AmbivaBlog: I'm so scared

Goodenough Gismo

This is the classic children's book, Goodenough Gismo, by Richmond I. Kelsey, published in 1948. Nearly unavailable in libraries and the collector's market, it is posted here with love as an "orphan work" so that it may be seen and appreciated -- and perhaps even republished, as it deserves to be. After you read this book, it won't surprise you to learn that Richmond Irwin Kelsey (1905-1987) was an accomplished artist, or that as Dick Kelsey, he was one of the great Disney art directors, breaking your heart with "Pinocchio," "Dumbo," and "Bambi."

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I'm so scared

Did they really have to release more 9/11 tapes?

I suppose so. They could reveal details of communication failures that may have doomed many firefighters (or did their calling doom them?) and made the response less effective than it could have been . . . than it could be next time. Chilling words to utter, stupid words not to utter.

And the families wanted them, wanted to know, wanted any little scrap of their loved ones even if it's a last choking cry.

Ann Althouse asks, "Are you listening to them?" (Click on that last link, and you can.)

No. Except for the little bits I couldn't help hearing on the car radio, no. I'm afraid to listen to them.

Watching that Peter Jennings memorial made me aware of how indelibly, horribly vivid that day still is, if you were here, and even if you weren't. (There were concentric circles of impact. In Greenwich Village, where I could hear Flight 11 churn right overhead and then the peculiar metallic thungg as it punched into the tower a mile or so away, we were not running from a boiling cloud of debris, but our lives were much more twisted and distorted than on the Upper East Side, where I had to take a "blocked" male cat to the emergency vet that very night -- bus drivers refusing payment, National Guardsmen rerouting traffic -- and saw nicely-dressed people going out to dinner.)

Some of Ann's commenters didn't want to listen to the tapes. Others wanted to, or felt they should. Some who listened regretted it. Reading some of the transcripts this morning is less immediate than listening, but does bring home all over again the hideousness of the crime and the sweet, ordinary innocence it destroyed:

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman described a "constant" stream of bodies falling from the towers.

"I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament," she said. "They were choosing to die, and I was watching them and shouldn't have been, so me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall and we could still hear them hit."

I suppose it is important to be reminded of that, ceremonially, over and over again; to have our awareness painfully refreshed, because it both softens and hardens our hearts in necessary ways.

(I can already hear my friends and family on the left saying We've done worse to non-Americans countless times. What's so special about American suffering? The warriors will answer, "It's OUR suffering, asshole!" If you don't feel that, then your survival instinct is attenuated beyond help by soft, hypothetical living. But I'd add that having it happen to us should make us more attuned to all suffering.)

One reason I don't want to listen is that I'm familiar with an all-too-vivid account of what it's like to be buried alive: my husband's. As an 18-year-old slave laborer in a Soviet coal mine, in his third winter, weakened by cold and hunger, he was caught in a mine cave-in. Decades later he wrote about it, and his description is already more than I need to know about what some of the victims in the towers -- those unfortunate enough to survive the meat grinder of the collapse -- must have experienced:

One afternoon we had just laid two meters of the side wall, when Omar snapped at me, "Come on, stop dreaming and get out of there." I shook my head and cursed myself. Then I heard Omar scream, "Jump out!" I was in front of the empty budka, sitting on my haunches and leaning against a brace. I heard him yell again, "Jump out! Jump out!" and then I felt a blow on the back of my head -- and then nothing ... nothing ...

The next thing I was conscious of was climbing a ladder. Up and up and up. I thought that I should have reached the outside long ago. The mine had never seemed so deep. Then I realized that I had a sore head and I couldn't move. I could breathe, but my legs were clamped down as if they were caught in a vise. Suddenly I realized that I had been knocked out and that I was just coming to. I was buried in a cave-in.

How was it that I was still alive, could still breathe? How long would I be able to breathe and to live? Had the cave-in occurred throughout the entire level, or was it a minor one . . . ? This mattered terribly. If it was minor, I had hopes that they would look for me.

I tried to move. Impossible. I tried to wiggle my toes, but they seemed to be numb. Then plain, naked fear overwhelmed me. I cried and then screamed, but I only succeeded in filling my mouth with coal dust that threatened to choke me. It looked as if my time was up.

My childhood really did parade past me. I remembered finding some wild strawberries . . . and [bringing] them to my mother inside a large green leaf. As I gave them to her (I knew how she loved them), she looked at them . . . and then gazed at me a long time. . . . I remembered that look she had in her eyes. It seemed to be the most beautiful and tender thing I had known in my life.

But then I came back to the present. No matter what I thought about, I always came back to the present.

I couldn't understand how I could breathe. It wasn't fresh air, but at least it was air. I lost all track of time. I felt the sweat running down my face, and it was tickling me. I had a strong desire to scratch my nose, but I couldn't move my hand. I cried again . . .

Up until now I had felt physically comfortable, except for the strong headache that had awakened me. But now I felt a dragging pain increasing in my right calf. Breathing was becoming more and more difficult. I was gasping. ... I couldn't take any deep breaths. I was in a cramped position and there was a lot of pressure on me, and I wondered how much longer I would last with only these short gasps of stale air. I thought I would suffocate. To me there was no death more dreadful than suffocation. I forgot the pain in my legs ... and then I kept trying to straighten my position, and as a result I felt new stabs of pain and had to take more gasps of air. Dust filled my mouth each time I gasped. The perspiration continued to flow; my exhaustion increased ... but I still remained in the exact same position.

How long had I been here under the rocks? Was it a day or two, or only eight hours? I couldn't tell. Fear choked up in me again. . . .

Suddenly I heard a faint, faint noise, a noise only a scraping shovel could make. . . .

That puts me right inside the towers with those unknown numbers who were buried alive, except that for all but a tiny handful of them, there would be no scrape of a shovel.

********************

UPDATE: Even though it's via Instapundit, I consider it an Ann-a-lanche. Welcome all, and thanks, Ann.

Posted by amba on August 13, 2005 at 08:44 AM | Permalink

Comments

...those unknown numbers who were buried alive...

If they weren't able to recover any bodies, then it seems unlikely that anyone was buried alive. From across the years, I'm remembering that they recovered 3 or 4 or 5 bodies only, of the thousands who were killed. I'm not remembering seeing anything about what happened to those who jumped but my overall memory of those days is that everyone and everything was pulverized into atoms. No desks, no phones, no computers were recovered. No one buried alive.

Posted by: NahnCee | August 13, 2005 at 01:54 PM

I was on the Upper East Side that day, in my apartment on 84th St. Our lives were affected too; I'm surprised that you would stoop to such a petty, "Upper East Side versus the Village" type of attitude. In fact, if I recall correctly, I went out to dinner that night. Not because I wasn't affected--but because I was so affected--and my wife and I wanted to be around other people, to share it with them. There are plenty of assholes on the Upper East Side, without question. But don't pull this kind of crap about such a serious event.

Posted by: Alfred E. Neuman | August 13, 2005 at 04:15 PM

This is a powerful post. I was a bit jarred when I came to the two previous comments, which both left me saying, huh?

As for whether there were people buried alive, I suggest reading this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050812/ts_nm/security_tradecenter_dc

It begins: "NEW YORK (Reuters) - "I'm trapped. I can't breathe much longer. Save me. I don't have much air. Please help me. I can barely breathe."

Those panicked words of a civilian on a New York Fire Department radio dispatch tape from the September 11, 2001, attacks were part of dramatic unreleased details of the attacks on New York made public on Friday."

As for the second comment, it seems to be reacting to a slight that was not in the post. Reread the supposedly offending passage and there is no offense offered or implied, merely an observation that Manhattanites farther from the collapse were less viscerally affected. Life *does* go on. The commenter seems to think imagined slights between uptown and downtown people is more important than the strong and poignant emotional thrust of the post. That is the only thing that seems petty to me.

Peace.

Posted by: Mark H. | August 13, 2005 at 05:43 PM

no slur intended Alfred. It was just concentric circles. It's just a fact/ We
were not driven out of our apartments or chased by roiling debris in the Village.
But our streets were closed and we had to wear kerchiefs over our noses like Western
bandits because of the burning smoke. Uptown was less disrupted. Less directly
olfactorily impacted. People in Denver and L.A. were upset too. I mentioned the
Upper East Side not out of prejudice but because that's where I had to go that night
to get to the vet clinic.

Posted by: amba | August 13, 2005 at 09:35 PM