There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.
For the record, I don’t own a gun, but I’ve been known to shoot shotguns at Thunder Mountain with my friends.
He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as if it belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and a hand-cranked adding machine. There are an old wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand, on large legal pads.
— “Robert Caro’s Big Dig,”
New York Times, April 12, 2012.
I didn’t see the BNN alert until about 2 p.m., after the fires had been burning a while. I was in Jersey City when it happened, so I had to rush down Routes 1 & 9, over to Route 3 and up Route 17 to get to Carlstadt where the flames were eating through acres in the Meadowlands.
I pulled up to a side road along the meadows, where a big black plume of smoke was rising in the distance. As I got out of my car, a man yelled from one of the warehouses. “Buddy, the cops have been kicking everybody out of there.”
Just as I got back in my car to move, a Crown Victoria with tinted windows pulled up. I could hear the swearing inside the car. I rolled down my windows as an officer emerged.
“I don’t care who you are,” he said as I opened my mouth, press credentials at the ready. “Get out of here!”
“Where should I go?” I managed to say. “Connecticut,” he barked back.
I drove two blocks over and parked my car.
The fire had covered 60 acres at this point. The Meadowlands are hundreds of acres of marshland abutted by everything Jersey. Mostly it’s factories and warehouses. The weather has been dry and windy, and the red flag warnings have become a daily occurrence. The fire trucks just kept coming. I was going to be here a while.
I ran to the trails that jutted into the reeds, where people were gathering to watch the flames inch closer. By the time I got there, though, the police were kicking everyone out. I interviewed a couple eyewitnesses. “It just took over and didn’t stop,” one of them, a 17 year old kid with a sense of adventure, told me.
I watched the smoke grow for another two hours, as the fire swept from the Izod Center toward the New Jersey Turnpike. In the meantime I talked to a couple more eyewitnesses, and tried to talk the warehouse employees into letting me onto their rooves. One pointed out a big, yellow semi truck sitting in a parking lot at the edge of the meadow. “That hasn’t moved in years,” he said. So I climbed on top of it.
Mostly, though, I waited.
Eventually I got to talk to a deputy fire chief, who gave me an idea of what emergency crews were up to. I went back to my car and filed a story, and started creating a gallery of photos.
I was in my car for more than an hour, focused on the screen of my laptop as the flames continued to eat up the reeds just a couple yards away. Eventually I looked out the window and saw the flames had grown high. Really high. I stored my laptop and ran back out.
Fire crews had begun lighting backfires, controlled blazes that would create a buffer zone between the wild fire and the buildings along the edge of the meadow. The sun was setting.
I started shooting photos and video. The flames were right there, sometimes 20 feet high. It was hot, and I’ve never shot a fire that big before, so it was hard to expose for the flames and the figures of firefighters keeping watch with their hoses.
In the background was the New York Skyline.
Eventually, emergency crews got the blaze under control. They kept pulling tires from the field, piling them up in parking lots along the meadows. The deputy fire chief from Carlstadt told me more than 25 departments provided mutual aid, and I could still hear the sirens when I filed my last story around 11 p.m.
Thursday night, I went to sleep to the sound of sirens.
You’ve got to read and understand the cultural forces that journalism comes from, the great traditions that it partakes of, the political and social philosophy and, at the center, good writing.
— Howard Ziff, journalist and professor emeritus
of the UMass journalism department
We’re here tonight to bring you the news with a beat, with a beat, with a beat! We’re here to send you home with your feet hurtin’ and your back hurtin’ and your sexual organs stimulated! It says that right on the ticket, right on the ticket it says those very words somewhere.
— Bruce Springsteen, American poet.
Thanks for the show, Bruce.
[Story]
Aboard a retired Martin 202A airliner — the last of its kind — which flew the skies in the 1950s.
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