When you live in Troy during these times, believe me you are really isolated. “Well, duh” one of my friends replied when I said that to her, but you still won’t understand what I am saying until you see the City.

Just as I got to the Lincoln Tunnel, I noticed two things—the skyline and the policemen. The skyline, altered forever, is now empty where the World Trade Center towers once stood. The steel and the glass are not what makes them most memorable—buildings come and building go—but the lives lost in them make them almost human. Now the Empire State Building takes on all the void as if saying “I am here to comfort you.”

Then we came to the policemen; a policeman at every lane, policemen stopping trucks to check them, and others peering at cars as they sped by. Man, I have to tell you, I am pleased that these guys were there—for obvious reasons—but the longer I thought about it the more I could not see how they could prevent some crazy guy in a Ford from blowing himself and the tunnel up.

As we entered Manhattan, I felt strangely happy to see that as usual the tall buildings with their shadows gave the impression of a permanent cloud hovering over the city. People seemed to be going about their Saturday morning in a normal way, walking their dogs, shopping on Fifth Avenue, waiting in long lines at TKTS booths in Times Square, and standing for hours to get to see the best musicals in Radio City.

I wonder if that normalcy was born out of bravery, perseverance, or helplessness because just below the surface a lot is not “normal.” The rancid odor of burning material is unlike any smell that I know of, an odor that stays with you even as you leave the city. It is a haunting odor. NYPD officers and cars seemed to be everywhere, and the National Guard in their camouflaged suits could be seen as you get closer to ground zero. To New Yorkers these men are the new form of normalcy. To me, they are reminiscent of some scenes right out of the police state in George Orwell’s 1984.

And then you get to ground zero. All roads leading to it were closed so the only way you can see it was through the road blocks and the fences erected around it. There were four or more of these ‘openings’ and hundreds of people from everywhere were gathered there; among the “Oh, my God’s” and the looks of horror, the flashes of cameras kept going on. It was like a pilgrimage for everyone there, going from one opening to the other and from one wall memorial to the other wondering if they could see more, taking pictures that one day will remind them of what they saw.

I guess you have read and heard enough about it, but still I will tell you what we saw. As the smoke wafts out of the rubble, your eyes open on a sea of protruding metal, crumbled concrete, and twisted iron poles. Among the dusty brown and permanent gray, the orange vests of the workers are the only sign that life exists. It is that ugliness and helplessness that many crane their necks and rise on their toes to see. I was there, and I took pictures too.

I had a still digital camera, a video camera, a tape recorder, and my notebook with me. I guess when I embarked on this trip I was thinking that this would be a journalistic opportunity for me to write about the “real N.Y.C.” I videotaped the sites and the people and their reactions, but in just one day I did not even get close to getting “real.” Real is something you can’t get from papers, pictures, or videos. I would say if you want to really see it, go down there.

As we tried to leave the city later that afternoon, we had an encounter with the NYPD.

My brother, who was sitting in the front seat, had my digital camera in his lap as we were getting through the Lincoln Battery tunnel. There was a policeman standing at the one open lane and he saw that camera. What happened next will astonish you. To me, what happened taught me in a very fundamental way that, as much as I love America, it is far from perfect.

“Give me the camera, give me the camera! I said give me the camera,” yelled the policeman. His voice was menacing and his demeanor threatening, we really felt as if we were doing something illegal, and so we gave him the camera. He then directed us to stand to the side and wait until his supervisor came.

We waited a minute and then this chubby, almost nice, policeman came to us and tried to explain that this was standard procedure. He said that we are not allowed to take pictures of the tunnels or the bridges because they were federal property. My father told him that we did not take any pictures of the tunnels and that the camera was just sitting in brother’s lap.

The policeman’s response was exactly this: “But we saw the camera, didn’t we?”

Now here are parts of the rest of the conversation. My father: But where does it say that we can’t take pictures of the tunnels and bridges? When was this law passed? Policeman: It is a law that we have, we are on highest alert and so we can’t let this happen.

My father, who is an Arab, said, “I would understand, anything that helps national security is good, but were we stopped just because we look the way we do?” The policeman’s answer was that they have “caught a man who had pictures of all the five bridges” and then he commented “what would a person want to do with them” other than something evil.

Then came the supervisor, an Italian guy whose time I am sure was too valuable to be bothered by cameras and memory disks. He asked us to play the “video” (I am talking about a still camera here.) and then when we told him it was still and that it had only one picture he told us to wait a minute. He took off to one of those glass booths, talked on the phone, jotted down some notes, and then came back and asked me again to “play it” for him; and again I told him that it had one picture.

The picture was of a blue domed building close to ground zero, but still he wanted it erased and so I erased it. I also formatted the memory disk for him so that he would be assured that the disk is empty. Nonetheless, the guy who God knows might have rescued lives all his life, was still not sure of the effectiveness of all the measures I took, so I looked at him and said, “Sir, take the disk!”

This might have been a humorous story that I would tell to my friends or use when I write papers on technology and society, was it not for the fact that the policeman asked for my father’s driver’s license, car registration number, and insurance information. I mean, we went to great lengths explaining to them and proving to them that we did not take any pictures of any bridges and tunnels, and still they had to have some very specific information. I told them I was a journalist, but hey I don’t work for the Times or Washington Post so who cares. I wonder if my father was a little whiter, had blond hair, blue eyes, and spoke without an accent, if they would have asked for all those documents. I wonder if my father was not a Muslim and an Arab, would they have requested all of that information? I highly doubt it.

Now let’s say the NYPD, instead of letting us go after half an hour, decided to search the car, or let’s say they saw my video camera? Then let’s say they found the tape recorder that I had with me to use for interviews? And then they found two high tech walkie-talkies that my two adolescent brothers play with? Wow, to those policemen and their supervisor we would have seemed really “threatening”… and here come the headlines I talked about in the beginning.