Each year since 2001, when September 11 rolls around, I take time out to meditate. Today, my thoughts are centered on two trees—both of them, survivors of hate. One is at the site of the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist bombing that took place on April 19, 1995. The other is at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum site in New York City.
I remember going in to work at the World Trade Center each morning prior to that day. Sometimes I took the subway, sometimes I drove in from our home in Astoria, Queens, and later when my husband and I moved out of New York City to the Hudson Valley, I drove in really early to miss rush hour traffic on the New York State Thruway and New Jersey Palisades Parkway. I had a beautiful view of the Twin Towers as I got closer to Manhattan, from the Jersey side of the Hudson River.
I remember all my co-workers at the National Development and Research Institutes (NDRI) who occupied the entire 16th floor of 2 World Trade Center, the largest not-for-profit agency in the complex. One of them, plf515, who was there that day, has written about it here on Daily Kos, and republished that piece almost every year. I remember the faces of the security guards, many of whom were immigrants from Africa, who’d smile and check my ID as I entered the building. I used to greet one of them in Yoruba. He was elated by my attempt to speak his language. I remember the man from Pakistan who sold me lunch almost daily from a vending cart. We would exchange polite greetings in Arabic. He used to use the prayer room on the 17th floor. I remember meeting one of my coworkers each morning to buy a bagel with cream cheese and coffee in the basement area. We would laughingly complain to the Mexican-American counter guy about the fact that we couldn’t get cafe con leche, Puerto Rican style. Then we’d head back up to the 16th floor and get to work. That work, for me, was AIDS research. We also had a field office in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) so I didn’t have to spend every day in a sealed office tower made of glass and steel. But home base was in the Towers, where we were a multicultural, multiethnic staff. My boss was a Jewish Cuban.
All that ended for me one morning—a morning that I didn’t make it in to work because our sump pump broke. Throughout the days that followed, no matter how sad, angry, or horrified I became, it never occurred to me to lay blame on anyone other than the perpetrators and those who sent them. Sadly, I had to worry more about some of my fellow citizens, blinded by hatred because of how my husband Nadhiyr looks.
In spite of that, and in spite of the whipped-up fear, anger, and vileness boiling over from certain quarters of our populace, I have hope.
Things that grow have always given me hope. Flowers and trees don’t discriminate, and we can learn a lot from that. Out of the ashes of death and destruction, new life persists. The elm majestically spreading its branches in Oklahoma City is a symbol of life after a bombing that took more than 100 lives—many of whom were children in a day care center.
Oklahoma City bombing, terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., on April 19, 1995, in which a massive homemade bomb concealed in a rental truck exploded, heavily damaging the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. A total of 168 people were killed, including 19 children, and more than 500 were injured. The building was later razed, and a park was built on the site. The bombing remained the deadliest terrorist assault on U.S. soil until the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., in 2001.
Those who died looked like a cross-section of America.
Witness to Tragedy, Symbol of Strength
It is more than 90 years old. An American Elm Tree in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City, it survived the bomb’s blast and witnessed one of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil. Today, we call it the Survivor Tree.
Before the bombing, the tree was important because it provided the only shade in the downtown parking lot. People would arrive early to work just to be able to park under the shade of the tree’s branches.
On April 19, 1995, the tree was almost chopped down to recover pieces of evidences that hung from its branches due to the force of the 4,000 pound bomb that killed 168 and injured hundreds just yards away. Evidence was retrieved from the branches and the trunk of the tree.
When hundreds of community citizens, family members of those who were killed, survivors and rescue workers came together to write the Memorial Mission Statement, one of its resolutions dictated that “one of the components of the Memorial must be the Survivor Tree located on the south half of the Journal Record Building block.”
Rowland Denman, the Memorial Foundation’s volunteer Executive Director and Richard Williams, District Manager for the General Services Administration Oklahoma division, called upon the expertise of Mark Bays, an urban forester with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. Bays developed a plan to save the tree and has taken it on as his project for the last nine years. The asphalt that lined the parking lot was pulled away from the tree to begin improving the conditions around it. Seeds were taken and seedlings were grown. The tree began to thrive.
Like Oklahoma City, New York City has its own survivor tree.
9/11 Memorial Survivor Tree
A Callery pear tree became known as the "Survivor Tree" after enduring the September 11, 2001 terror attacks at the World Trade Center. In October 2001, the tree was discovered at Ground Zero severely damaged, with snapped roots and burned and broken branches. The tree was removed from the rubble and placed in the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. After its recovery and rehabilitation, the tree was returned to the Memorial in 2010. New, smooth limbs extended from the gnarled stumps, creating a visible demarcation between the tree’s past and present. Today, the tree stands as a living reminder of resilience, survival and rebirth.
The Tree That Would Not Be Broken
It was the last living thing rescued from the ruins of 9/11. A dozen years later, one mythical pear tree is finally home, and branching out from Ground Zero in mystical ways.
For a few years, the 9/11 Survivor Tree was lost.
Well, not really lost. Richie Cabo, horticulturalist for the Parks Department, knew exactly where it was. Since shortly after 9/11/01, he had been taking loving care of the callery pear tree at a nursery in the Bronx. But Ron Vega of the National September 11 Memorial & Musuem had no idea where the tree was. And he wanted to bring it home.
Vega had heard rumors of the Survivor Tree's existence from co-workers. Its story had taken on almost mythic proportions: the last living thing to come out of the rubble of Ground Zero, a charred stump that, to an untrained eye, looked dead. Apparently, someone from some governmental agency was taking care of the tree, although no one knew who or where. Eventually, after a lot of asking around, Vega tracked down the Survivor Tree and set in motion its second act.
It feels really good to see young people of all colors and backgrounds in New York City working together to help with growing survivor seedlings.
My husband’s former roommate, an immigrant from Panama, was one of the first responders on September 11. He died several months after 9/11 of respiratory failure. He was an EMS supervisor who stayed on the scene working around the clock for days. My girlfriend’s brother, who is Puerto Rican, was a Port Authority police officer who died, as one of the first on the scene.
Over the years, I’ve talked with spouses, children, parents, and friends in New York who lost someone as a result of that day. They represent the mosaic of race, class, ethnicity, and religion that is the New York metropolitan area. Not one of them has blamed an entire religion. Not one of them has expressed a desire to deport immigrants, or close our borders. I’m sure there are people who feel that way. I just haven’t met them.
Me … I just want to plant trees, and sow seeds of sanity. The answer to hatred is love, fertilized by education and empathy.
We have a choice: Be like those survivor trees and spread our branches to shelter all comers … or wither away and die, poisoned by vitriol.