Amid the Ruins, a Separate Peace

Midnight came and went, and Manhattan couldn’t sleep.

“Look at this. Just look at this,” Vincent Bury said as he aimed his yellow cab toward the smoke. “That used to be a beautiful view of the towers, but I’m going to tell you something. You see all these people out here? Everybody helping out in whatever way they can? They tried to break us up, but this city’s never been more unified.”

Vincent Bury drove slower than any cabby has ever driven in New York, loving his wounded city. The heavens thundered with an advancing storm, and flashes of lightning illuminated American flags that hung from fire escapes.

A few poor souls wandered the streets like ghosts, photos of missing loved ones taped to shirts or strung around their necks. They were consoled by people they did not know and would never see again.

“Look at this,” Vincent Bury said again, his heart full.

He turned a corner at 15th Street and 11th Avenue to find a group of teenagers cheering. “Thank you Thank you Thank you,” said the signs they held. They were spending the night at the intersection to greet rescue workers who came up for air after digging with their hands for hours. Digging for miracles. Ambulances lined the streets, waiting for a call.

On a normal night, Vincent Bury would have been driven off the road by angry motorists leaning on horns. But they passed politely, letting him mourn in his own time. He calls himself the last white native New York cabby, and he is different in another way too. Instead of ramming fenders and bumpers, like you’re supposed to do to let off steam, he meditates.

“The inner self never dies,” he said, and he was sure something good was going to come of this tragedy.

“Where to now?” he asked.

“A Hundredth and Riverside. The fireman’s memorial.”

Bury parked on Riverside and got out of the car with a camera. He said that in his 49 years, he had never seen the fireman’s memorial and its twin statues of Courage and Duty. He wanted to take the memory home to Brooklyn with him.

A little earlier in the evening, an advertising man named John Avery had left his Upper West Side apartment to walk his poodle Gracie. Avery had been in a state of shock over the attack on New York, but the shock was becoming sadness and anger. A co-worker lost her husband in one of the towers, and it was hitting Avery in a way it hadn’t until then.

He was thinking, too, about the estimated 300 firefighters believed to have died under the rubble of what used to be an American symbol.

Three hundred.

Avery walked two blocks to the memorial that has stood since 1913. Firefighters never hesitate, he was thinking as Gracie tugged on the leash. They take chances with their own lives to save others, and there is a striking gallantry about them. The bravery, the bond, the cut of the uniform.

On this night, candles had been left at the memorial, and they flickered in the breeze of the coming storm. Bouquets were laid about, and some well-wishers had written anonymous notes of thanks and sympathy.

“The whole world is a very narrow bridge,” said one. “Words can not express our sorrow,” said another.

Avery’s eyes filled, and anger floated just beneath the sadness. President Bush and the rest of America have to have the guts to root out terrorists wherever they are, he said, his voice deepening.

“We must go after the terrorists and anyone who harbors or finances them. It’s not about revenge; it’s about protection. If we don’t do it, this can happen again. But if it’s about revenge, we’ve sunk to the morality of the terrorists.”

The storm had moved across the Hudson, bringing with it a drenching rain that sent John Avery and Gracie the poodle home.

Vincent Bury took a picture of the memorial, which has the following inscription:

“To the men of the fire department of the city of New York, who died at the call of duty. Soldiers in a war that never ends.”

Vincent Bury drove away at funeral speed, in touch with both the living and the dead. It rained like everyone was crying all at once, and it seemed to me that New York had never been more beautiful.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.