SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORIES

The Circle Line boat churned toward an altered Manhattan before pausing abruptly halfway across the Hudson River. On this sightseeing vessel that could hold 600, there were only a half-dozen people aboard, including the captain, a distraught man clutching a paper bag — he said he needed to bring his wife her lunch — and me.

Waiting for a berth to open on Manhattan’s West Side, we bobbed in silence, staring at the charcoal plume mushrooming from where two sky-piercing towers belonged. Only the slapping of waves against the hull disturbed the quiet.

A quarter-century later, moments submerge and re-emerge in the bruise-colored Hudson of my mind. The cortege of exhausted firefighters carrying another body from the wreckage. The refrigerated trailers packed with human remains. That dining-room table on Staten Island, where a grieving father told me his dead son “sits right there, where you’re sitting,” for Sunday dinners. “That’s his spot.”

All of us who were around then have our stories. They might be stories of loss, of heroism, of close calls, of bearing witness, of remembering exactly where we were when. We might talk about it too much, or not at all. But there exists among us the stipulation of a shared experience. A faint nod of recognition: Sept. 11.

When telling my small stories of witness to those then too young or not born, I can feel my words falling short; the stipulation isn’t there. Still, if asked, I will tell these stories again and again, if only to wage a private war against the inevitable erasure of time.

But the passage of 25 years can test the memory of what you’d rather not remember. In poor imitation of the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, I am balanced between the tower of remembering and the tower of forgetting, sometimes having to remind myself that yes, all that happened. The Circle Line, for example.

After terrorist attacks reduced the World Trade Center to a funeral pyre and forced Manhattan into lockdown, a half-million people were evacuated by a makeshift fleet of tugs, ferries and pleasure boats. As hundreds rushed off one of those Circle Line boats and onto the solid ground of New Jersey, where I lived, I shouldered through the disembarking crowd to ask for a ride back, and took the captain’s shrug as a yes.

Then there we were, strangers being gently rocked by the Hudson, suspended between the before and the after on a sun-bright Tuesday morning.

The days that followed became an endless deadline of typing out unimaginable combinations of words. Thousands dead. Vital documents of commerce fluttering in the air. Medics with no one to save, first responders collecting scattered human remains, a cadaver-sniffing police dog overwhelmed by the smell. All in Lower Manhattan.

Journalists tend to compartmentalize their emotions when covering tragedy, boxing away personal feelings to remain as cleareyed as possible. This was the mode I assumed, focused and matter-of-fact, barely aware of the acrid whiffs wafting through the south-facing window beside my newsroom desk.

That is, until the Friday after the Tuesday, when my telephone rang.

“Danny?”

Hearing that name rocketed me back three decades to my Long Island boyhood. The caller was my lifetime friend Brian McShane, comrade in arms through a dozen years of Catholic schooling. Funny. Bright. Tough on the football field. Always pressed his black Bic pen too hard on loose-leaf paper.

“Danny? They can’t find Terence.”

His younger brother, a New York City firefighter assigned to Ladder 101 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, had raced with six colleagues through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel to the World Trade Center, so.

I told Brian I was sorry, and would call first thing if I heard anything at all. I hung up the phone, crawled under my desk and wept.

Some moments are permanent in the national memory. The hijacked planes slamming into the twin towers, crashing into the Pentagon, going down in a Pennsylvania meadow — all within 77 minutes. But also the falling man. The missing posters wallpapering Manhattan. The Pietà-like image of the Franciscan priest Mychal Judge being carried from the rubble.

We remember, too, the fleeting communal bond that followed in tragedy’s wake: the prayer vigils and donation drives, the benefit concerts and vows to rebuild. Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins” as a haunting soundtrack to it all.

But the disaster became so all-consuming that, looking back, it seems we could retain only so much. Often forgotten are the many Sept. 11-related scams, and the virulent xenophobia, and the protracted arguments over how best to honor the dead, and — oh, what about the jetliner that crashed in Queens just two months after Sept. 11, killing 260 people?

Sometimes lost, too, is how inescapable grief became. Grief expressed in car decals, in tattoos, in the veneration of trade center girders. Grief in all its manifestations, including anger.

Until recently reminded, I had forgotten that my colleague Kevin Flynn and I wrote a story about a scuffle at the trade center site early that November between New York City firefighters, who had lost 343 colleagues, and police officers, who had lost 23. “A familial brawl at a never-ending wake,” we called it.

A never-ending wake.

The dozens of stories I wrote about a wounded city seem now to blend into one long Sept. 11 requiem, with certain chords silent until struck again by something seen or heard.

Suddenly I am back at the 300th funeral for a firefighter — this one on Long Island, like all too many. The funerals were so numerous, often with little or nothing to bury, that the somber ritual of a firefighter farewell became uncomfortably routine: the beating of a black-clothed drum; the lone bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace”; the wall of white-gloved firefighters in salute.

Or I remember the 16 refrigerated trailers humming in sad chorus behind the medical examiner’s office, where staff members worked to identify the nearly 22,000 body parts stored inside. I watched a forensic pathologist try to glean DNA material from a bone, and heard the chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, explain that when presented with yet another body part, he always asked the same question:

“Who are you?”

(Twenty-five years later, that astounding work continues. Of the 2,753 people killed in the World Trade Center collapse, the remains of 1,099 have yet to be identified.)

Or I see the stacks of crushed police and fire vehicles amid the 1.2 million tons of trade center debris that was trucked up to a village-like operation established on the Fresh Kills landfill. For nearly a year, investigators in hazmat suits sifted through the rubble for credit cards, jewelry, bone fragments, anything that might have provided identification.

Then one day, this nightmarish Brigadoon was gone.

Or I think of one victim in particular, 30-year-old Ann Nelson of North Dakota, who had gone off to find her future in the big city. Her personal laptop, sent home, sat unopened for years, until her mother began playing games on it as a way to keep her daughter present.

One day she clicked open a file labeled “Top 100.” What appeared was her daughter’s earnest — but unfinished — catalog of how to live.

1. Be healthy/healthful. 5. Make a quilt. 10. Kilimanjaro. 14. Read every day. 18. Volunteer for a charity. 23. Helicopter-ski with my dad. 24. Spend more time with my family. 34. Kayak. 35. Drink water.

And the last: Learn about wine.

Ann Nelson was planning to attend a wine class that night.

I recently returned to the area of Lower Manhattan once known as ground zero. So much has changed that, emerging from the E train, I struggled to find my bearings. Only the sight of the old Millenium Hotel — now the M Social Hotel — helped me determine north from south.

Walking through the 9/11 Memorial plaza, past the tree groves and the reflecting pools and the museum, I could not help but see shadows.

One day back then, I packed a small bag and slipped into the restricted area surrounding the grimmest crime scene in American history. My assignment was to relieve an intrepid colleague, Chris Chivers, who had been camping out with the National Guard in nearby Battery Park.

I shared a tent that night with the gifted New York Times photographer Eddie Keating, a compact man with a knowing grin and an ever-present Leica. Greeting us in the morning was a Coast Guard cutter in New York Harbor, a 270-foot symbol of the jittering uncertainty coursing through the city.

We put on yellow construction helmets and walked into a 16-acre calamity that less than two weeks before had been the center of international finance. With clipboard and camera in hand, we spent the next few days chronicling a smoldering wasteland, exposed all the while to the toxic air that would contribute to the deaths of so many, including my friend Eddie.

We saw emergency workers too weary to grieve, earnest volunteers handing out donated clothes no one wanted, preachers and gawkers and dazed residents stumbling out of bars that stayed open out of civic necessity. They all played their roles on a still-life stage, where fruit rotted under the gray blanket of dust in the Amish Market, and the newspapers in the deserted Millennium gift shop reported the news of Sept. 10, once urgent, now inconsequential.