With our turn eastward on I-40 in New Mexico, just south of Santa Fe, our trip underwent an instant metamorphosis from a focus on the sights, people, and experiences of the US to a focused, two-person shuttle with a goal of Memphis by sundown on Friday afternoon. We planned to cover about 900 miles in less than 48 hours with no sightseeing whatsoever.
Or so we thought. Oklahoma City changed that in a dramatic way.
After spending the night in Amarillo, Texas, our next major city was Oklahoma City. We decided that in addition to visiting the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum (which were really good, particularly the life size model of the Old West town and the exhibits about Native American and Cowboy lifestyles, art, and clothing), we also wanted to visit the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial and Museum.
I have to admit that going in, we thought something like "we know this was a big event, but how can it really compare? Besides, we're probably somewhat desensitized to it by now."
Boy, were we wrong and I am glad about that. The museum starts off innocently enough, like the morning of April 19, 1995 with an overview of what was going on that day. The mayor was going to speak at an ecumenical breakfast. The Water Treatment Authority was scheduled to have a meeting and all of the other basics. You hear voices of kids going to school, mothers waking kids up, firefighters doing routine checks.
Then, you walk into a meeting room (the door ominously closes behind you).
On the table rests a microphone and a tape recorder. It is from the Water Authority's meeting of that morning. It began promptly at 9am. The first two minutes sounds like any meeting. The chairwoman introduces herself, discusses the agenda, and makes a note of the attendance. Then, even though you know it's coming, it still shocks you.
At 9:02am, you hear it. An unmistakable, room-shattering boom (the lights flicker for added effect) and you know, just as we knew on September 11th, that life had just changed dramatically, only you don't know how.
Then, the door on the other side of the room opens and you walk into a cacophony of sounds and sights. The TV above you shows the first scenes from the helicopter of the destroyed rooms. There are emergency radio calls being played and you can feel the distress in the voices. The pictures jump out of you as you see one man waving for help as he looks out over a crater where the other part of his office had been.
Then, you get into the lives of the survivors. Through video and computer, you hear story after story of what it was like to see eight people in front of you one moment and then the next, see them fall through the floor to their deaths. People covered under piles of rubble, screaming, disoriented, and praying. Fears of another bomb. The chaos of not knowing if your family member is dead or alive. All of those feelings we all know all too well now.
The decisions by emergency service personnel made every moment about whom to save and whom to leave to die. There was one woman whose location was known, but the fear was that removing the rubble around her might destabilize a column and trigger a full building collapse. The worst was hearing her son tell of the visit by the emergency people saying basically 'we know where your mother is and she may be alive, but we can't save her.'
Halfway through the first exhibit, Tamar and I felt the first waves of emotion overcome us. The tears welled up and we drew upon our own (all of our own) experiences of having collectively been through this.
The Museum was extremely well done. It brought you into the events, the emotions, the survivors lives, a simple room for the victims where each person has a roughly 6x8 portrait within a glass cube on the wall, at the front of which is some personal effect which, presumably, the family has placed there to give a sense of the person.
The most emotional ones are the children. The beanie baby in one case; The favorite doll in another. There's a Pulitzer Prize winning photo a young baby girl, badly burned, being carried out in the arms of a firefighter.
There's the timeline of the McVeigh and Nichols trials. There are video clips from news agencies around the world. There are different memorial efforts, like the 27,000 pennies collected by schoolchildren.
The whole exhibit is presented as a timeline, from the morning of the bombing, to the day the last survivor, the last victim, was pulled out, to the memorial service the following year, and the completion of the Memorial.
You really feel the full range of emotions as you literally walk through the history of the event.
A special exhibit talks about 9/11 and in one poignant section, a policeman, who was called from the NYPD to Oklahoma City to help in April, 1995, was killed in the WTC.
When we walked out, all we could say was 'Whoa.' It was simply much more powerful than we had thought possible.
Outside the Museum is the actual memorial. On one end is a large archway that says '9:01.' On the other end is one that says '9:03'. In between is a reflecting pool of water and on one bank, 168 empty chairs facing it, representing the minute in between those two times in which all of those people died. We were there at just around dusk, when the lights under the chairs had come on and the intensity of the emptiness was really driven home.
It was estimated that 20% of all the people in Oklahoma City went to one of the funerals following the bombing.
To be cynical for only a moment, the museum's mission is to show the effects of senseless violence, which it does extremely well and to "prevent terrorism." While it makes an effort to talk about the terrorism on a global scale, the connection between the event and its presentation (which, as I've said is highly effective) and its ability to prevent terrorism is, in my opinion, tenuous at best.
At the end of the exhibit, the wall reads something like "we hope that by seeing what happened here, YOU will be changed and YOU will make the world a better place." I guess I just am skeptical that any terrorist or would be terrorist is going to 1. visit in the first place or 2. change his mind about the potential impact of terrorism.
I hope I'm wrong and I hope places like Oklahoma City's Museum can have that impact on those who would commit these types of crimes against humanity.
I do know that of all of the places we've visited so far, this was only time where I left the place and said, "I must write this down now. I need it for therapy." That is what I am doing, thanks to Tamar's generosity about driving the bumpy I-40 route to Fort Smith, Arkansas.
All along the trip, we've been marveling at the wonders of technology. I check my email from random motel rooms. Our car reliably takes us where we need to go. Our credit card, used often, brings us supplies whenever and wherever we need them.
But, we have seen the dark side of technology as well. Today, it was Tim McVeigh using 4,000 lbs. of dynamite to bring down a building. Yesterday, as we visited Los Alamos and learned the story of a town that 'didn't officially exist,' of the brainpower assembled in the remote New Mexico desert, now called "The Hill" (it's a town of 18,000 people, 10,000 of whom are employed by the National Laboratory), of the censorship and control the military had over the lives of their civilian employees, we were starkly reminded of the destructive possibilities which technology can wrath.
The accomplishment and secrecy of the Manhattan project is certainly one of the great scientific achievements and I believe its cause was noble and just. Nevertheless, we cannot forget the effect it had on human lives and the people in Los Alamos don't forget that either. In the small house, which use to be a part of a privileged Ranch School for Boys before the Army appropriated it, there are three pictures of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after being hit by the result of the developments from Los Alamos.
It was as jarring yesterday as it was 5 years ago as I stood in the Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan. And it made me more resilient in my belief that good, freedom-loving people of the world must do all they can to prevent evil people for acquiring and using these types of weapons.
One of the fascinating things about traveling is how you can move across subject matters and historical periods and events in a matter of hours. Rome is a great example of this as you go from the Roman Era to the modern Italian era to the influence of the Catholic Church in one city.
In New Mexico, we had a similar experience surrounding our visit to Los Alamos.
In the morning, we left Farmington, NM, right on the outskirts of the Navajo nation, the largest reservation in the US. Over the course of our trip, we've entered the Cherokee, Apache, and Ute nations among others. In Shiprock, NM, we spent some time in a convenience store, which was operated and patronized entirely by Native Americans.
We had really hoped to get an introduction to the Navajo culture while on the reservation, to understand how the culture operates today (it has its own police force and political instruments that are separate from the state government), but with no motels at all in Shiprock, we couldn't do that. We did have a long talk with the clerk there. She spoke Navajo as well as English and told us a bit about the Navajo nation (it has its own President, who I subsequently read is being accused of potentially corrupt or at least ethically questionable practices), but not enough to fill our inquisitive minds.
While in the store we also saw another, unfortunate side of life on the reservation. Alcoholism apparently plagues the Native American population of many different nations and we saw two men who fit that bill. The clerk just sort of shrugged and said "he's been drinking" and "the manager tells us to get rid of the drunk ones, but we don't succeed."
It wasn't until we got to Oklahoma City and the Western Heritage Museum that we got a great deal of information about the Native American culture, with one exception.
In Aztec, NM there are some wonderful ruins left from the Anasazi Indians who lived in the area about 1000 years ago and built small communities of common interest. The homes were mostly submerged and built around a small common area. The religious gathering places, known as Kivas, are domed structures with windows to allow for light from multiple angles into the structure. It's got a dirt floor and a hole in the top (I think for smoke from the fires). The video at the Visitor Center was great and told of how the culture evolved from a hunter/gatherer to a farmer way of life and speculated about their sudden disappearance.
Sudden disappearance was sort of our motto, unfortunately, as we began the long road home. With a time constraint of sorts, we would spend about 1 hour in Santa Fe (a beautiful city with a uniform code of architecture (another theme), 2 hours in Oklahoma City, an hour in Los Alamos, and the like. And now, we find ourselves back in the Plains, shooting across Oklahoma and spending the night in Clarkesville, Arkansas.
Just one comment to share (I think people are getting tired of emails ;-).
>From my cousin, Leonard Epstein
I should've mentioned St. George's Utah to you. During the family trip in 1972, we came out of the mountains there, and I was extremely carsick. I finally had to tell my dad to pull over, and I barfed outside the car onto the pavement. It was exactly infront of the Mormon church in St. George in the center of town. A Kodak memory? Just wanted to share.
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