Column by Hal Walter
Sept. 11 events – November 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
For more than a week before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a lone red-tailed hawk shrieked like a banshee while flying circles in the bright blue fall sky around the small basin where I live. Was it trying to flush out rabbits? Staking out territory? Looking for a lost mate, sibling or parent?
Or was it trying to tell me something?
The first day I found the hawk’s presence intriguing. By the third day it had become somewhat eerie. By the fifth day I had begun to ask the hawk out loud what it was saying.
But I got no answer.
Then one day the hawk was gone, and the two buildings in New York came tumbling down. I saw the second tower collapse live on CNN. The inconceivable event beamed in from a satellite somewhere in orbit, through the same blue sky where the hawk had ridden the thermals. The wonders of modern technology drove home the horror of made-for-TV terrorism. Something like a rock sank to the bottom of my gut when I watched that building fall. And it’s still there.
I was too dumbstruck to move away from the tube. Neighbors called. Like me, they were all in shock. They wanted desperately to talk about it. But none of us really had anything to say. What was there to say?
The only thing that sticks out in my mind is that everybody mentioned how thankful they are to live here, away from population centers that are the most likely targets of terrorism.
But while we may be somewhat safer from actual attacks here, we are not immune from the effects of terrorism. It affects our freedom. It affects our psyches and our senses of well-being.
It also affects our economy. When you live at these altitudes there’s something known as the “trickle-up” theory of economics. When the proverbial cowplop hits the pavement in the Metropoli, well, gravity works.
I live in a corridor that normally sees a fair amount of air traffic.
Following the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the sky was deathly quiet and empty over my ranch in the Wet Mountains. Normally I would welcome the chance to see the sky as it appeared 100 years ago.
But this was spooky. I had never heard such deafening silence. Gone too was the shrieking hawk.
Also deafening was the silence in my numbed mind. I didn’t know then if I would be able to write about the events of Sept. 11 at all. But I decided that if I did I would take my time, sort things out in my mind, and try not to speak out of ignorance. Now, even a month later, I feel shaky writing even peripherally on such a weighty matter. All that I have read, seen on the TV news, or heard on the radio only serves to obfuscate. The more I learn the less I know, a serious quandary for a writer.
I TRY, BUT I CANNOT even come close to comprehending the social, political, religious and cultural dynamics of the Middle East. The harder I try, the more I realize that it’s almost impossible to have a clear understanding. But it’s easy to have an opinion. Everyone seems to have an opinion these days, ranging from the insane hawkish notion “nuke them till they glow,” to the bliss-ninny dovishness of showering the Middle East with food and brotherly love. Even farther out there are the fringe lunatics who preach that this was “God’s judgment” on us all for allowing such things as civil liberties.
Obviously, nobody has a real solution.
At this point I’m not sure I really understand my own culture so well either. Since the tragedy I am troubled by the bizarre irony of flags fluttering from car antennas or taped to car windows, and the signs at gas stations that say “free flag decal with purchase.” This is not to say that anything justifies what the terrorists did, because nothing does, but it is at least partly our conspicuous consumption of foreign oil that led to our entanglement in the extremely complicated and sticky web of Middle Eastern politics.
Oil is literally thicker than blood, and at least as volatile. It says a good deal about our culture that more people fly flags from their cars, trucks and spewts than from their dwellings. Many people spend more time in their automobiles than their homes. More people can afford to purchase a vehicle than a house. It’s sad but true. Cars R Us. From the outside how could it not appear that we value internal combustion more than internal peace.
A few days after the attacks I was working in my upstairs office when I heard the thump of a bird striking one of the windows downstairs. It’s not unusual for birds to fly into the glass every now and then. But a few minutes later, another bird hit a window. And then another. It was as if the minds of these birds had been hijacked by terrorists. After the fourth bird hit a window I went down to survey the scene but found no dead birds on the ground.
I went out hunting for elk later that week, on the day that air travel resumed. I’ll always remember the ghostly white bellies of those first few jets returning to the quiet sky. There weren’t many of them. And they seemed to be flying faster than I remembered airline jets flying.
If I didn’t look up as soon as I heard the roar, I never caught sight of the jet before it disappeared over the mountains. I also heard elk bugling in the turning aspens. But I did not stalk them. I mostly walked around aimlessly in contemplation, or sat in the tawny fall grass stupefied by the stark contrast of my peaceful world with that world which the terrorists had created. I thought about how truly powerless we are in an age when you can no longer trust your fellow human beings to not fly jetliners into skyscrapers or release spores of deadly bacteria into the air.
FOR ME, trying to comprehend this sort of madness leads almost to a state of mental paralysis. On one of my travels since the tragedy, I stopped to move a dead roadrunner that had been hit on the highway. How on Earth could a bird so fast, with such great mental agility, get hit by a car? As I placed the crumpled carcass under a juniper tree, I realized that I don’t know what to think any more. I just don’t know.
But I do know this. My hawk came back. One day the following week the red-tail swooped over my property again and landed in the big dead pine west of my house. As it landed on a branch I could see it had something in its talons. I went inside for binoculars.
Back outside, I dialed the focus ring and in crisp detail the tail and actual rattles of a good-sized buzz worm appeared dangling about a foot below the branch where the hawk sat eating. He ate quickly. Soon only a few inches of snake remained. When the hawk flew away it had just a short stub of snake in its clutch. The red-tail circled over me and screamed. Another hawk came soaring from over the ridge and briefly joined the circle over me. Then together they flew away.
I take it as an omen — for all of us, and for this world. I hope it’s a good one.
Hal Walter writes from his burro ranch in the Wet Mountains, which used to seem away from it all.
