It was a similarly lovely spring day 15 years ago today. I remember that because I had just come in from examining my newly tilled garden when the phone rang - my Kansas City Star colleague Cindy Lozano calling to tell me about the Oklahoma City Bombing.
For just two days, I'd been working as a state correspondent for the Star, based out of Springfield, Mo., and covering parts of four states. While Cindy told me about the bombing and asked whether the state desk editors had called to send me to the scene, a dozen mundane thoughts ran through my head. I had moved to Springfield from Kansas City the week before, and though I had a bank account, I had less than $100 in it. I didn't yet have a refrigerator in my house, which was also my office, and I had a flat of strawberries sitting in the sink. My Mazda pickup was low on fuel. I hadn't unpacked all of my work clothes.
I called my editor, Caitlin Hendel, who told me the National Desk was getting a reporter and photographer on a plane to Oklahoma City and might need my help. By late morning, I'd drained my bank account, gassed up the truck and was headed southwest out of Springfield toward Oklahoma City.
The radio stations in Oklahoma were full of the news as I drove, although I remember little of those early reports. I stopped at an I-44 rest stop somewhere in northeastern Oklahoma, and I remember people clustered around TV screens hanging from the ceiling. A middle-aged woman in a blue shirt in the restroom told me she was praying for the victims.
I entered Oklahoma City from the east, and was stuck in a maddening, incredible, traffic jam. I don't know if I can trust my memory, but I remember columns of smoke in the skyline. The downtown exits were closed, so I overshot the downtown area and exited at the fairgrounds. I managed to snag a map at a service station and tried to quickly learn the layout of the city. I began a tour of the city's hospitals, where hundreds of wounded had been taken, while national desk reporter Scott Canon gathered what he could at the scene.
I spent weeks in Oklahoma City after the bombing, writing about the living and the dead. So many of those stories are right in my mind to grab when I want to, not that I often do. The story from that first night that sticks with me is one told by a physician to a cluster of reporters in a basement hallway of one of the hospitals. It is the tale of a woman whose leg was pinned under a beam at the bottom of the building. Rescue workers couldn't move the beam, which in some inconceivable way was helping to hold up what was left of the building. Dr. Andy Sullivan squeezed through the rubble to reach her, was able to give her a shot of sedative, and then amputated her leg with a pocket knife because the amputation knife was too large for the space he had to work. She survived, although as I remember, her family did not.
A lot has been written about the destruction that occurred that day -- more than 160 people dead, including children in the federal building's day care center. Hundreds of buildings were damaged, cars destroyed, downtown businesses irreparably lost. I spent some time in the city in later months, too, writing about the lingering effects of this act of domestic terrorism. I also was fortunate to reflect and write about the things and people that survived that day.
One of those is now known as the Survivor Tree, the lone shade tree in the Murrah Building's parking lot. The elm was scarred by shrapnel and burned by the blast, but leafed out and lived on despite its injuries.
I had covered human tragedy for years before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah that April 19th. I had watched stabbing victims bleed out on the streets of Kansas City, seen the aftermath of shootings and beatings, explosions and fatal housefires ... death on a smaller scale, but death of a horribly palpable nature to the families of its victims. As well-prepared as I was to deal with the grieving families and shell-shocked workers in the wake of the bombing, I was deeply affected by the pain of the survivors. I walked away from those weeks in Oklahoma a stranger to myself.
Sometimes I feel a lot like that surviving elm ... worse for the wear of some of the things I've experienced. But some of the changes I experienced as a result of the bombing were good ones. I left Oklahoma City a better reporter and a better person - more compassionate, perhaps, but certainly more appreciative of the moments we live and they way our lives touch the lives of others.
Today, I'd love to know that people around the world are thinking of Oklahoma City, are still praying for the victims and their families that had to go on living. Though time has past, survivors are still pulled back to that lovely spring morning 15 years ago and experience moments of sheer fear and pain. I hope some of them find solace each spring in the unfurling leaves of that lone elm.
