Soothing Suffering With Steel

Nineteen months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Americans have found comfort in the mangled carcass of the twin towers. Steel remnants, bearing the wounds of the tragedy, have become cultural touchstones: the symbols of unified grief and the instruments for collective healing.

"It speaks to your soul," Mark Ross said of the I-beam -- creased down the middle and puckered along one edge -- that he worked for six months to bring to Martinez, Calif.

Though New Yorkers have publicly, sometimes acrimoniously, debated how to build memorials to 9/11, people in communities from Fawnskin, Calif., to Franklin, N.J., quietly have been getting to work. Across the nation, they have incorporated World Trade Center steel into more than 250 tributes to the dead.

Girders carefully stacked like Lincoln Logs have become the centerpieces of municipal gardens. Church bell towers display an incongruous mix of battered metal and smooth stone. Civic reflecting pools shimmer with wavy images of cold, hard steel.

"Sometimes it takes a physical reminder to convey the spiritual feeling you have for an incident," said Ross, vice mayor of Martinez, a city of 36,000. "You just need something physical, something more than a plaque."

For some, the scarred steel shards are like the bones of saints, carefully preserved in gold and silver reliquaries: objects of worship that speak of pain and sacrifice. For others, the metal is a symbol of the bodies that will never be recovered, a rare artifact from a day when America was united in horror and mourning.

"There is this need, this compulsion, to share in the pain and sorrow of New York," said Emory University religion professor Gary Laderman, an expert on how Americans relate to death. "But there's something even wider going on, something that has to do with literally finding ways to bind the social body together, to bind the national community together."

The pieces of steel, he said, "become touchstones for that."

Builders of monuments to the terrorism victims -- many of whom lack any personal connection to the tragedy -- say they feel a deep sense of patriotism inherent in their work. It is not necessarily an endorsement of the war in Iraq, or even a call to arms for those enforcing homeland security -- although both those views have been expressed. Rather, it is a tribute to the freedoms that so many think were attacked that day.