“I was there” isn’t the point of what I would like to say. I wasn’t one of the people trapped in the South Tower of The World Trade Center at 8:45 am when that American Airlines flight hit the building. Or the second plane at 9:03 am. My body wasn’t seen falling from the building; a decision to jump rather than be burned to death or crushed as every floor above came crashing down. I was down the street just waking up, staring at the television screen for forty minutes in silence, tears streaming down my face- all the while calculating that I could run from the apartment I was in to the WTC in less than five minutes. Asking myself, “Who of my friends lives near there?” and “Who is at work right now?” Going bloodless once I started to add it all up. One of my oldest and closest friends lived in the shadow of the Trade Tower, just feet away from the collapsed buildings. I had no way of finding her; all landline and cell phone service was down. It was as if she had just vanished. Another friend visiting from Oakland was unlucky enough to get caught in the dust ball while running away from it. For the first couple of hours I sat there watching it unfold on television while I tried to make phone calls to sort out who was home and accounted for; mostly to no avail.

I watched an interview with a paramedic at the scene on television late that first afternoon. Both his mother and brother worked in one of the towers. He had no knowledge of their whereabouts but in the meantime he decided that he was going to help victims. He said (in the most obviously terrified though level voice I’ve ever heard in my life): “Always help when you can help. Take care of people. That’s what my mom always taught me.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said out loud to myself as the tears came cascading down my face. That medic and thousands like him kept the city going. My whole life I’ve strived to be one of these people. It is this attitude that will get us through these kinds of things with our minds and spirits intact, despite the overwhelmingly negative evidence. To want to help was to understand the gravity of the situation but to not be paralyzed by it. I came to see that distance breeds inaction and a sense of detachment. Things so mighty we cannot conceive of them just vanish from our minds. We can’t wrap our heads around everything despite all of the information satellite television feeds us. Millions of Americans around the country were just watching it all unfold in disbelief. Dozens emailed and phoned me for updates. There are many even now, exactly two months later, who still cannot conceive of what went on in New York. I tell anyone who thinks they should go to New York right now that they should do so. That they see it in order to fully comprehend it for themselves. For those who can’t go or who don’t want to this is what I tell them when they’ve asked me about my experience there. [A few photos I shot in NYC have been posted with this update. More from the tour should be available soon]:

Imagine this visual: Every person living south of Houston Street became immediately homeless around 10 am on September 11th, 2001. I watched people lose their minds, their homes, their jobs, and their friends. Some of these people are my friends. Some of these friends have friends, co-workers and family who have yet to be found alive or identified in one of the orange body-bags carried to the Chelsea Piers Ice-skating rink over on the Westside. Within hours of the attacks it becomes Ground Zero’s makeshift morgue. It is real. It is immediate and lastingly real. These are facts felt in the real here-and-now and not in the abstract, not to be intellectualized in the after-the-fact. Two months later it’s still real; to my knowledge it’s still a morgue.

All across lower and midtown Manhattan shelters went up, restaurants opened their kitchens, shops donated clothes. Within hours of the attacks hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and New Jerseyites, tourists, business travelers and foreign nationals lined up to volunteer in any and every way. Every day I would make a dozen phone calls to more than a half-dozen volunteer hotlines: The American Red Cross, The Blood Donations Line, The NYC Emergency Hotline, The Search And Rescue Line, FEMA, The Missing Persons Line, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Cabrini Hospital, etc…all in an effort to be of some use.

I went to St. Vincent’s Hospital (the closest trauma center to Ground Zero) to give blood. By the time I got there they were turning people away. The line was hundreds of people long until they’d ran out of blood-bags. Same situation at Cabrini Hospital. Within two days all blood centers were full. So I mass emailed everyone I knew around the U.S. and asked them to donate blood in their states. Within a week the nightly news was reporting that the entire nation’s blood supply was full. Amazing.

On the morning of the 14th it began raining. I took a long train uptown to the Javits Center where they were coordinating volunteers for search and rescue efforts. Having had courses in avalanche search and rescue, and many summer jobs framing houses and doing demolition projects I wanted to volunteer. As driver, an errand-boy, an anything-they-needed. I arrived to discover that within 36 hours all search and rescue teams were being manned by a volunteer force of over 7500 certified, skilled welders, construction and demolition workers (in addition to the FDNY and NYPD teams already at the scene from the beginning). Even earthquake search and rescue teams from around the world arrived within hours. All had the proper tools, helmets and clothing. Groups of workers were said to be on the pile working in 15-minute shifts. The unbearably toxic fumes it emitted would allow a worker no more. Clearing away piles of debris in the rain only served to further oxygenate the fire and created more smoke. Even all the way uptown at The Javits Center you could smell faint traces of it in the air; like someone had lit a piece of plastic on fire and was holding it under your nose.

Three foremen, all construction workers in bright yellow rain gear, were in charge of wearily answering the questions of would-be volunteers. Repeatedly and with an air of sublime boredom they yelled in loud, wise-ass, blue-collar New Yorker accents: “What part of ‘WE NEED NO MORE VOLUNTEERS’ don’t you understand?” Their tone was directed at any and all persons who looked like they weren’t a “skilled worker,” which is to say anyone without work boots, a faded pair of jeans, a hardhat and a slip of paper certifying your particular skills. On the surface one could have thought they were behaving a bit smugly or over-antagonistic. But upon further examination it was glaringly easy to read them. It wasn’t their sarcasm that made them seem bored, exhausted, angry. Rather, there was an ache they carried in their postures and on their faces that spoke to something more. This ache was what prompted their sarcasm. Intimately, they felt the painfully slow and grisly nature of the task. There was some small pride to be had in knowing that they were needed. Well-wishers and novice volunteers be damned, they wanted people with proof of experience and proper equipment. I, like so many others had arrived in a panic to be of some use. I couldn’t produce the evidence showing I was “certified, bonded or unionized.” I had no work boots on, nor a hardhat. Even if I had these things they would have turned me away, as was explained to me- I’d be getting in line behind 7500 others who wanted to do all they could. I left happy knowing that all that could be done was being done. I left happy to be useless at least in this capacity.

So I walked down the Westside Highway all the way from Javits Center to The Chelsea Piers believing I could perhaps help load supplies onto trucks coming from barges across the river in New Jersey. Nope. All supply lines had been established and manned. So I looked into running errands for the triage centers. With the exception of occasional rescue workers being treated for smoke inhalation, no one was being seen at the triage centers anymore. It quickly became clear to me that in this tragedy most victims were either spared injury, having escaped with their lives and limbs intact, or they were simply dead and so far- gone without a trace. Though many in the city were holding out hope for their friends, neighbors and loved ones- with each passing hour the information gathered at the scene of each emergency effort was leading up to one big answer.

New York and New Jersey’s Dept. of Corrections officers volunteered for the immensely difficult task of identifying the remains as they would come in. They arrived in orange body bags by the truckloads. But even here they had no need for additional volunteers. Because though the WTC buildings have as many as 50,000 workers in them on any day of the workweek, they weren’t recovering many bodies, at least nowhere near in ratio to what they knew the death toll could eventually amount to. That day, of the 5,422 estimated dead, only 110 bodies had been identified. Where were the rest of the dead and injured? The answer was not difficult to deduce. Most victims were pulverized, burned beyond recognition, turned to ash, or still buried under the debris of the attack.

Another place I volunteered was The Missing Persons Center, set up at the Armory on 26th and Lexington Ave. I had been there earlier in the week when we had been in town to play two shows during our tour. A friend of mine is the production director for a casting company. It is normally her job to location-scout venues and cast fashion shows, parties and celebrity events during things like New York’s Fashion Week. The week prior the attack she had just rented The Armory for an Ungaro Fragrance Launch Party and a Donna Karan Fall Fashion show. She had just spent $500,000 turning a beat down Army Reserves barracks and weapons storage facility into a palace replete with faux-whirling dervishes and naked girls frolicking in pools filled with pink lilies. And then the planes hit the buildings. Nearly overnight the U.S. Army reclaimed the Armory and moved 3500 reserve troops into it. And then they decided to make it the Missing Persons Center.

If the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center were what comprised the actual physical body- the heart of the attack- then this place for a time, The Missing Persons Center surely was the location of its soul. Finding neither heaven nor hell in this place, I was surrounded by misplaced souls in limbo. Souls were everywhere, the living and the missing or presumed dead. It was one of the most sorrowful places I’ve ever found myself on earth. An entire city’s grief, an entire city asking: “What happened?” “Why me?” “How?” “Where is he?,” “Can you find her?,” “What will I do now?,” “My children will have no mother now, what am I going to do?,” “Have you found my son yet?”

Over and over and over and over and over…. Day and night thousands of people came clutching photos and descriptions of their missing loved ones. They came to fill out an 8-page dossier riddled with the most basic and painful questions. They wallpapered the whole of Manhattan with ghostly images and pleas for information. Then they waited. And waited and waited…in a cluster that went around the entire city block. I went there every day for four days to volunteer. And every day I saw Mayor Gulianni come on the news to sadly and exhaustedly inform us that the possible death toll had yet again risen. He bore the burden of that daily toll like a reluctant specter of death.

In the wake of his updates I would come to the Armory a couple of times a day only to find that each time the scene had grown larger. It was a slow-simmering frenzy of the terrified and the ill informed. People spilled out onto the street and were starting to take over the adjoining blocks. A red-eyed mob of loved ones clutching those damn photographs- comprising a glimmer into the life of every person who was perhaps at, in or near the Twin Towers that day. So many people came there to volunteer that for every one of the thousands of people who had come to fill out paperwork on their missing person there was at least one to two volunteers ready to attend. There were so many volunteers that it became increasingly exhausting for those workers to tell would-be volunteers: “Sorry, we need no more volunteers.” That’s all the volunteers did after awhile.

See, once the 8-page form was filled out there was nothing more to do for anyone. No missing people were being found alive. Very few complete bodies were being recovered from the wreckage. Of those bodies and/or limbs found, most were still awaiting a positive identification- often awaiting matches with the DNA samples gathered with the 8 page dossiers. When the Commissioner decided to consolidate the Missing Persons Center with the morgue at the Chelsea Piers I recognized the significance of that gesture, both for its tactical efficiencies and for its symbolic role in the city. Anyone not living in NYC during that time during the immediate aftermath of the attacks will ever be able to comprehend the power, the sorrow and the solidarity these attacks have generated. No amount of television will ever convey the destruction, not in buildings destroyed, lives lost or lives forever altered. I didn’t fully realize this until I was on the plane back to Seattle. As it flew over this great geographical expanse we call The United States of America I physically felt a pulling away. At that time there was New York and then there was America. I felt overcome by a strange psychological distance as I got further from the source. An unsettling distance to be very honest.

I decided to come home to Seattle when Juno was asked to play an American Red Cross benefit show at I-Spy with Death Cab For Cutie and The Bronze. All totaled we raised $6000.00 that night and gave some of the proceeds to an Anti-Hate Crimes organization in addition to the Red Cross. The event brought out a strange mix of emotions in everyone. It was good to see so many friends and to feel like everyone was trying to do something to be of help. People generally were ready to cut loose and celebrate life for the first time in awhile. The benefit raised more than money, it raised people’s spirits and made them feel like they were doing something and were a part of a community again. But goddamn it was weird to be home, struggling with all I had seen and had done- compounded by touring for over a month in advance of the time spent in NYC. For the first few weeks all I wanted to do was to go back to New York. But two days after coming home I had surgery for a collapsed sinus I sustained during some trouble with a broken nose ten years ago. For years I’ve gotten recurrent sinus and throat infections whenever we go on tour. I knew it needed to come to an end when I had started coughing up blood by the end of that last tour. So I had the surgery and have been focusing on healing up and resting for our upcoming European tour. I spent a week bleeding like a wide-open faucet. I spent the next week sporadically bleeding like a leaky hose. Good God, in all the years of injuries I’ve never seen so much of my own blood. But all in all things are all right. We’ve been practicing with our friend Levi Fuller on bass. He’s just recently moved out here from Boston and has offered to come to Europe with us. He’s proving to be pretty hilarious. So things with Juno right now are good as can be I suppose. It’s raining and miserable in Seattle, amazing….Life is strange and painful sometimes. We’re all very much looking forward to this European tour….sure to be interesting given the state of the world. It will be our second trip to Europe in six months. We’ll see many of you perhaps very soon.

Have strength and take care of yourself and those you love,
Arlie Carstens/Juno
carstanza@hotmail.com