They say there is solace in the 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.
At the Counterterrorism Training Center in Corinth, Texas, Ron Reid underscored this point as he described the "simple, understated" monument he was building. The 2-foot structural beam, torn almost in two, will sit on a pedestal near the entrance to the private center, which trains law enforcement officers to respond to terrorist attacks.
"Anyone who comes in to training will have to walk past it. I want them to know why they are here."
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Not long after the terrorist attacks, a steady stream of letters, e-mails and faxes began arriving at New York's Office of Emergency Management. It was almost too much to handle, said Francis E. McCarton, a deputy commissioner. Sent by cities, churches and civic groups, they asked for chunks of debris: dust, rocks, steel, anything.
In response, the office and the city's Community Assistance Unit quietly set aside several hundred pieces of steel for monuments and memorials. New York gave away what it could -- chopping up some girders, leaving others intact, honoring as many requests as possible -- until late 2002, when the supply was exhausted.
The city rebuffed anyone wishing to profit from the tragedy. One man who hoped to make violins out of leftover debris was turned down. Besides, there was little if any wood left from the shattered buildings.
Recipients had to agree never to use their steel for commercial or financial gain, and to acknowledge that it might contain asbestos and other contaminants.
Last May, two public works employees from Lafayette, La., traveled to New York to retrieve a charred, 13-foot piece of steel.
The beam, now cut in two, forms a 1/100-scale model of the towers, which was placed in the city's Parc Sans Souci in September. Just above the Pentagon-shaped base, a quote from President Bush is translated into Cajun French: "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America."
In July, Father Andrew Harrison drove a rented Ford Windstar 1,600 miles, from Palos Hills, Ill., to New York City and back. His only cargo on the return trip was a 2-foot, 200-pound beam that he had carefully draped with an American flag.
That section of steel, now installed in the narthex of St. Luke Orthodox Church, sits in front of a copper icon of St. Nicholas. (The New York church named after the saint was destroyed when the buildings fell.) A rectangular box on top of the steel holds taper candles, always lighted in remembrance of those who died on 9/11.
