 40 hero passengers who’s ranks apparently rushed the cockpit and fell on a bomb meant for Washington DC, perhaps saving hundreds of lives and sparing another American monument.

            They stood in the acrid smoke of the wreck and they scratched their heads and they wondered aloud to the CNN camera why someone over there thought so badly about all of us over here to do something so cowardly ---  so absurd.

 

            Something like this ...

 

*Being There:

Movie Night at Camping Zeeburg

   

The Case For Rage and Retribution:

Let The Civilized Toughen Up

 

Excerpts from a Time Magazine article I read on Friday

(in the Sept. 14 European Extra Edition)

 

                Let’s have rage ... let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with such a short attention span ... and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred ... anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company ... the worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized ... this is the moment of clarity ... let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started.

                                                                                                                                   Lance Morrow

 

                        On Friday night (movie night at Camping Zeeburg) one camper (I believe he was a Dane) became much too philosophical for decent company when he tried to lure me into a, “What about all those baby-killings in Vietnam ” debate. But the timing was all wrong and the antique issue didn’t blend with my new world funk at all, so I smiled and politely declined.

            “It’s just not the right time,” I said.

            But the lout tried to force the debate, and the second time I declined it was with much less decorum and without a hint of a smile anymore. And then the third time he tried it I repeated what I’d said the first two times with more verve and in a tone that left no question where I stood in my funk as it applied to his 30-year-old Vietnam concern. Crammed down my throat by a lout only three days after September 11 and on the sacred day of remembrance in Europe .

            “This is clearly a time of mourning,” I barked, biting my lip as I expressed my displeasure with his horrible timing and his rude insistence. The jerk leaned forward in his chair as I spoke, again about to ignore my appeal until I leaned right back at him getting right up in his face and ended my last answer with a loud, angry, and unmistakable, “IT’S JUST NOT THE RIGHT GODDAMN TIME.”

            At that point, not willing to start a fist fight with an enraged man, the rude camper melted back into his chair and gave me no more trouble the rest of the night.

            A minute later the film began.

            It turned out to be Peter Sellers and Shrilly McClain in the classic film about a simple civilized man traveling at great risk to himself through the safe TV screen and into a complex partisan world of geo-political control freaks, Being There. I was way too exhausted to stay up for the whole long movie, but the theme of the film fit what I do in my career and what I was certain the current new-world circumstances would encourage me to do with that career during the next few months or the next few years.

            My career.

            A lifetime spent watching TV news, mostly CNN, and occasionally deciding something on the TV news was inspirational and important enough to be worthwhile diving through the TV screen at. Seeing history in person through my own camera lens instead of just sitting on my couch and watching it through the CNN Breaking News Box filter.

            Sometimes traveling unaccredited to places so remote that you can’t even buy a Coca-Cola, and sometimes getting there ahead of the news for the sake of grass-roots global street art.

            Global street photography in unusual and historical circumstances.

Not a bad gig if you can take the trauma of what you might end up seeing along the way. Nasty dehumanizing things that imprint differently in person than they do while flickering across the edited CNN Breaking News Box.

            I thought about the latest article published about my art career last week in the weekly art magazine put out by the local newspaper [3] in Lawrence. About how I’d been practicing my street career in the public eye for a long enough time that the press had finally begun getting what it was that I’d set a lifetime aside to do.

            The article was headlined; “Into the Eye of the Storm; Local Photographer Seeks Lethal Situations for the Perfect Shot.”

            It was about an exhibition of a set of my multiple-image story board-like Dreamscapes showing at an art gallery down on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence . The critic was particularly drawn to the Montserrat Volcano Eruption-scape canvas and he focused the article on the lengths I go to back up my hype as a global street photographer. Not just focusing on outdoor cafe street life in Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Chicago or Toronto, or any of the number of other festive, flamboyant, or everyday city streets I’ve wound up on around the world since 1982 --- more than 50 countries in all. Rather, a more complete global street photography package including grim streets of a world where war, natural disaster, and chaos share the CNN Breaking News Box with canalside Bailey’s and beers. The critic writing the August 30, 2001 article followed my dark street history from photographing the Central American wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala from 1982 to 1984; to my lengthy expeditions photographing German and European Reunification in 1990; to the collapsing Soviet empire in 1991; and finishing up with my 1997 to 1999 trips to the exploding volcanic streets of Montserrat in the British West Indies.
 

 

           

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

                     

 

 

 

    

 

                In the article the critic wrote, “Contrary to his lifestyle, Gary Smith says he does not have a death wish. Though he’s served as a war correspondent, traveled to third-rate hellholes, earthquakes, floods and erupting volcanoes, Smith would rather be out of harms way --- most of the time.” And then he had me replying to my resume by saying that, “I’m kind of nuts --- But mostly I just stay in my house...”

            It was as good a lead for a story about my artistic method that’s been written and continued, Smith’s style is to travel for weeks on end, then return home to work on post-production work. Fashioning the prints into what he calls Dreamscapes.

            “On at least a few of the photos the word nightmare comes to mind.”

            Art critics and newspaper headline writers love to zero right in on any sexy hook they can get their hands on and this new story about my career was no different. But the author at least had the sensibility to accurately include at the end that, “It’s not all fire and brimstone for Smith. He also travels extensively out of a backpack and a tent to photograph more benign street scenes. He’s been shooting (the streets of) Amsterdam for more than 20 years as part of an effort to capture the social dynamics of that European city.”

            And so here I was. Two weeks after the article was in the magazine. Back in my lovely Amsterdam. Watching the classic Being There movie at Camping Zeeburg a few feet from a Danish lout who would ruin my night if I let him by making me take responsibility for a folly-driven Vietnam policy I fought against when I was young, just because I was an American.

            Contemplating Afghanistan . Contemplating self-defense and war. Thinking about being there. Wondering how we’d all gone from here to there in just a few hours of TV evil. Sitting at outdoor cafes on the European theater contemplating what I do and what I’m probably going to make myself do now.

            The streets of the world good or bad.

            Buying an airline ticket and diving head first through the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Screen. Landing on the global street somewhere inside of history on the other side --- cameras blazing. Buying that airline ticket, packing my backpack and tent, getting on that airplane, and landing inside history.

            Being There.

            Smelling the smells of a place, seeing everything as it happens, hearing the sounds of the street, tasting the spices of life in strange, exotic, and often edgy street markets. And then bringing my slice of that life back to Kansas in my camera bag and printing the images on gallery canvases and into the pages of books.

            There was so much to think about, that despite being as tired and miserable as I was when the movie started, I ended up staying up for the entire film anyway, drinking Bailey’s after Bailey’s and distracting myself from thinking about September 11 --- while simultaneously preparing myself to go to the outskirts of its next killing ground.

            I’ll be at the war before Christmas, I told myself as Peter Sellers left his movie TV and wandered out onto the streets of a whole new world. Confusing and angry streets he didn’t understand. Exotic streets at the other end of his world and on the other side of his 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box remote control.

            I’d be at the war before Christmas (I knew that) and as I watched the film I imagined what Kabul might be like by then. Maybe still under control of the bad guys. Maybe run by the United Nations or even --- if we’re desperate enough by then --- the US military.

            Maybe blown off the face of the earth if things go really badly.

            Being There.

            A simple regular American rising out of his living room chair and leaping through the complicated political TV screen. From his quiet garden into the clutches of the beast. Into the world as it is, not the world painted for us up on our TV screens.

 

            Being There.

 

            Inside the TV with my own interpretation of global history instead of getting stuck again, just another deer in the TV headlights armed only with a remote control and doomed to be run over by history while mining for truth watching Larry King Live. Watching celebrity experts and pathetic pundits fielding softball questions from Larry and telling us their points of view shaped almost wholly by watching other TV talking heads and listening to other pundits they chose to tune into.

            Indeed.

            Being There would be a far better thing than just that ...

 

*Same As it Ever Was:

The Church Bells of Amsterdam

 

   Music is Our High!

 

                   During the day on Friday, all of Europe (except maybe the Thumbs-Pumping Angel-With-Oversized-Muscles Punk at Down Under Coffee-shop, the Let’s-Talk-About-Vietnam Lout at Camping Zeeburg, and probably a few other ghosts of the American experience) stopped and remembered the dead.

            In England, which may have lost hundreds last Tuesday at the World Trade Center attack, the Star Spangled Banner was played at the changing of the Royal Guard instead of God Save the Queen.

 

            Similar genuine compassionate mourning was felt and expressed throughout the European theater because Europe took the attack to heart. Post-World War II Europe finally had a genuine reason to help America out. And America was finally vulnerable enough to actually need Europe ’s help for a change (instead of demanding it). Flowers were stacked hip deep and higher outside US embassies all across the EU. And on Friday all of Europe stopped, bowed it’s heads and prayed for three minutes in memory of the thousands of US civilians and the hundreds of European citizens who’d been killed three days ago.

            During the continent-wide three minutes of reflection on Friday, I sat inside at Rick’s along the canal and watched. It was cold and Janet and I were upstairs, leering out of the upper-story cafe windows. Watching boats chug up and down the canal and the rest of Amsterdam walking and bicycling and driving by over the bridge on Damstraat. At noon I heard all the church bells in the red light district ring out, bells from New Church around the corner at Dam Square, and from Old Church up the canal toward Central Station, and from across the red light district at New Market Church on the Zeedijk. According to the media, every church bell on the continent marked the beginning and ending of those three minutes of mourning.

 

            Rick’s, as usual, didn’t know or care what time it was and rang with loud rock and roll (“Music is Our High,” is Rick’s motto) and the few folks who were downstairs at the bar spent the noon-hour tribute listening to the sounds of the Talking Heads. But outside through the second-story window I saw a taxicab stop in its place for the full three minutes, the cabby getting out to bow his head in his hand as he leaned against the open door. I watched a Dutch woman wearing a flower print scarf over her head and carrying a shopping bag in her hands stop in the middle of the Damstraat bridge over the canal, bow her head, and then wipe away tears with a tissue she pulled from her sleeve. No canal boats passed under the bridge during the tribute.

            Aside from the wind and the birds, it was still.

            Watching out that window and tapping my foot to David Byrne singing “Once in a Lifetime” from the “Stop Making Sense” disk, I saw several dozen people (mostly locals) stop in their tracks when the bells began ringing to remember the dead in America. And I felt all of Europe doing the same thing all around me.

            Around the corner at Dam Square. Across the North Sea in England. Up in Oslo, down in Paris, over in Prague. And probably just about everywhere else in civilized Europe.

You may find yourself,

In another part of the world,

You may ask yourself,

How did I get here

            In the spirit of the ceremony I began to reflect about the victims of September 11 and their horror, but the weight of never being able to forget Tuesday somehow made my mind wander with the music at that poignant time. And I began imagining other songs on the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense record that might have been playing during those three minutes. It could have been: Psycho Killer, (“...feel so nervous I can’t relax ...”) or Burning Down The House, (“...were in for nasty weather ... fightin’ fire with fire...”) or What A Day That Was, (“...you feel like talkin’ to someone who knows the difference between right and wrong ...”) or Life During Wartime, (“...this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around ...”) And any one of those songs might have been somehow apropos to the moment.

Under the rocks and            stones,

There is water under            ground,

 

Same as it ever was

            The church bells rang again at three minutes after noon and then everyone went about what they’d been doing before the tribute began.

            Still stung with an inconsolable sadness.

            An unshakable funk.

 

 

~

September 18, 2001

Amsterdam to Brussels to Paris and back to Amsterdam

 

 

 

Road Trip to Wartime Paris

(One week after September 11)  

 

                        Left Amsterdam today for an edgy and morose Paris on the (unfortunately named) bullet train through the European capital of Brussels.

            Glad for a fresh environment to suffer in.

 

            Amsterdam had begun to look gray to me --- even in the splendid rain.

 

 

  

*Paris in The Crosshairs

 

 

                         Headline News*[4]
                           Sept. 17-20, 2001

                              ________________________

                        *  War Against the West

                        *  President Wants bin Laden ‘Dead or Alive’

                        *  US Deploys Warships and Planes, Calls Up Reserves

                        *  NY Rescue Hopes Fading: Only 6 Rescued from Rubble

                        *  Stock Trading Reopened: Terror Topples Wall Street;

                            Insurers, Airlines Take Hardest Hits

                        *  Baseball Back in Business

                        *  Terrorists Spent Last Days Together in Las Vegas

                        *  Threat Closes Down US Skies Again

                        *  Paris in Terrorist Crosshairs:

                             Eiffel Tower Reopens to Public Under Extreme Security

 

~

                        Janet and I left Amsterdam Central Station on Tuesday afternoon on a three-day road trip to Paris with the weight of the whole new world on our shoulders. Tuesday was the one-week mark after September 11 and the end-of-the-week news headlines were still unbelievable. Everywhere we went in Paris we felt an aura of sympathy and a strange and almost eerie kinship with Parisians who themselves felt under the threat of attack from terror cells presumed to be operating in France.

            At the hotel.

            At the cafes.

            At my favorite crepe stand on the Champs Elysées.

 

            It was the very end of tourist season, traditionally the surliest time in the City of Lights for visitors. Time for autumn to come around and let everyone forget all the absurd idiosyncrasies of the yearly summer tourist throng and slow their pace for a couple of seasons to heal the wounds and regain strength.

            I’ve been to Paris in the springtime. Alive again. The waiters rested and hungry. Less surly. More patient with the tourists. I’ve been to Paris in the fall, and felt lucky to ever see a waiter smile. But on this trip, at the seasonal frayed end of Paris, the state of mind and courtesy of the French toward American tourists was spring-like. Because Janet and I watched Parisians hurt for us as I never contemplated the French ever could. It was like April with the waiters, French people smiling at us and making an effort to be extra kind and gracious to us. When the subject came up, many French urged us to be strong and told us they were with us whatever may come.

            Even badgering Metro staff for subway directions --- a task without adequate French that’s often pure torture --- was easy for us on this trip. Thus was the weight of post-September 11 in the mull of the worldwide mood.

            The whole civilized worldwide mindset.

 

            Even France.

 

*Thumbing Her Nose:

I’m Not Going to Let Those Bastards Scare Me

   The Games Must Go On

 

                        We’d decided several weeks ago to take the road trip from Amsterdam to Paris to be at a museum art opening in memory of my friend, the American artist Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton . Elizabeth was from Wellsville , Kansas and after a successful career as the publisher of the local weekly Wellsville newspaper, she took up drawing in her late sixties as an alternative to electroshock therapy --- prescribed by doctors to treat the severe depression brought on by the death of a son. The private opening on Wednesday evening was for a three-month showing of her and five French artist’s works included in a group exhibition of primitive art at the Halle St. Pierre, Montmarte, in Paris at the foot of the Basilique du Sacré Coeur.

            Earlier in the morning on the Wednesday of the exhibition opening, as French President Jacques Chirac was in Washington DC to meet with President George W. Bush, Janet and I road the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. 

 

 

            The landmark, a target of a similar World Trade Center threat several years ago when terrorists almost succeeded in crashing a passenger jetliner into the globally beloved heirloom, was tightly guarded. On many past road trips through Paris from the first time I was at the Eiffel Tower in 1982 until now, I had seen military guards there armed with automatic guns and serious about their security. In America we weren’t used to that kind of overt presence at our airports and major attractions. But I guess we better get used to it now.

            There was no line for the elevator ride up the Eiffel Tower like there usually is. Usually a tourist would feel lucky to only wait an hour or two to ride up the tower. But on Wednesday we just walked right up to the ticket booth and boarded the first elevator. Of course the top of the tower was still shrouded in it’s own early morning fog, but that never stopped the lines from forming to get up it except for the most miserable of days in the tourist off-season.

            Janet was aware that at that hour the president of France was meeting on the front lines of World War III in Washington DC with the President of the United States to discuss how the civilized world was going to fight a war on terrorism. Aware that she was about to climb one of the top 10 terrorist targets on Earth on the first day it reopened after September 11 very early in the war on terror. Circumstances so ripe with the horror and terror and sadism and the stink of our enemy that the thought of it all even gave me the willies.

            And aside from all of that, Janet’s afraid of heights too!

            It was a special moment for her. Like that time up on the summit of Mount Ngauruhoe in New Zealand , when despite her fears, she made it to the top of that steaming active volcano. Or that time on that narrow windblown walking bridge suspended over the Colorado River at the bottom

of the Grand Canyon when despite acute anxiety, she made it across. But much more than that; this was (as she put it) her big chance to thumb her nose at the terrorists. As she walked around the observation deck she thought about what had made her come back to this spot at this time under such an awesome threat --- up in the clouds in Paris in zero visibility. Way too high up in the air for her tastes and a budget-busting elevator ride as well. All so she could thumb her nose at terror in the very early days of World War III Paris. To somehow get involved and to somehow fight back and to not let those bastards scare me...

 

            The games must go on!

 

*First Distractions

 

                        The meals in the city restaurants and cafes and even from vendors on the streets seemed particularly good on this trip to Paris. Perhaps a week of living as an American target stranded in Europe somehow just made the food seem to taste better, more flavorful and alive. But mirage or not, Janet and I felt like we ran into some exceptional dining at a fortunate time. Particularly that muscle dish we ordered over at Cafe Olympia near the Place de la Madeleine that alone distracted us from our funks for almost two hours. The hour it took to eat it and the hour after eating it that it took to stop talking about eating it.

 

            A banana and chocolate crepe I had on the Champs Elysées also took my mind off the war for a minute or two, as did finding several very good streetphoto moments and capturing them with my camera, which had finally come to life in Paris after a nearly idle week in post-attack Amsterdam. The food and the photos were the first effective distractions in a week for me and soothed my nerves, but only for a while. Reminders of September 11 were everywhere. On the covers of newspapers and magazines at every newsstand we passed. On the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box in our hotel room. And in the sympathies expressed to us by every Parisian we encountered.
 

 

 

 

      

 

 

        

 

 

            But a little bit of a distraction was better than none, and I was grateful to have ended up out on the streets of the European theater taking pictures and taking notes and eating delicious French food and wishing I could just make the whole thing go away --- rather than having been stuck on the homefront watching the horror on television every minute of the day and wishing I could just make the whole thing go away. No matter how much of a target we may have presented --- out and about on the streets of a wartime Paris on edge.

 

  *Mistaken For a Fascist:

   The War on the West

 

                        This morning on the way to a breakfast at Halle St. Pierre, Montmarte, to meet Elizabeth Layton’s friend and curator Don Lambert who came to Paris from Topeka in support of the exhibition, I came around a corner at a Metro station rushing to meet my train when a striking two-square-meter twin subway station advertisement stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a twin-printed set of covers from the terrorist attack issue of L’Express Magazine pitching its coverage of the War on the West and using a photograph of the second jet about to ram the south tower of the World Trade Center.  

 

 

            Several Metro riders stopped to stand and watch me take the picture. One looked me in the eyes and shook his head sadly about the attack before going on with his commute. I often make wallscape photographs out on the street and as often as I can in the world’s subways. Like the poster I was standing in front of, the scenes often contain dynamic elements. Elements worthy of a second look or even a full study. But dynamic elements in poster art are never lone subjects for my camera, rather they are principal elements that I combine with broken windows in front of the poster or maybe graffiti scrawled on top of it or unmolested in its place but arraigned among people, or windows, or doors, or urban utility elements. Never before had I made a photograph of just a poster or subway advertisement.

            Aside from a few surrounding Metro wall bricks and a photo-framed layout of my own of the double image, this time I shot the principal thing mostly on its own merits and mostly in its own place. It’s magnitude having nothing else in common on the streets of Paris, still so out of place in its twin depiction of the twin horror to be a mirage, a rumor, a goddam adventure film poster pitching next week’s block-buster theater opening of the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

 

            After breakfast at the museum, we strolled to the Gare du Nord (railway station) to board our Amsterdam-bound bullet train. While Janet spent our last French franc coins we’d ever spend, (since the switch to the Euro was about to occur on the first of next year,) I went outside the main entrance to have a cigarette and to see if the boulevard there would give up one final Paris street photograph. It had been raining hard when we got to the station to check up on our train, and I do so enjoy a good umbrella streetphoto opportunity. But by the time I got back outside --- the rain had stopped.

            As I stood there smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk, a panhandler wearing a Nike windbreaker began to hassle me for a “donation.” After two polite “no” answers, the man -- apparently of Arabic descent -- called me a “fascist.” I burst out laughing at him as he began to move away from me and then he stopped and turned around to tell me that I would be, “Going to hell as a fascist.”

            I laughed out loud again as he turned and kept walking and a second later I grumbled after him, “You’re the one wearing that Nike jacket pal, not me. Think about that for awhile asshole.” Well, that stopped that panhandler in his tracks. He turned around to face me from about six meters away and bristled at what I’d just said to him, his fist’s clenched and his body straightened up. Bristled at how I’d hit a nerve that he knew that I knew he could understand. He clearly wanted to return toward me and do violence, but he could tell by my smile and the way I’d slammed him about his Nike advertisement that I wasn’t going to be an easy target. So he spit on the ground between us, turned around muttering something or other in a language I could not understand, then stomped off down the street --- glancing back every now and then to curse and spit.

 

            I finished my cigarette and Janet and I boarded the northbound train through Belgium --- back to Amsterdam.

  

~

 

 

September 22, 2001

Amsterdam, Holland

 

  

                        Headline News*[5]

        *  Later in the week it was reported on CNN that Paris police arrested seven sleeper cell terrorists suspected in a plot to blow up the US Embassy in Paris on the morning of September 20 --- while Janet and Don and I ate breakfast at the Halle St. Pierre Montmarte.

        *  Other arrests were reported all around Europe, from Holland to Belgium to Germany and Spain. The war against terrorism was heating up on the European  front, and was seemingly following Janet  and me around.

 

            Thumb your nose at them if you will, but that can’t discount the real and present danger the civilized world and especially Americans are in at this time, especially those stranded out on the streets of the world ...

 

 

*New Amsterdam:

Almost Everyone Wants to Feel Better Somehow

 

                        Back in Amsterdam this afternoon we checked into the Boatel New Amsterdam in the harbor behind Central Station. It’s an antique Dutch canal boat turned into a floating hotel. Not a lot of room for sleeping (a standard ship berth bunk bed with hardly enough room on the floor to even turn around in) and shared facilities, but tenants get a great big Dutch breakfast every morning in the mess and a fine window-ringed common area in the galley to comfortably watch the portside street traffic and harbor ships roll by. A fine transitional Amsterdam place between the raw elements of Camping Zeeburg and our next stop, the Hotel Sint (Saint) Nicolaas with its monster bathtubs and its gritty red light district location and it’s CNN TV. For Janet, the Boatel New Amsterdam was a welcomed place because it was out of the rain, (Janet’s not quite as enamored with the rain as I am) a rain that hadn’t stopped for more than 12 hours straight since we arrived in Europe two weeks ago. The cramped quarters in the old dry ship in Amsterdam Harbor (to Janet) would be preferable to the cramped quarters in the moist tent at Camping Zeeburg.

 

            Finding shelter from the Amsterdam rain and from the rain of September 11 in an ark called the New Amsterdam. An ironic coincidence, the ship named for Manhattan Island’s original name for almost 40 years until the English assumed management from the Dutch in 1664 and dropped the New Amsterdam name in favor of New York.

 

            After checking into the boat, we took a bus and a tram out to Zeeburg to fetch our backpacks we’d stowed there while we were in Paris . On the way back we transferred from the tram to a bus at Muiderport Station in an immigrant quarter of Amsterdam. While there, a Palestinian man waiting at the bus stop approached Janet and invited us to spend a week at his house with he and his family. He somehow wanted to feel better about September 11. He somehow wanted his whole family to feel better. Everyone, (except maybe that Thumb-Pumping Angel-With-Oversized-Muscles Punk at the Down Under Coffeeshop or that Let’s-Talk-About-Vietnam Lout at Camping Zeeburg movie night or that Called Me a Fascist Nike Panhandler at the Paris Train Station (and probably a few others) wanted to be involved, wanted to somehow feel better.

 

 

Headline News*September 23, 2001
Amsterdam, Holland      

  

   

     *  From Afar, US Expatriates Try to Sort Out Tragedy [6]

 

         Far from home physically but emotionally in the heart of the crisis, US citizens around the world struggled on Wednesday to make sense of terrorism and the catastrophe in a distant land ------- their own.

 

         Sad, angry, and sometimes dazed, they sought out each other, grasped for news and accepted unexpected condolences from their foreign neighbors and colleges.

 

                  *  Diverted Passengers Left in Daze [6]

 

        I’ve never felt more American ...

        My French friends are sad for themselves, but they’re also sad for me ...

        A Russian came up and held my arm for a while, and it made me feel good ...

 

        The French feel that this was an assault on democracy everywhere, and they feel

        violated, too. People are having trouble focusing regardless of their nationality 

 

*Almost Home At The
   Hotel Sint Nicolaas

 

                        The quaint Hotel Sint Nicolaas (with only 18 rooms) was built out of stone and brick in the mid 19th century with high ceilings, exposed wooden ship beams, and a ton of Dutch charm. And it’s served transient Amsterdamers well ever since. It’s not a very fancy place. Probably just above adequate for your typical tour bus flop house. But the perks of its location in the red light district near the train station and the harbor, the view -- and of course of its marvelous bathtubs -- makes it seem like a castle to me. It’s a handsome four-story stone corner building rounded on the front and crowned by attic dormers with simple wooden Amsterdam gables on top. It’s got comfortable big beds and an antique Jan Hamer Elevator with swinging doors and a metal gate and tight Dutch spiral stairwells in case the elevator ever breaks down. The room comes with a Dutch breakfast in the lovely downstairs dining room that itself comes with a homey Dutch feel and a charming tabby housecat who trolls the salvaged wooden ship deck floor for handouts from guests.

            Over the years the Hotel Sint Nicolaas in the noisy center of Amsterdam at the edge of the red light district has become our only choice for getting-out-of-town lodging in Holland , and on Friday we moved from the New Amsterdam Boatel to there to spend our last two nights of this memorable trip in our favorite room in the city. Room 23. That room at the front of that centuries-old round corner building with its spacious ceilings and its two sets of huge Dutch swinging windows in both the bedroom and the bathroom, each with wide window seats overlooking the action out on Spuistraat, is as good as it gets for the budget traveler. A bit tattered and in need of refurbishing, the Hotel Sint Nicolaas is, yet that only makes the charm of the space affordable for the likes of me.

            Room 23 at the Hotel Sint Nicolaas is our third home away from home in our adopted Amsterdam , aside from Camping Zeeburg and a canalside seat at Rick’s Wild Style Cafe. And we particularly feel at home when we’re awash in the killer bathtubs there, built deep and narrow and hot by some bathtub-building genius for generous heavenly soaking with a beverage and a smoke on the bath tray. The great big Dutch windows open and the sheer white curtains wave and twist in the breeze. The sound of trams and cabs and bicycle bells wafting up from Spuistraat coming through the windows and the curtains and the smoke and the steam.

            Sweet home Amsterdam.

            Sweet home Hotel Sint Nicolaas.

            Strange days and restless wartime nights ...

            Two people don’t do well in a Hotel Sint Nicolaas Hotel bathtub, but it’s one of the great selfish treats available in the red light district. Janet left to do some last-minute shopping this afternoon and so I decided to leave the babbling CNN TV in the bedroom to indulge in the bubbling tub. I opened up both of the huge Dutch windows in the white tiled bathroom and tied the curtains aside, letting the smell of the North Sea blow in through those big windows from across the room --- salty, fresh, and tinged tonight with the smell of someone baking.         

            I filled up the marvelously womb-like six-foot long, by two and a half foot wide, by (and here’s where it gets good!) --- two and a half foot deep tub with hot water and a few suds. I sat back with a beverage and listened to the streets of Amsterdam out the windows. In fact, I must say tonight that I believe I like listening to the streets of Amsterdam from my tub in room 23 at the Hotel Sint Nicolaas almost as much as I love wandering around the streets of Amsterdam below taking streetphotos.

            The gnaw of the tram wheels as they grind along the tracks and the charming tram bells that conductors ring as warnings to pedestrians. The flow of cars and trucks going up and down the street. The buzz of motorcycles. The whoosh of bicycles going by. The soothing sound of the rain that so often falls whenever I’m here.

            The sound of lovers quarreling. The sound of a group of rowdies having too much fun under their umbrellas as they parade up the street in the rain. The sound of car horns and sirens from the brick streets and ship whistles from the harbor. The sound of people out having fun touring the city, dining or drinking at the restaurants, clubs, and coffeeshops on the block. And the sounds of some out scouting for sex from the girls in the red light windows in the Wallen just down the block.

            All this noise is so rich, but the only time I ever notice it well enough to dissect its parts is when I’m two-and-a-half feet deep in a sudsy hot water tub in room 23 of the Hotel Sint Nicolaas --- a smoke in my left hand and a beverage in my right ...

 

 

 

~

September 24, 2001

Amsterdam, Holland

The Stranded ...

Ten Goddamn Beautiful Days in this Goddamn Place ...

 

                        Stranded in Europe. Stranded in Amsterdam.

            A silver lining to some. Others are just ready to get back to the house or back to their desks, un-stranded, un-trapped, and back on American soil. With all the pain and confusion and uncertainty over the attacks and the aftermath of September 11, it was easy for the world to quickly overlook the tens of thousands of stranded Americans sprinkled all over the globe. Isolated and in shock thousands of miles away from home by an unprecedented attack on their own country, watching in horror along with sympathetic and compassionate hosts and other civilized nationals knocked out of the sky and set down in front of the CNN Breaking News Box at unfamiliar bars, taverns, and restaurants around the globe. Watching the suffering, and suffering along on TV. Unable to touch loved ones or be touched by those you need around you in times of grief, chaos, crisis, and misery.

            It’s one thing to go to Amsterdam to relax. Take in the art. Holiday around at the cafes. Even work a little bit along the way making streetphotos. But it’s quite another thing to sit vulnerable at a public house in a foreign land glued to the tragedy on TV and be unable to get the comfort and familiarity of home or the healing of family.

            For Janet and me --- holding return flights back to The States on Sunday --- it was tough enough. Janet wanted to flee west to her center for the first 36 hours, to be consoled and healed and put at ease of her fears by the comforts of home. The first time she suggested we get back to America was less than an hour into the horror show on September 11. Janet was freaked out. The Pentagon had just been hit and the President of the United States was fleeing west on Air Force One. Another hijacked jet was rumored to be zeroing in on the White House and it was reported incorrectly that a bomb had gone off at the State Department. Janet broke into tears and she began trembling. For a few moments (that must have seemed like an eternity to her) she thought the US was about to be defeated by an army, taken over in all-out war. She grabbed my arm and moaned that she wanted to go home. Wanted to get back to Kansas, Now!

            I, on the other hand, felt blessed to accidentally be stuck in my lovely Amsterdam during this horror. Diverted from the pain as much as possible by the pressure to holiday. We’d established Amsterdam over our lifetime together as our second homefront. All the time we spent on the streets here over the decades had made both Janet and me part Dutch in theory and part European in ancestry and mindset. We had a support system of friends and acquaintances here and familiar streets and haunts to help wind down the intense sadness and horror of September 11. We were in a tent or on a boat without TV for much of this trip, a blessing of course. Had we been back in Kansas, we’d have been in front of the CNN Breaking News Box obsessing and fretting every waking minute with family and with Kansas friends. Just as isolated from the fire as we are in Amsterdam, but saddled with an overdose of saturation news programming that would only tear our hearts out further and faster.

            I told Janet she’d soon thank the gods of aimless travel that she’d been stranded by September 11 roaming around the streets of Amsterdam and Paris instead of pretending to be able to go about normal life lost in the fog on the homefront. To be able to flit around drinking on holiday, and seeing sights under these circumstances and only having to watch TV two or three hours per day at the most was damned good luck. To leisurely suffer the convulsions of grief lollygagging around Europe was a timely gift worth celebrating. And ultimately -- through the most severe pain and suffering we could imagine -- we did.

            It wasn’t a great holiday. But it was a civilized way to suffer, that’s for sure.

            Suffering our roll as part of what’s become known in the news as the Stranded, we also had the opportunity to study the attack from the viewpoint of Europeans. A continent of people who --- ever since America came in as Prince Charming during World War II and then never let anyone forget about it --- has always resented needing our help so badly and never being able to return the favor to us in a manner up to its standards of exchange. Americans never seeming to need the sympathy of the outside world. Rich, powerful, self satisfied, and often seen as smug about its standing.

            But there we Stranded were. All over the world and like Janet and me, all over Europe . Crushed, grieving, terrified, and... well... --- stranded. Eating bar food and sipping cocktails in hard chairs at unfamiliar taverns while we gathered bad news.

            However, along with the pain and the isolation there was the rare sense of international compassion. The only September 11 silver lining I’d encountered so far. For all the world to sympathize with the Stranded’s pain, to comfort us and to grieve and cry with us. From afar, (by way of the media,) it was a clear-cut case of a civilized world uniting against the insanity and tyranny of uncivilized terror. But from close up (face to face on the streets) it was a once-in-a-planet opportunity for a whole people to practice unprecedented grass roots compassion toward each other. For a French woman selling newspapers at a sidewalk kiosk to stroke the hand of a crushed American buying the latest bad news from home, touched by the helping hand of a shared humanity of healing. An opportunity for stranded Americans to need the attention given by people who’ve never needed to make their peace with America --- but nevertheless were there when we needed them.

            It was a basic exchange of solidarity and unity in war at the most poignant of levels. A touching of civilian souls on the streets out ahead of the news in what the CNN Breaking News Box was still only presuming would be a united front against terrorism. Touches and hugs and tears and well wishes between Americans and the world that together with the scope and gravity of the attack led to that gathering coalition against the criminals by the governments of all the civilized world. Both the United Nations and NATO say to count them in without even being asked. More than 140 countries have already made immediate and stiff condemnations. And 56 Islamic and Arab countries voted unanimously to support the anti-terror coalition against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

 

~

                        Janet and I weren’t alone stranded in Amsterdam and Paris.

            I watched one poor drunken fellow a couple of nights before we left town sloshed to the gills on an Amsterdam bridge in the red light district, moaning his sad stranded story to a string quartet trying to busk for their rent. It would have been sad enough, listening to him tell about how his flight from Berlin to New York to see his honey had only been a couple of hours from landing at JFK when the jet turned around and flew him back and landed him in Amsterdam instead. It would have been sad enough when he told the quartet how he’d been stuck in Amsterdam (without his honey) for, “Ten goddam days, ten goddam beautiful days in this goddam place” and how he thought he might lose his job if he didn’t find a way to get back soon. It would have only been sad, but as it turned out, it was so sad it was pathetic --- and then so pathetic it turned comical.

            The poor fellow’s zipper was down, his shirt tail was hanging out on one side, he was holding his latest beer in his dancing hands, and he moaned his story at the busker band all through their five-minute string and drum rendition of Rocky Top Tennessee. Nobody stopped to put any money in the busker’s case while the man raved about his ordeal, singing his own sad tale to the street musicians, to passers by, to the prostitutes of the red light district in their red light windows, to God, and to just about everyone else within earshot. So --- before I walked away, I pitched a two-and-a-half guilder coin into the busker band’s case and then went back about my own funk.

 

            Still depressed, but now mildly amused as well ...

 

~

                Before we left for Paris we ran into a couple named Britt and Billy from eastern Pennsylvania at the Camping Zeeburg clubhouse cafe who’d been at the end of a six-week European tour on September 11. They’d been stranded in Amsterdam for a week when we met them. Dropped into an absolutely full Amsterdam and reduced by budget and vacancy to living in a tiny wet tent pitched in the constant pouring rain at a cold muddy post-season campground. We were going to leave them our watertight tent and warm sleeping bags when we left for the three days in Paris. But Britt finally succumbed to the strain and forced the budget issue to collapse. United States airspace had been closed, reopened, closed again, reopened and then threatened to be closed again, but it had finally caught up with the stranded enough that Britt and Billy were reissued airline tickets to fly home on Friday. The last word we’d heard about them was that after a four-hour phone booth session at Zeeburg on Monday, they’d also gotten past the housing issue by lucking into a just-canceled room at a hotel in Amsterdam for Tuesday through Thursday nights, their last three nights stranded in Europe.

 

 

 

*Getaway Dinner:
      Except For the Crazies of Course  

 

                        We ate our getaway dinner Saturday night at a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from the Hotel Sint Nicolaas in the red light district, and the Egyptian waiters there begged us to stay after we were done dining to listen to their suffering of our pain. They told us how sorry they were for our trouble and then they urged us to go home and get out all of our guns and to go down to Asia and the Middle East to, “Eliminate the fucking Muslims from the face of the Earth.”

             These anti-Islamist Arabs told us how their hatred was spawned growing up as members of a Christian minority in Egypt, “Trying to live peacefully and prosper amongst Muslims” who they said had suppressed them at every step of their lives and had eventually driven them away from their homeland to here.

            I cautioned them that although I understood their animosity and would never dream of being qualified to change their minds about their religious war, that for the most part (except for the crazies, of course) we thought differently in America. A place where indeed all religions are welcome to practice. I told them that a vast majority of Americans would have nothing to do with a religious war or a backlash against Arabs and that we’d only be going to Asia gunning for terrorists and those who shelter terrorists.

 

            Except, of course, for the crazies ...

 

~

September 25, 2001

Lawrence, Kansas

Open Airspace

 

                        The airspace was open again all over the world, and it had taken the world about 10 or 12 days to do it. To catch up and set everyone down at home or wherever they were trying to get to on the morning of September 11 and since. We flew home through Philadelphia hardly noticing a difference in airport security.

                 Headline News*

                  September 25, 2001
                           Europe Edition

                           ________________________

                                            

 

                        *  New Wave of Attacks Thwarted [7]

 

             At least seven men suspected of having been planning a second wave of attacks in Europe were arrested yesterday in Rotterdam, Belgium, and Paris.

 

            As soon as I got back to the house I let the cats out, opened my mail, read the September 10 to September 16 headlines from the stack of already-yellowing Journal-World newspapers, and put the rest away until tomorrow:

                 Headline News*[8]
                         Sept. 10-16, 2001

                    Late Home Front Editions

                           ________________________

                          

                           Before 9/11:  

                      *   Book Says Judges Wrangled Over Election

            *   NASCAR Event ... a Boon to Lawrence Economy

            *   4.2 Earthquake in Los Angeles

            *   Rumsfeld Remains Firm on Missile Defense Program

            *   Rich Rake in Bulk of Federal Farm Aid

            *   Rural Residents in Poorer Health

            *   The Musketeer Takes Top Box Office Spot

            *   Census Shows Gender Gap Narrowing

            *   Hurricane Erin (120 MPH) Scours Bermuda

 

                  After 9/11:

            *   Evil!

            *   Panic Sends Lawrence Customers to the Pumps

            *   Lawrence Prays For Blast Victims

            *   Games Come to Standstill

            *   Flights Skid to Halt at KCI Airport

            *   Lawrence Lends Hand in Fundraising Efforts

 

5
August 30, 2002

A Baseball Strike Averted

 

                                A year later, by the end of this day in a season of anniversary remorse, I’d adjusted to the building melancholy and succumbed to the necessity of me covering it from the homefront in the media and from the pages of last year’s streetphoto journals.

            By the end of the day today, the baseball strike that threatened to shut down the rest of the 2002 season just when anniversary America needed baseball the most, was settled. Probably because people still aren’t looking for hurtful fights, especially now that the anniversary and an anticipated season of morose has arrived. And by the end of today --- nearly a year after the September 11 attacks --- 12 more suspected sleeper cell terrorists had been arrested in an anti-terror sweep for their parts in the plan to blow up the American Embassy in Paris last September 20 while Janet and I were in the city.