As I approached Kenmore Square, I realized something I had overlooked: an afternoon Red Sox game meant thousands of aimless fans parading around the area, creating a human dam of Brookline Ave. With many of side streets that I would usually use to complete my route being closed off, and feeling surprisingly fresh on my feet, I made a last-second audible and kept running straight, right through Kenmore onto Comm Ave, and into the back bay of Boston...
Dozens of stoplights and hundreds of brownstones later, I found myself standing at 671 Boylston St. The break was well-timed, as I had just started to get a cramp in my 'calvstring' (you know, that mysterious muscle that connects your lower torso to your foot.....OK, fine I was just tired). I hit pause on my RunKeeper app, threw off my headphones, and leaned up against the outer wall of Marathon Sports. As I caught my breath, I watched....This must be the place.
The decision to take out my camera phone was a harder decision than one might expect. A.) My phone fits so snugly in my exercise armband that taking it in & out expends more energy than exercising itself and B.) What was it exactly that I was taking a picture of? Only 54 days prior, the exact spot where I was standing was the epicenter of one of the most shocking and horrific terrorist attacks this city has seen in years, if not, ever. On this day, like all other days before April 15th 2013, it was just a square block of cement that supported the feet of hundreds of innocent passers-by as they walked up and down Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. No markings. No debris. No blood. Just a plain slab of grey concrete.
I knew where it was based on the lamp post in relation to the finish line. It was the last post on the left right before the finish line, which was still vividly painted on the roadway. It seemed so familiar to me. Hell, I'd seen the photos and watched the videos hundreds of times before. I surveyed the explosion from every angle, often using slow motion and zooming techniques. I plotted out the fences, and the trash cans, and the red bricks on the sidewalk. I analyzed the faces of the people in the crowd, and I charted out the directions that they ran in when the blast occurred. I looked for clues - pre and post-explosion - any nuance that seemed off to me. I wanted to find whatever parasite could be responsible for such inhumane and savage destruction. And I wanted to bring that thing to justice. So I looked at every photo I could find.. Over. And over again. In the hours and days after the explosions, I knew the sidewalk in front of 671 Boylston Street like a birthmark on the back of my hand.And that, quite frankly, was the ironic part. A place that I learned through photographs and had meticulously studied for countless hours was a place that I had actually been to hundreds of times. Whether it was bar-hopping on a busy Saturday night or people-watching on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I had stood where I stood on that Saturday many many times before. It was all the same. And yet, it was completely different.
I tried to focus on the people walking by, to see if they acknowledged that the ground they walked on was - at one point in the not-so-distant past - a battlefield. I wanted to see if people were able to recognize the lamp post and the trash can and the red bricks, even without any markings or debris or blood. I took a mental note of every time a person looked down, or pointed, or slowed their pace. But no one really seemed to stop. For the most part, everyone just...kept moving.
As I stood there watching others, I noticed I was being watched as well. A gentlemen in a solid blue pullover had been standing a few feet away from me and had turned in my direction a few times, as if to keep tabs on me through his periphery. The next time he turned to me, our eyes met, and without hesitation, he took a few steps closer to me. It was clear he wanted to say something. The first thing that came out of his mouth was something that shook me still and left me utterly speechless.
"Are you standing here for a reason?"
It was such a simple, yet unbelievably loaded question. What I thought was an obvious answer suddenly became the hardest thing to explain. Why was he asking me this? Something in my subconscious immediately assumed he may have been an undercover cop. After all, it wouldn't have been that surprising to me if the city had set up some type of police detail in the area to watch over any suspicious activity. But was I being suspicious? I was, after all, one of the only people to stop and loiter around while others seemed to weave their way through the area. Before I could answer the man, he muttered another line that knocked me to the ground like a second blast:
"I was standing right where you are when it happened."
"Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers." - Victor Hugo.
For the next hour or so, I listened to this man's story of how he was only a matter of 15 feet away from the homemade pressure cooker device when it exploded, shooting three pieces of metallic shrapnel into his 13 year old daughter who was standing right next to him against the wall of Marathon Sports. I listened to him explain how he bent over and shrouded his daughter like a human umbrella while large shards to glass from the office windows above pierced his back and head. I listened to him as he explained how he had to take her hand and lead her through the mess of human carnage, closing his other hand over her eyes so that she wouldn't see the graphic scene unfolding before her. I listened to him tell of how, amid all the noise and confusion, he was lucky enough to find his wife - who had been standing a hundred feet or so past the finish line - and they were able to get out of there rather quickly. I listened to his story about how he had to track down his wife's college-aged nephew, so that he and his out-of-town friend could drive them to the hospital in Weymouth (while having to stop for gas on the way there..."college kids," I remember him saying with a smirk). I listened to all this before the man even told me his name...
The next half hour or so of my conversation with Mike was spent summarizing the next 54 days of his life: the obvious emotional toll that the events have taken on himself and his family, the physical scarring that remains on his head and his daughter's legs, the perpetual ringing in his ears that continues to this day. These are the things that you and I forget about when we think about the Marathon bombings. Now two full months removed from the incident, what to most of us was a tragic day in Boston history, remains as a constant waking nightmare for the people who were there.
It's easy to distance yourself when you weren't there. For those who weren't first-hand victims of the attack, they'll never fully know what it was like to be in that devastation, and that's OK for a lot of people. But it's also the pitfall of empathy. We can say how sorry we feel for the victims and their friends and families. We can donate to the One Fund in their honor. We can cry out "Boston Strong" until we're blue and yellow in the face. We'll never really know, and we should never act like we do. But that doesn't mean we should stop supporting the ones who were there. It's the reason why I'm so glad I met Mike on that beautiful, sunny Saturday. Aside from my coworker Jesse who was a block away from the blast, Mike was the first person who I ever met that was there. And not just there, but there. In the blast there. He was, by all accounts, a first-hand victim of this terrorist attack.
I'll never forget Mike and his story. It was his first time being back to "ground zero" (nb: I use that term with caution) since that fateful day, and he wasn't necessarily looking for someone to hear his story, but he found me anyway. I'll never forget how apologetic he was. He'd be midway through telling me how the doctors spent hours picking glass out of his head, and he stop and say "I'm so sorry I'm wasting your time and interrupted your run." But, really, for a man whose whole life was interrupted by two evil men, I had all the time in the world.
Mike and I walked over to the memorial that the city has set up in Copley Square. People have placed flowers, signs and even their old running shoes with little notes on them for the victims to "Get Better" and "Keep Running." It's amazing how many people this memorial attracted, and yet there was no one except me and Mike that day, who gathered around that plain slab of concrete at 671 Boylston.
Boston will keep running, there's no doubt about that. Even Mike, who has lived just outside the city all his life but was still attending his first ever Marathon, will keep running. But for now, he just wants one of his daughters to buy him a "Boston Strong" T-Shirt for Father's Day.
Happy Father's Day, Mike.
Keep Running. Boston Strong.
