As any gardener will tell you, every plant tells a story.  But only a handful revealed their stories to me before I discovered a passion for gardening in my middle years. Lilac and iris meant the arrival of spring.  Peonies heralded my June birthdays.  Marigolds brought back memories of the mingling of their scent with the cherry pipe tobacco that clung to my grandfather as he taught me how to pull weeds and told me of the effort to coax a garden out of his suburban lot. Yew, a plant-kingdom cliché, was never on my list of story-telling plants.

It was not surprising, then, that I paid slight attention to the struggling shrub tucked beneath a window at my friends’ house in upstate New York, where I would visit on weekends. When my friends decided to redesign their garden beds, the yew was the first on their get-rid-of list.  One day the removal of the beds began in earnest, and the shrub was pulled carelessly from its bearings and unceremoniously dumped in a pile at the back of the property. When I arrived the following weekend, I noticed that despite my friends’ deliberate neglect the yew’s waxy needles had retained their intense green.  Intrigued by the plant’s tenacious will to survive, I decided it deserved another chance.  And so, one Sunday evening, I tossed the shrub in the back of my van and drove south to my city garden.

My Brooklyn garden was tucked behind a wrought-iron fence between a brownstone housing our parlor-floor apartment and a restored nineteenth-century brick carriage house next door. The then-neglected garden had been planted decades before by an Italian immigrant family.  Compelled by agrarian memories too insistent to ignore, the family had planted what would become a fruitful oasis of two sour-cherry trees, a pear, an apple, a peach, and one green and one black fig tree.  With the nurturing of their skilled hands, the whips grew over time within the garden’s constricted circumstances into grand specimens and, in their maturity, bore improbably bountiful harvests of fruit.

My own maiden planting was tucked in beneath the cherry trees that stood next to a crumbling concrete slab at the center of the garden.  At a loss to understand why anyone would mar the garden’s natural beauty, I imagined a superstitious gardener pouring the unyielding material in hopes of obscuring the garden’s true nature, trying desperately to overcome the fear that something so ravishingly beautiful would not be left in peace to endure. Apart from these fanciful musings, I was sure the reason for installing the concrete was far more mundane.  I guessed that one disinterested property owner, finding the task of pulling up uninvited urban flora too repetitive to endure, found it easier to sweep and hose than weed and tend. This was the garden, rich with hidden stories and memories, to which I brought the forlorn yew.  I dug the tangle of its remaining thickened roots into fertile soil in which two generations of fervent Sicilian gardeners had buried their tabbies and mutts.

That garden and brownstone became a nurturing place for my husband, myself, and our then-baby daughter.  In our tenth year there, on the morning of September 11, my husband climbed the stairs to the roof of our building and with numbed disbelief photographed the plume of gray dust and sparkling shards emanating from what had been Manhattan’s tallest towers.  Before we rushed out of the building to retrieve our daughter from school, my husband had captured in sequential snapshots the hypnotic drift of the detritus over the East River to our Brooklyn neighborhood.

For several days, shock kept us from venturing out into a garden transformed by  fallout and the sound of fighter jets scanning the skies overhead. Fragments of charred office memos blanketed the soil between plantings, the names of their recipients sometimes still legible.  From our bedroom window we could see how the gray powder had settled thickly on leaves, at once outlining and then obscuring their silhouettes in a frost-like show.  When I finally stepped out, my gardening boots stamped perfectly sized 7 ½ imprints on the dust-covered path.  Although it felt almost too soon, my husband and I gathered the paper scraps, swatted the plants’ leaves with a broom, and then sprayed them with a strong stream of water until they shed their dull coats.

That December we bought a house in upstate New York.  I knew I would bring with me the plants I had nurtured during those ten years of my ever-increasing fervor for gardening.

Among the plants that made the trip north was the yew, which had thrived in the fecund soil of the Brooklyn garden and now was returned to its roots.  I had faithfully pruned, watered, and fertilized.  Rewarding my attentions, it grew into a bushy two-foot-round ball that settled in at the northerly edge of a bed between our newly renovated 1780s house and a wooden outbuilding.

That first full winter in the country I observed how the relentless foraging of our deer herds nearly returned the yew to its former state of decrepitude.  I realized then that the survivor would need renewed pampering.  In the first warmth of our second spring in the country, I combed through the yew’s center to remove any dead, loose needles left behind by the deer’s voracious nibbling.  As my fingers probed the deep recesses they dislodged a light cloud of spectral gray dust that rose and hung in the air for the briefest of moments, like the puff of the extinguishment of a flame, before being dissipated by a sunny breeze.

This spring, five since that fall in September, I impatiently busy myself to meet the new season.  As I have every year, I note the condition of the yew. As I stroll through the garden taking stock of the day’s tasks, I am reminded that among the other things I brought with me to my new home are the remains of that September dust tucked within the sphere of the rescued yew and mixed into the earth that clings to the roots of the other transplants. The shrubs, perennials, and herbs have grown large, bloomed fragrantly and abundantly, and multiplied robustly in the co-mingling of Brooklyn’s loamy soil and the pebbly soil of upstate.  In this quiet place, where no grand ambitions need be fulfilled nor competing interests appeased, the yew has become a part of my story. It has become my own modest, improbable memorial to the world-shattering events of one clear fall day.

[Editor’s note: On September 11, 2001, Renee Shur was living in Brooklyn, New York. She wrote this reminiscence five years later, and she is sharing it here for the first time.]

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I’m writing this on Sept. 8, as the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedies looms large.  The media loves this.  It’s a chance to re-visit what happened, interview survivors, dig out photos, and talk about heroes.  For the rest of us, it’s a chance to remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard about the attacks, educate our children about that recent page in our history book, and attend commemorative services.

For my part, I’m doing none of the above.  I’m going to spend the day thinking.  Thinking about our newest national obsession, the “war on terror.”  I think terror may be winning.

It’s astonishing to think about what our response to these attacks has cost our county.  We have launched two wars (unfunded) in parts of the world where history would tell us we have little chance of success.  We’ve lost thousands of brave men and women and we’ve spent billions of dollars with little to show for the expenditure.  Few Americans are able to articulate just what it is that we are fighting for.

Some of us have launched a full-scale public relations battle against Islam, a religion that includes peace and justice among its tenets.  It’s been a great victory for bigotry and religious intolerance.  (What do you think would have happened if the attackers had been Presbyterians or Methodists?)

The aftermath of Sept. 11 has caused the world economy to shudder and the U. S. economy to endure a seemingly-endless recession.  It’s hard to sell a house but it’s awfully easy to lose a job.  We have more people visiting food pantries and fewer people with health insurance.

We have a burgeoning Department of Homeland Security that pretends we are safer because we have a fence separating us from Mexico, but still hasn’t figured out how to check the massive shipments of cargo that come into our ports every day.

Our political discourse has deteriorated to new lows.  Everybody is afraid of something (anthrax?  wire-tapping?  trials of Guantanamo Base prisoners on U. S. soil?  gun-toting “patriots”?)

During the past decade we have watched our civil liberties erode in the name of safety, and we have shrugged.  We have taken off our shoes in order to board airplanes, and we have pretended that makes us safer.

The late Helen Keller, in her book “Let Us Have Faith,” wrote:  “Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.  To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

I think I’ll think about this on Sept. 11.

The post Reflections on September 11 appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Many Americans have looked to fixed-rail modes of transportation such as intercity trains, subways, and light rail systems as key to addressing America’s transportation problems.  As has been reported in the Occasional Planet and in many other publications, exciting innovation is occurring in the world of rail travel and fixed rail provides opportunities for easing metropolitan and inter-city transportation.

One of the major advantages of trains over airplanes is the ease of boarding.  You can still do with trains what you could pre-September 11, 2001 with airplanes: go to the terminal, purchase a ticket, and board.  But how long will this last?  If more and more Americans use rail transportation, will trains become targets for would-be terrorists?  Apparently there are some who think so.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this past July 4:

Don’t be too alarmed to see stepped-up security on MetroLink or Amtrak trains in St. Louis.

During the past week or so, Metro and Amtrak officials have alerted their passengers that they may encounter canine teams and uniformed law enforcement officers.

“This is not in response to any sort of threat or risk,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said last weekend. “This is something we are doing around the country more and more. I think our customers are going to see this more and more often as they travel around our system.”

The surge team was in St. Louis for an undisclosed number of days, Magliari said last Sunday. The dogs are brought in to detect explosives on arriving and departing Amtrak trains.

This stepped-up security corresponds with the holiday weekend — a time when more people are out and about. Metro is expecting big crowds this weekend and will have extra trains for people attending Fair St. Louis.

This weekend, Metro — along with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local police agencies — will patrol the transit system. The operation goes by a clunky name: Visible Intermodal Protection and Response. And this weekend isn’t the first time it has been in effect. The teams are on the system a few times a year.

We should not be surprised that officials are taking steps to try to ensure more safety on rail travel.  What we should be concerned about is whether or not these officials learn from the way in which security has been instituted at airports.

At airports such as Lambert International in St. Louis, travel is down more than 50% since pre-September 11 days.  While part of this is attributable to a lagging economy, much is due to passengers’ unwillingness to endure the delays, aggravation, probing, and at times invasion of privacy that occurs in going through security to terminal gates.

As railroad officials increasingly address security issues, it is important that procedures be reassessed.  Two things are clear: (1) regrettably, we may need more security with trains, (2) airport-type procedures would drastically undermine an attempt to generate a renaissance of rail travel.

What is unclear is what different procedures would work.  Fortunately, we now have an opportunity for a “do-over.”  The post-September 11 procedures were put in effect under emergency conditions; there was very little time for thought and none for debate.

There has to be a better way to address security issues for fixed rail while not taking the fun out of riding the train.  If we don’t mandate serious studies of how to address these questions now, we will be caught in the jaws of the same instant procedural changes that occurred after September 11.  We now have an opportunity for forethought; let’s use it wisely while we can.

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