since tuesday i've been visited by a most penetrating memory. as an adolescent and young teen, at odds with the world, capitalism, consumer culture, i frequently rode my bike to the watchung hills to hike around, be alone, sit by a stream. it didn't take much riding before the new york skyline came into view. once i got a little elevation, there it was, the end of the world, the center of the universe, through the trees, just across from new jersey. from there i could commune with my grandmother, still on 84th street, my father, as a young boy, leaning out a window on 72nd, could he see where i stood, here on this ridge? when i got older, and my friends and i could drive, we'd go up to the hills at night, find a quiet street to park on and sit and look at the skyline. it was like stargazing - amazing, awe-inspiring, and captivating and oddly reflective and quiet from that distance. during the day, though, i was usually on my bike, and i was usually heading to the interior, the woods. the park in watchung was a rarity - a rough and rugged swath of the kittatinny ridge left in its natural state - save for an eerily orderly pine forest planted by the ccc in the 30's. it was a gasp of sanity in the midst of urban scarring.

just beyond the western perimeter of the park was a reminder of an ongoing tension between the value of the land as a nature preserve, and the value of the land as real estate. the park lay directly in the path of route 78 - a highway corridor that would allow direct access to nyc from eastern pennsylvania - and there, outside the edge of the park was an elevated highway structure, stopped in mid-air. for twenty years the project was successfully blocked from ripping its way through the reservation. however, there was always, in the back of my mind, the awareness that at any moment DOT could prevail, and this essential life-affirming natural beauty could be traded for pavement - no longer a destination in itself, but merely a route to the place that really mattered. i never really understood what all those pennsylvanians were doing driving to nyc with such urgency. if they felt, as i certainly did in eastern nj, that nyc was the center of the universe, why in the world were they living in pennsylvania anyway? so these were among the questions and concerns that i carried with me as i rode up the winding hills to watchung reservation.

tuesday, though, as my thoughts flew back thirty years, i was revisited by the particular agony i felt as i watched the eastern horizon slowly transformed by the emerging world trade center towers. it was my first awareness that even new york could make an awful mistake, and my first bitter taste of political disillusionment. every fiber in my young body resented them - their hungry aggressive claim to a corner of sky that i never imagined was available for that. all day yesterday i was caught in this memory. i could feel and see myself peddling toward the reservation. as usual i would pause, slightly sweaty, straddling my bike, and grieve these awful monuments to consumerism and capitalist culture. it was like staring at a bloody highway fatality. i couldn't help myself, and yet i couldn't do anything about it. and it was that feeling of somehow being let down so profoundly by new york that has remained in the quiet center of my feelings about the towers. over the years i did what i hated and wished i could resist, i became accustomed to their forceful angularity on the horizon, and my grief moved into a more distant feeling of dissent. but my history came surging back up as i heard of the one and then two crashes, and was shocked, with the world, by the eventual collapses.

last night i dreamed they rebuilt the towers in two days. it almost sounds biblical, doesn't it? it's so hard to accept that this story has a beginning and an end. the buildings went up, and then they went down. i am not sure how i will come to accept this loss, just as i was unsure how i would accept their presence. it's a question i can't ask myself without tears. i know we are shaped by our history, by all of our history, not just the parts we prefer, but i can't get over those towers, those towers that broke my heart as they broke the ny skyline thirty years ago, breaking me again. unfathomable. thirty years suddenly compressed into this slow wrenching grief.

amy rowland