skittish

I found myself thinking about tragedy last week, even before the crash of US Airways Flight 1549. Or rather, more specifically, I found myself thinking about my city in the wake of tragedy. I sometimes joke about, and yet take a certain pride in, New York's not infrequent appearance in disaster movies. But it's been another thing entirely to watch this city of mine reeling from actual disasters, or even just near-disasters, or potential disasters, from the skittishness and knee-jerk assumptions that set in after those airplanes took down the Twin Towers to the collective sigh of relief that went up last Thursday night.

There was Flight 587, en route to the Dominican Republic from JFK, crashing into Far Rockaway on November 12th, 2001, killing all 260 on board as well as 5 people on the ground. Though terrorism was quickly ruled out, the entire city, still in shock over 9/11, was in turmoil for weeks afterward, and in mourning for months. There is a clothing shop not far from my apartment, in the subway station at 181st Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue. The woman who owned the shop died on Flight 587. For a long, long time the passageway to the subway turnstiles was clogged with candles, flowers, prayer beads, letters.

There was a building explosion in April of 2002 down in Chelsea, leaving the city shaken again, though this time with only 40 or so injured and no dead. In this, too, terrorism was quickly ruled out. Friends of mine on the west coast called that night anyway, just to be sure I was okay, even knowing I tend to be miles north of Chelsea. It seemed it wasn't just New York that was skittish still, in those days, but the whole country.

Then there was the great blackout of August 2003. I was, as usual, in the basement of the International Affairs Building. I sometimes complain about working in a basement but that day I was grateful to be so close to the surface instead of stumbling my way down from an upper floor, flight after flight of stairs lit only by cell phone glow and strategically flickering lighters. It took me a while to realize how big it was, and even longer to realize that many people, including friends of mine, had at first feared it was terrorism. One of the most vivid memories I have of that day, while walking the four miles home along Riverside Drive, watching commuters navigate the streetlight-less roads, was coming across a rooster strutting its stuff on the sidewalk around 145th Street. That and wandering the neighborhood later that night, made hungry by the scent of impromptu barbecues on street corners bathed in headlights, and watching the inbound traffic lighting up the George Washington Bridge which was, for the only time in my memory at least, in itself, dark.

It's been awhile since we've had a large-scale tragedy (unless, I suppose, you count the Republican Convention of 2004) here in New York City. But when a coworker came running into my office last Thursday afternoon to tell me that an airplane had just gone down in the freezing waters of the Hudson River, my first thought was to brace myself for a city soon to be in mourning all over again.

I cannot imagine the terror those people on Flight 1549 must have endured that afternoon. All I know is the relatively minor fear that I felt in those first moments before it became clear that tragedy had been averted by a heroic captain and the quick response of rescuers on a 20-degree day.

I went out for drinks with a couple friends that night and the talk of the evening, not only with us but with everyone in the bar, and on the subway to and from the bar, and on the streets walking to and from the subway on the way to and from the bar, was the crash. And I found myself thinking how, but for the grace of God, it could have been a different kind of night all together, and in my own very selfish way I am grateful that my city was spared yet another disaster, yet another tragedy to absorb into itself, and will instead be able to tell the story of that bitterly cold winter day when a plane was brought down by a flock of birds, and everyone on board survived.