Four years ago a firefighter friend asked me if I would run a 5K race with him up in New York City. I didn’t have to think about it very long. Despite being a certified “country girl” (cowboy hat, horse and all) I had developed an unexpected love affair with the Big Apple. This happened a few years prior, when I quickly overdosed on the thrill of throngs of people moving rapidly through the city streets, glaring Broadway lights and the blaring car horns. What should have disturbed my peace and irritated me, I found thrilled me! Plus I was a runner with an impressive collection of race medals hanging on my wall. So I said yes to The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers run, with almost no thought.
A few weeks later, I found myself in a tiny lower Manhattan hotel room reaching for a bar of soap I had just dropped under the sink. For some reason, I thought it had been a great idea to “crush a leg workout” at the gym the day before. Now I was moving like I was 80 and any degree of leg bending or squatting came with considerable colorful language. Suddenly, I was dreading this run and honestly trying to find excuses not to go. Race morning came too early. I peeled myself off the uncomfortable European style mattress (fancy speak for a mattress that was as hard as a slab of concrete sidewalk), blinked open my bleary eyes and groaned. And then I slowly and reluctantly pulled on a t shirt and running shorts.
I was sure he was lost on the way to the Wall St pier. It was god awful early. The sun wasn’t even up yet. It was chilly and the city was eerily quiet. No honking horns, no throngs of humanity, just predawn silence. It was odd. Like someone had hit the mute button on a remote and forgot to turn the sound back up. Then we began to pass by some familiar sights. The West Side highway, Ground Zero with a construction fence stretched around its perimeter and finally the massive globe sculpture that had stood in the courtyard between the two towers. Mangled and bearing scars, it stood now in Battery Park as a reminder of the day.
Figures also started to appear. I had to blink at first to make sure they were real. To make sure I wasn’t imagining them or seeing ghosts. Men and women in fire turnout gear carrying their helmets. On the back of their jackets were their names and their departments. Firefighters from Jersey, firefighters from North Carolina, firefighters from Texas, from California, from Great Britain and France. All walking in silence south towards the Hudson River.
Once we arrived at the pier we were again surrounded in humanity. Runners in star spangled socks, runners with pictures of lost first responders and military members on the back of their t shirts and of course the firefighters. All of us boarded ferry boats as we watched the sun begin to rise over the Brooklyn Bridge behind us. Nobody spoke much beyond soft whispers. It was a time of quiet reflection. Occasionally two burly firefighters would make eye contact. There would be a slight head nod to acknowledge the moment and say “be safe” but there wasn’t conversation.
To be continued in a journey of remembrance part II…
My T2T 