By Jack Sullivan
For three decades, they were always there. Towering on the horizon, staking their claim to that piece of the sky. They were a comfortable connection to the kinetic canyons of the greatest city on the face of the Earth.
From the Atlantic coastline of Long Island, they were visible nearly to the Robert Moses Causeway, out in Suffolk. Surfers crossing the Ocean Parkway, boards tucked under their arms, could see them standing sentinel to another day at the office, while they romped in the waves at Gilgo Beach.
They provided quiet company to the fisherman, testing their luck in the bays and channel holes from Far Rockaway to the Jones Beach Inlet and beyond. On warm summer evenings from the sand dunes near Nassau Beach and Malibu, they drew crowds, rising in stalagmite splendor while a setting russet sun was consumed into their backdrop.
Only the regal snowy egrets wading and working the tidal marshlands, hunting the shallows for a meal, seemed to pay them no regard.
Kids’ eyes lit up catching distant sights of them, especially from a boat while cruising or fishing or tubing along Reynolds Channel under the sunny sky. They were larger than life. They conjured dreams reaching for the Heavens.
To many who lived in these beachside communities, they were much more than that. They were the places where dads and moms, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors went to work. Parents proudly pointed out to their children where they earned their livings. The kids, in turn, would point them out to their friends.
That all changed on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. They disappeared into the Earth, entombing innocent dads, moms, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors in a miasmic plume of evil black smoke. A mortal wound in the sky casting a pall of death over the landscape. They’re gone. Felled by murderers of monstrous proportion, a sense of violation fills their void.
On a day of tears, people stopped what they were doing to stand on bulkheads, docks, road shoulders, parkway bridges, sand dunes and the decks of boats along the coastline staring in stunned disbelief at the festering death cloud that darkened the distant sky. For many, night fell as a relief.
Early the following morning, drifting quietly on Reynolds Channel, a hazy brown scab of smoke enveloped the wound in the sky. A snowy egret waded in the marshes silently stalking a meal. The skies were eerily quiet, only sea birds flew in the dawn. Soon the scab of smoke would disappear, but this wound will take a long, long time to heal.
Those of us who know dads and moms, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors upon whom this wound was heinously inflicted must start the healing process. That’s the mandate of life. We must also resolve never to forget the terrible price that was paid to venerate that wounded piece of the sky under which those innocents, and the heroes who came to their aid, now rest in peace.
God Bless them all.
God Bless America.