I found myself quite far from Manhattan on September 11th. My wife and I were living on a small lake in the Adirondacks, waiting to close on our new apartment in the city. Our access to the tragedy back home was a strange combination of old and new technology: without a television, we relied on the radio, telephone, and the internet.

On our mountain lake, the contrast to the week's events was intolerably vast. As we observe it, nature changes very slowly or not at all. Leaves turn, the temperature drops, but the crunch of pine needles and the sound of ducks stay the same. Looking about us, the world was in repose. The oft-repeated phrase "everything has changed" strained our imaginings. The destruction was well beyond what we could see or feel; it lay in the dark precincts of the unfathomable.

New York City was grieving and bonding. We were a community of two. The nearest town was eight miles down the road. Our relation to this small town was never exactly one of belonging. We came and went, spending our money with the usual distance of summer people. As the week of the attack wore on, we felt anew the long expanse that separates the North Country and New York City. Across the nation, flags took on a new prominence and new meaning. In our nearby hamlet, this was difficult to measure. Hadn't flags always lined the streets? Which ones were new?

As the tranquility became cruel, a void left in the distance from friends and the chaos surrounding them, we spent more time in town, eating dinner at a local bar that showed the news. We went to a candle light vigil at the bandstand between--where else?--Main St. and Elm St. An alderman with a thick, North Country accent stumbled through a short statement; Sister Mary read two passages from the New Testament, including "Jesus Wept" from the Book of John and then led a prayer; we all sung the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America the Beautiful, the Star Spangled Banner and, of course, God Bless America.

Back home, apparently, our city had turned into a village. The usual
frigidity of urban living had turned to the intimacy of shared loss.
Strangers were hugging in the streets. Here, the village remained, well, a village, but one with a new regard for its city brethren. At the vigil, a man with a flag covered jacket over a flag dress shirt, with a flag in the brim of his cowboy hat took the stage. He was a driver for a local taxi company. On Tuesday afternoon, he had ferried a passenger from a nearby resort to the city. The passenger's wife worked in the World Trade Center and, by 2:00 pm, he hadn't heard from her. When they got to the edge of the city, he left his luggage in the car and continued on foot.

Choked up, the driver turned to the crowd on Elm St., "Tourists are people,too!" "We may be happy when they finally leave after Labor Day, but they have family and loved ones" "They make more money than us, but they deserve it. They have to live down there."

Even writing it now, his moral gives me a nervous levity, gallows humor at someone else's expense. We were strangers at the hour of their communality. But we were also estranged from our avid, exhausted city. We had no context to appreciate what it now meant to "live down there," only the verdant comfort of a vacation home.