Fence Provides Canvas for City’s Sorrow

That its chain links are only temporary matters not to survivors who make the pilgrimage to the fence.

In the minutes, hours and days after a 4,800-pound truck bomb blasted a nine-story crater into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, people waited for news, their faces pressed against a security fence.

Rescue workers walked out of the rubble after 16 days. Demolition experts razed the building’s shell. Bulldozers cleared debris from other structures.

The fence endured. And today--as the second anniversary of the bombing approaches, and as Timothy J. McVeigh’s trial begins--the fence offers sanctuary to everyone touched by the destruction.

Calvin Moser was in his Housing and Urban Development office, inches from the front wall, when the bomb exploded April 19, 1995. He was hunting for other survivors when his wife arrived.

“She was there to find me, initially, but she ended up going up and helping remove the children from the nursery, so she saw things that I didn’t see. It very deeply affected her,” Moser said.

Moser doesn’t visit too often. His wife does.

“It’s become a place to her that’s comforting,” he said. “It’s kind of a boundary of caring.”

People still come from around the world, leaving flowers, toys or even the shirt off their backs. Moser and his wife have gone to the fence at 2 a.m. to tuck a poem into its links and encountered other visitors.

Jane Thomas acts as guardian for the fence and all of the offerings: wreaths, photographs, a multicolored ring of plastic keys. A full-time archivist for the Oklahoma City Memorial Foundation, she removes items left by outsiders when they begin to deteriorate.

But tokens left by survivors and families remain, until they want them removed.

“They love that fence,” Thomas says. “They like the fact that people come to the fence and that they don’t forget. There is an underlying fear among survivors’ families that people five years from now will say, ‘Where was that bomb, now?’ ”

A visitor from San Diego wishes he had a camera to record the images.

“I’m just overwhelmed at what’s still standing,” says Joe Robinson.

This is one of his first stops as he visits family in Oklahoma: “I wanted to see people pouring out their hearts--I have feelings, too, compassion for these people, especially the kids. This is where people should come together and understand why this should never happen again.”

Turning to the 8-foot fence, Robinson marvels at the city’s reverence: “In California, half this stuff would be gone.”

Evidence of the blast radiates from the fence. Warped aluminum frames hold shards of glass in the windows of the old Journal Record newspaper building, north of the site. An upended desk leans toward the light in one room. Air ducts dangle from the ceiling in others.

It all looks familiar to Richard McClellan, who works for the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s bomb squad. He and his wife have stopped by on the way to the airport after visiting relatives.

“I deal with this on a daily basis,” McClellan says. “I think you always have to be prepared for something like that. If it could happen in New York, it could happen in L.A., it could happen here.”

On April 19, the two-year anniversary, a committee plans to announce finalists in a competition to design a permanent memorial around the surviving plaza and parking garage of the Murrah building.

Moser, who serves on the panel, decided the entries should be hung for the public to see on a chain-link fence winding through a downtown warehouse.

“It’s a reminder to us,” Moser said.

He knows the links will someday be replaced with a more ambitious, enduring remembrance. He doesn’t mind.

“I really feel like there’s a point at which we will get over this fence thing. That will be the day when we actually have a decision upon the design of what object, what is this tangible thing that is the memorial.”