New York’s grim tragedy bonded nation

At a charity golf outing in New Jersey over the weekend, where the talk was of terrorism one minute and tee shots the next, I was asked a strange question more than once.

Do the people way up in Maine, they wanted to know, feel this crisis as strongly as people here in the New York area, who are so much closer to where it happened?

The question surprised me. How could they think that anyone in the country could feel the least bit removed from a national trauma of such enormous scale? Did they actually think that geography really mattered at a grave time like this, or that anyone, whether 500 miles from New York or 3,000, could feel safe and secure after seeing those famous towers collapse on 5,000 people?

I tried to explain the extent of the shock and grief that Maine people have suffered with the rest of America in the last several days. I told them about all of the connections Mainers had to New York and the World Trade Center on that day, and how so many anxious people called this newspaper about their friends and loved ones who were at the site of the catastrophe that it was impossible to interview them all. I reminded them about the couple from Lubec who were on one of the hijacked airplanes, of the thousands of Maine people who stood for hours to give blood, of the stores that sold every flag they had. I told them of the vigils we held across the state to mourn the dead, and of the helplessness we felt because we couldn’t be in New York to help search for victims.

As I drove back to Maine Monday morning, I wondered about the source of their puzzling questions. I’m convinced it was rooted in stereotype, in a largely naive caricature of Maine and its people – perhaps of all rural people. Mainers are those folks with the funny accents tucked up there near Canada, far from the centers of power and culture. We’re known for our lobsters, our scenery, our world-famous horror writer, and little else of real consequence.

But I suppose our perceptions of New Yorkers can be equally false and cliched. They are, to many Mainers, little more than that garrulous, loud bunch that streams into Maine each summer to throw their money and weight around. We’ve made a cottage industry of lampooning the New York tourist on T-shirts and of getting the best of them in our traditional Maine stories. Many Maine baseball fans even shunned their TV sets in disgust last year when the Mets and Yankees conspired to turn the beloved World Series into an all-New York spectacle that made the games unbearable.

For many dyed-in-the-wool Mainers, the way life should be in no way resembles life in the Big Apple.

But something changed last Tuesday. We dropped our preconceptions, if only for a while. The more we watched the horror unfold in Manhattan, the more New Yorkers seemed just like the rest of us. In their grieving faces, their tortured tales of loss, we saw ourselves and our loved ones. They were no longer brash New Yorkers, but simply people in pain. Not arrogant and abrasive, but strong and courageous. Not New Yorkers, in fact, but neighbors to each and every one of us across America who witnessed their suffering as if it were our own.

When those towers fell, so did the unflattering stereotypes. Our differences dissolved in the rubble, and the distance between us was closed. In a single tragic morning, 50 states finally did become one nation – not just in name, but in character. Linked by misery, fear and a resilience that erased the borders that once made us feel separate, we were all Americans. We were all in this thing together.

Crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, I glanced down the Hudson River to Manhattan and knew I would never be able to look at that island in quite the same way I always had. Maybe none of us can anymore.