It was 3:30 in the afternoon of September 12 and my Dodge Dakota was headed north on Interstate 85. It would be a long trip—Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and its Harbor Tunnel, the New Jersey Turnpike, then New York and my destination, Manhattan. I’d never been to Manhattan; this was my first time, and I was heading for a war zone.

The events of the day before continued to reverberate in my mind: the Trade Towers in rubble, the Pentagon in flames, the President on the run, the world gaping in disbelief at America’s humiliation. As the tragedies of individual citizens flowed through the radio, my heart was broken by a woman in anguish for her lost husband. “He’s down there, under all that,” she lamented, “and he might be alive; he might be calling for me. And I can’t get to him. I can’t help him.” I cried with her, pained by the thought of losing my own in so terrible a way.

As I bypassed Washington, D.C., on I-495, there was no smoke evident on the horizon to mark the conflagration that I knew was still burning there. Firefighters were slowly getting the blaze under control, reported a local station. The death count was still indeterminate.

How strangely normal the world appeared as I passed up 95, one of the nation’s primary arteries: heavy trucks transported their goods; people commuted home; gas stations and burger joints were busy. Despite the outer aspect, I knew it wasn’t normal. The tension in my shoulders, the unease in my belly whispered that the world was forever changed.

Darkness descended and still my truck hummed its way north. Then my first challenge: as I approached the New Jersey Turnpike great overhead signs flashed in yellow, “ALL EXITS TO NEW YORK CITY FROM NJ TURNPIKE CLOSED.” It was still 150 miles to New York. The entire lane to the turnpike appeared dark and bereft of traffic: a few cars, a few semis. I made up my mind: “I’ve come this far—I’ll go till someone turns me back,” and headed up the darkened lane. Fear stirred inside me. It suddenly felt as though I were heading into Beirut. The highway lights had been darkened. The air felt tense. Traffic was extremely sparse. People in service areas along the way—not many people—were glued to television screens. Service station attendants were unusually helpful.

A local traffic channel gave me some hope, the AM announcer’s voice crackling with static: Holland Tunnel closed, Lincoln Tunnel closed, Staten Island Ferry closed, but the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge is open. That was my way in, around and over the top of Manhattan, then down and in. My destination was St. Vincent’s Hospital—the closest trauma center to Ground Zero, a little more than a mile away. If I couldn’t help there, then from there I could figure out where to go, what to do.

High up the turnpike, now late in the evening, my first view of Manhattan suddenly opened to the right. I sucked my breath in. The buildings of the Financial District looked like they were partially enveloped in a black bank of fog. From them a broad black plume billowed up and streamed northward, spreading its pall across the city skyline. The beautiful towers of the World Trade Center were profoundly absent. The Empire State Building appeared lonely and vulnerable. Here was the pained center of the world’s attention. My truck struggled to hold its lane as my gaze held overlong to the east.

I crossed the George Washington Bridge, driving down into the city at the first available exit. I was tired and very soon I was lost. I grew frightened and prayerful as my haphazard choice of streets seemed to be leading me into old, poorly lit, derelict areas with rough-looking characters lurking about. “Officer,” I said with relief, out of my truck and approaching a flared intersection, “I’m trying to get to St. Vincent’s Hospital. I’ve come from North Carolina.”

He looked at my Duke University Health System photo ID. “You a doctor?”

“No,” I responded, “a chaplain, trying to get to St. Vincent’s to help out.”

His face softened and he and his fellow officer gave me directions. Though the directions sounded easy, within five minutes I was lost again. It was midnight. I was tired and anxious and not thinking too well. I found another group of officers, got more directions, got lost again. I was praying hard by now. Finally, a couple fellows pointed to a road I’d just crossed, Broadway. Get on it and keep going, they said, it would eventually bring me right down to St. Vincent’s. Directions I could manage: Get on that road and keep going.

Street numbers began to diminish as I dodged and wove down Broadway: 155th, 145th, 135th. I passed through run-down neighborhoods, and neighborhoods with bright lights and expensive looking stores. The buildings gradually grew larger. Cabs cut in and out. At times, flashing emergency vehicles would come by individually or in convoy—heading south, always heading south.

I had learned earlier that St. Vincent’s was on the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue. I encountered a police roadblock at Fourteenth Street. Again I showed my Duke ID and explained my purpose. I was given directions, waved through, and shown a place perhaps 200 feet in from the barricade where I could park. I was in behind TV trucks and equipment vehicles, only a stone’s throw from St. Vincent’s.

At the hospital, a worn-out triage team rested in a loading bay beside the emergency entrance. Tired police officers stood guard. Looking south down Seventh Avenue, close above an uneven wall of tall buildings, smoke billowing up from the destroyed Trade Center. Helicopters flashed and beat the night sky, circling the smoke. A sulphurous smell and acerbic taste hung in the air. An ambulance pulled up and the triage team jumped into motion.

They couldn’t use me at St. Vincent’s, so I flagged down a taxi and made for Bellevue Hospital. It was about two in the morning. A helpful young lady there, alone at a huge information desk in the empty lobby, told me of her own narrow escape from the falling towers. Then she suggested I might find family members to work with at the medical examiner’s station, where bodies were being brought, or that I go to the National Guard Armory in the morning, where people were being directed to file missing-person reports.

I walked the several blocks to the medical examiner’s building. Rounding a corner where countless policemen milled about barricades, I stumbled upon a harrowing scene, like nothing I’d witnessed. The place was lit up like a Friday night football game. The center of activity was a large open door on the side of the morgue. Masked, green-gowned workers filled the large inner room visible within. Others, mostly in white gowns, were in the street outside. As I watched, gurneys would come one at a time, about ten minutes apart, from deep within the building to the area just inside the door. The team there completed final preparations and bagged the body for transport, when it was wheeled by white-gowned workers to one of the large semi containers crowding the road to the right. The workers would open the refrigerated container and place the body bag inside atop others. Other containers to the left of the door, I was told later, contained bodies and remains that had not yet been examined.

Surely this was as much Ground Zero as that smoldering pile down on Church Street. How surreal it seemed, like a Hollywood set. But it was no set. These were real corpses being wheeled by. Elsewhere in the city their families wept and hoped in vain.

Several white-gowned workers spoke to me. They belonged to a group of prison guards from an area prison that had volunteered for this duty. It was hard duty. Fatigue and numbness were etched on their faces. They would never forget this night; nor would I.

After a few hours’ sleep, I brushed my teeth, washed, and shaved from a cup in my Dakota. Coffee and an egg sandwich from a nearby café got my stomach up to speed. Then I headed over to the National Guard Armory on 26th and Lexington. By now I’d grown accustomed to police barricades and showed my ID. It was amazing that with that Duke badge I could get anywhere in this tightly clamped-down, cordoned-off city.

The Armory proved to be just the right place to be. The day before, families had been going to a number of different locations seeking information about their loved ones. Now word had gone out that all such inquiries were to be handled at the Armory: It was to be the clearinghouse for information on missing persons. At the door, people received a blank eight-page missing-person report, which they would carry to one of many tables where teams of NYPD officers waited to help them complete the forms. These were necessarily detailed questionnaires—birthmarks, name of dentist—and officers were seeing their fair share of raw grief across those tables, doing their best to be caring while trying to hold themselves together. When people had finished completing the missing-person forms, they congregated at a waiting area inside the building. Here they waited to see if their family member’s name was on a list compiled by local hospitals and by the morgue: desperate people clinging to hope, traumatized by inevitable loss.

Along one side of the room, the Red Cross had set up tables where allied health professionals could organize and provide care for families—prominent among these were an area for social workers, and an area for chaplains. I managed to get plugged into the corps of fifteen or so chaplains—Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant. Our task was to move around the Armory on the lookout for families in distress and for police officers in need of support. There was no shortage of work.

I remember one lady just laying her arms and head on the table in complete surrender to her grief, the officers looking on helplessly. I remember a young man very rigid and stern in aspect, trying so hard to keep the floodgates of his sorrow from opening, the anguish within from spilling out. Some people had computer printouts of missing persons pinned to their shirts, with names, pictures, details, and phone numbers to call.

A young woman, Cathy, asked me to show her where the restroom was. I took her arm to steady her. She was very shaky, could barely walk. Her husband, Francisco, a tech support worker in one of the towers, was missing. She’d heard a rumor his name was on a list. The next day in USA Today, I saw a picture of Cathy in tears, asking if anyone had seen her husband.

It was a tough place to be, a valley of shadow, and emotions were raw. I spent a lot of time going from table to table to see how the NYPD officers were doing. When they had a break between cases, I’d approach. Most of them were ready to talk, appreciative of someone who would listen, and surprised someone would come there all the way from North Carolina to lend a hand. It was gratifying to be able to support these heroic men and women, and equally gratifying to represent my friends and colleagues back home in this hour of need.

As the day wore on, the crowds grew heavy and the system for processing them got backed up. Tempers flared. Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke to us. He was a reassuring and calming presence, and clearly comfortable in his authority--everything a good leader should be in a moment of crisis.

By late afternoon I was exhausted and knew it was time to go. I got back to my truck, then managed to find my way to the now-opened Lincoln Tunnel. With a sense of relief, I drove beneath the Hudson on my way to the New Jersey Turnpike. As I headed south, lower Manhattan still smoldered to my left. It would be weeks, months, I knew, before the cleanup was well in hand, and years before the damage was erased.

Why had I come to this place? Did my little bit of energy and effort make a difference in the midst of so much tragedy? I had come because I’d felt an undeniable call to do so. I did not decide to come. I had to come. I came to be a witness, to look with open eyes and compassionate heart on a people thrown down and bereft. I came simply to be with my fellow citizens in their hour of darkness. And I came to offer my modest set of skills to any who would accept them. Half-expecting than no one would, it came as a gratifying surprise that the NYPD and a few others had.

Later it struck me, too, that I did not go in isolation. I was alone, but my Duke colleagues, and especially my Triangle Hospice family, were with me. I was a representative of a compassionate, caring, community in North Carolina, a community that also grieves yet continues to do its vital work in its proper place. I wore my Duke badge throughout my time in New York—it opened doors, and gave me a sense of belonging throughout. In so many ways, the reality of my community informed my every step. From community I came. To community I was called. In community I witnessed and served.

Grey is a spiritual care coordinator for Triangle Hospice, a part of the Duke University Health System.

Copyright © 2001 by Richard W. Grey