Mark Bays works not far from the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, but when his building shook and the skies turned black on that awful morning 17 years ago, he figured it was thunder. Then he saw the billowing smoke and realized something terrible was happening.
It was April 19, 1995, and he was watching the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the federal building downtown. What few Americans remember or knew in the first place is that 324 buildings in this flat, quiet city center were damaged or blown out by the bomb set off by Timothy McVeigh. "It was like a war zone, with glass all over," Bays recalled during a recent session with garden writers in the city. "It was a horrific sight."
A lot of folks didn't go home that day, including Bays. They raced to the disaster. There was an eight-hour wait to donate blood, and a later study revealed that fully 78 percent of the people in Oklahoma City were directly linked to the victims. One woman I spoke to during my visit said she knew four. There were 168 deaths, including 19 children, and 800 injured.
While I was in Oklahoma City, I visited the memorial on the site of the bomb blast twice - once in the afternoon, once late at night to experience its full impact. It's a powerful thing to describe - 168 empty bronze and stone chairs that are lit up after dark and a long reflecting pool flanked by two huge gates or arches. One is inscribed with the time 9:01, the other with 9:03. The pool between them is designed to represent the moment of the blast.
The federal building is long gone, replaced by a new one nearby.
Mark Bays is the urban forestry coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, and he's made a special study of what has come to be called the "survivor tree," an American elm that was shattered and singed that morning - but survived. Largely because of Bays, the city rescued the tree, removed what was left of the concrete around it, enriched the soil and pruned it in a way to promote healing and future growth.
Families of victims and just regular people like me who visit the memorial often sit or gather under this remarkable tree. As I did so, I was reminded again of the healing power of water and trees. It was a warm, sunny day on my first visit, and it felt slightly surreal to be resting under this huge, leafy tree. It was hard to get my arms around the fact that so much death and horror had unfolded all around it just 12 years before.
Compounding the sadness is the realization that most Americans have forgotten the Oklahoma City bombing. Timonthy McVeigh was found guilty and executed three months before 9/11, and that momentous event has overshadowed everything that came before.
But if you walk down the streets that ring the memorial site, which is now a national park, you'll see a fence stuffed with mementoes of the dead. A formal portrait here, an I.D. badge there, baby toys, poems, all the wrenching reminders of the human cost of the evil that McVeigh and his co-conspirators did.
