I find that I feel the loss of the World Trade Center from the New York City skyline very personally. I don't know if people who live elsewhere in the country can quite appreciate what it means to those of us who grew up within view of them.

Like Glenn, I, too, had once savored the view of the distant skyline from Bearfort Ridge.

However, in my case it was not the better-known AT viewpoint, but one off-trail in the Terrace Pond area.

I wound up there in the course of my side hobby of climbing county highpoints. On the USGS Franklin quadrangle, six small areas can be found in the pond's vicinity with contours of 1,480'. One of these thus contains the highest point in Passaic County.

But until an exact determination is made, it is necessary to visit all six.

If this sounds like work, it was. And it's even more challenging in reality since all six areas are off-trail, located amid thick patches of mountain laurel and often requiring hand-over-foot climbs on the finlike glacial rock outcrops that predominate in the area. Since I wisely chose to do this in cool, leafless weather in early December, I also had to contend with crossing or circumventing deep, ice-crusted puddles along the gas pipeline easement. Outside of some of the trailless peaks in the Catskills, it was easily the hardest work I'd done to achieve a hiking objective.

After going up a steep ramp just off the Terrace Pond South Trail to the last group of three areas, which I immediately realized were lower than the two east of the pond, I sat down on a small knob, deciding it was finally time for lunch.

I turned my gaze to the southeast and was surprised to see the Manhattan skyline pop up through a low point on a nearby ridge. There are probably a thousand better viewpoints and a thousand better days to see it on; still I felt a special rewarded. From a viewpoint on the gas pipeline, near the northern area, I had been able to see the Catskills looming over the distant Shawangunks, and this was the only hike I'd ever done where those extremes - the wilderness of 4,000-foot peaks and the great city whose thirst it slakes - I had been able to contrast on the same trip.

Appalachian Trail guidebooks make special note of the fact that, on reasonably clear days, you can see the skyline from Mombasha High Point in Sterling Forest after the trail makes its second and last crossing into New York from New Jersey. Since the view to Washington from Shenandoah National Park was obscured by increased air pollution, it is the only major American city that can be seen from the Trail. And if it has to be only one ...

Growing up in Summit, New Jersey, in the 1970s, the towers were close in space to my childhood, but also in time. Begun in 1966 and completed six or so years later, they came into existence around the same time I did. And they were a part of growing up, even though I had the usual New Jerseyan's resentment of the way New Yorkers saw New Jersey, even as the Giants, Jets and Nets moved out to our state to play their home games and anyone could see that the Statue of Liberty was really within our state (I sort of compounded this by opting to live in and identify with upstate New York as an adult, but that's neither here nor there at the moment).

But it was always a love-hate relationship. Without a doubt they were one of the cool things about living near New York City. Other kids in school would brag about having gone into the city in the weekends and having gone to the top of The Twin Towers. I didn't even know they had an official name for a few years. We passed around urban legends about it, stories about friends of friends who'd dropped pennies off and seen them kill people on the street below, about throwing juice on pedestrians below and watching the effect (how it was possible to see people in the street, we didn't ask). That there was a tower on one but not the other because King Kong destroyed it.

It just seemed right and natural that they were the tall buildings you'd identify most with New York, the ones King Kong would climb as he did in the 1976 remake. The Empire State Building? Oh please ...

So, at some point after George Willig made his famous climb in 1977, we made the pilgrimage, first viewing from the enclosed lower levels, then the walkways on top of Two World Trade Center (the first building to collapse Tuesday). My brother and I felt afterwards that we had triumphed over the inevitable fear of heights (never mind that the walkway is/was on supports on the roof and one would have to jump off it 20-30 feet, then surmount an electrical fence, to jump or fall off from there.

It would continue to figure in my life in other ways, too. On one of my mother's last birthdays before she and my father divorced, we all went out to Windows On the World and ate dinner. That was cool, too, and worth some more bragging to the kids at school although by then frankly we were getting a little old for that.  

At that time, my father's law firm worked out of offices in the nearby Chase Manhattan Bank building (At that time, they suffered broken windows in an FALN bombing in 1978 or so. We thought back then that that was terrorism at its worst). So, if we went in to see him or meet him, we took the PATH train to the World Trade Center stop. Again, we younger ones were amazed that we were under a building so tall it stuck up into the clouds every now and then.

I talked with my father a couple of days ago ... although his firm is still in New York, they moved to midtown offices years ago, perhaps quite prudently now.  

He let on what he thought was a secret to me but wasn't because I have a really good memory about pronouncements he's made in the past ... that he'd never liked those buildings as architecture (he has hardly been alone). After rattling off a long discussion of their history and the WTC's genesis as a way for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to offset the deficit it would inevitably incur through being forced to take over the Hudson and Manhattan tubes, apropos of why any rebuilding would have to to include the PATH station now buried under tons of rubble, he admitted that, since his office faced them for many years, he was able to watch it get built and should have taken pictures of that as it went up.

On July 4, 1986, my mother, stepfather, stepsiblings and I went to Liberty State Park (currently the triage center, although now there is a lot less triage to do, so they're trying to identify the dead there) to watch the special fireworks show for the Statue of Liberty's centennial. They were over the top even by the usual standards of Independence Day celebrations in New York Harbor, but from this view they were enhanced by their reflection in the glass of the WTC and other financial district buildings behind them.

I grew up, and would live near or in cities on Lake Erie before settling down in these northern outskirts of the NY metro area, where many city police and firefighters live as it is among the furthest from the city they can do so (and thus most affordable and still sort of rural, like Mendham in fact), and thus there are plenty of families are still worried sick about those who haven't been heard from yet and are presumed dead.

But the Twin Towers were still there at some key junctures. I proposed to my wife on New Year's Eve 1992 with our car in the parking lot of Montclair Kimberley Academy, near the Essex County HP, not where I went to high school but a place with a superb, unobstructed view to both the midtown and downtown skylines.

They glittered in the night, as they always did. There was something reassuring about the way the building never totally went dark, except in the 1977 blackout. They were like a pair of benevolent if bland patriarchs of the city.

I think of their use in the opening credits of the film "Wall Street," David Letterman's show in the '80s, and as a backdrop on many local New York TV stations' news shows, and even more recently the "Simpsons" episode where Homer's car is booted in the plaza between the towers. Woody Allen's film "Manhattan" cleverly used them to form the T's in the title on the onesheet.

They are far from the only symbol of New York City, but they will be missed as the tallest buildings in it.

More recently, I recall visits to the now-affected area, dashing down to the New York Secretary of State's apostilling unit on William Street and the courthouse to get the proper certification for the documents sent to Bulgaria that allowed us to adopt our son. From the streets around the Brooklyn Bridge approaches and City Hall, they still seemed almost too big, too high, to be works of man.

So, in a small way, they stood watch as I became both a husband and a father.

Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I was going into the city with my mother and stepsister for the former's birthday dinner, which we had considered having at Windows on the World but didn't.

As we waited for traffic to spiral us down to the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, I caught a glimpse of the lower skyline yet again.

It was perfect ... it had been a beautiful day with crystal blue skies, and at this time the golden light of the setting sun hit them at just the right angle. The light, the colors, the contrasts, the shapes ... never, not even on some hikes, have I so regretted not having my camera at hand.

Who could have known then that that was the last time I'd see that tableau which I have seen so many times, with my own eyes? Perhaps that was its peculiar way of saying goodbye to me, to leave me with that memory.

On the morning of the attacks, shortly before I heard of them, I had what must have been a premonition of sorts as, for no reason I could think of, Billy Joel's old song "Miami 2017," a somewhat fanciful account of the demise of New York, went through my head. Specifically, the lines "I've seen those lights go out on Broadway/ I saw the Empire State laid low."

Well, that didn't exactly happen, but it might as well have. My wife cried as we saw, live, the towers collapse on Tuesday morning. I went numb, in a way I haven't since our first son died, not wanting to believe that this was happening in our reality. "Independence Day" and "Deep Impact" notwithstanding, you never thought of them as something that could be erased from view permanently.

I'm sure they will be replaced with something that may be both taller and more beloved by architecture critics, but it can't replace the place the Towers had in my mind.

On the Saturday after, I went down to visit my mother, who still lives in Summit. The main reason was to drive as close as we could get and just look at what was left.

We wound up in the Harborside area of Jersey City, at one of the Waterway Taxi slips, looking right across the river at the ... well, truncated is the only word I can think of, skyline. Others had come to this point too, taking pictures and video but mostly keeping a respectful quiet, much like guests at a wake (which this was).

By any standard, it was a beautiful and peaceful day on the river. Even that greyish-brown plume of smoke and dust coming from the site seemed almost benevolent.

But all it did at the time was remind me that I couldn't even place where, exactly, the towers had been. Some of the wreckage was visible in the gaps between the World Financial Center buildings, the Cesar Pelli designs still undiminished, but it seemed not to belong to this city anymore already.

There were no gaps, no swatches of dark grey, in the sky to remind us of what we once would have seen. The future without the Twin Towers had begun already, whether we wanted it to or not.

Diamond Mountain

- Ralph V. Balfoort, Albany, NY
   Conference Delegate for the Paddling Bares Canoe Club

A few years ago I sat at the top of Diamond Mountain where the old Diamond Mountain Trail meets the Seven Hills and Hillburn-Torne-Sebago Trails when a group of hikers came up behind me. One of them, standing behind me, made the comment, "Look! You can see New York." I half-turned my head and said, "Yeah, but who'd want to?"

What that other hiker saw was the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Even though I live many miles away from Gotham I enjoy doing trail maintenance on the Diamond Mountain/Tower Trail with my fellow club members, but being able to see Manhattan was not what drew me to that spot. Now that view will be different; there will be something missing, something that we thought almost as permanent as the rocks we scramble over everywhere in Harriman State Park.

When I go down to the trail to do maintenance this weekend I'll make it a point to stand at the top of the trail and pause for a moment - to remember what was - and to weep for those who were.

Good bye

- Michael Rea

I didn't want to accept what was happening on September 11th. Even when I saw pictures, I still didn't want to believe it. As I drove home from work, I knew that I could have taken a short detour and glimpsed the disastrous New York skyline right from the road. That would have given me a closer look because I was heading away from the city. Maybe I was feeling some kind of shock, but I just drove until I reached my trail. It is a shortcut that I have been using for many years to reach my favorite section of the Appalachian Trail. Eventually, when I became a maintainer, the shortcut became a necessity to maximize my work-time on the trail. On this day, the familiarity of the forest and the release of walking helped bring me back to reality. I thought about the first time I walked it after I had become a proud new maintainer. I remember how my eager eyes scanned the ground for litter. I spotted what I thought was a discarded shotgun shell buried in the trail. But when I picked it up I was surprised to be holding a New York City subway token. Disbelieving that this piece of civilization would be carelessly discarded in the forest, I looked south on the Horizon. I had to check my balance on the ledge when I realized I was staring at the New York City skyline. I knew for certain because I could recognize the unmistakable Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. In all the years I had been there before I had never seen the skyline. It is almost 50 miles distant and I usually walked here in the warm hazy summer days. Now that I was a maintainer, I was out on a clear spring morning grooming the trail before all the other hikers came. For me, the view of the Twin Towers from the Appalachian Trail on that crisp spring day marks the beginning of my memory as a volunteer maintainer.

September 11, 2001 was a clear crisp day too. With every comforting step, I kept thinking how proud I was of that view of the New York City skyline from the trail. When I reached the ledge, I saw the distant smoke rising in a tall cylindrical cloud. It was in the exact spot on the horizon where I had viewed the World Trade Center many times before. Seeing it now helped me believe the reality of the disaster. Also now, standing on that mountain, I believed that if we could build those great buildings and build this two-thousand-mile trail, then we would overcome and triumph over our loss. I said good bye.