Phelan, CA: The View from a Small-Town Gas Station

Among the mountains, before the highway curves and splits and rises to where it tosses you out into the vast California desert, sits an unremarkable place called Phelan. Like many unremarkable places, Phelan has a gas station.

I slid out of my seat and into the hazy California sunshine. From the edge of the gas station lot I took in the unspectacular, hemmed-in view of the surrounding hills.

The desert is not something I grew up with. And while I’d driven this way a few times before, for all the nothingness there was still novelty here.

Spread over the vast landscape around Phelan was Angeles National Forest, with views of Ontario Peak and Bighorn Peak and Timber Mountain. Iron Mountain and Rattlesnake Peak were out there somewhere too, along with the Bridge to Nowhere, spanning the San Gabriel River as part of a road that was washed away by a flood and never rebuilt. Off to the east were Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake. Silverwood Lake, California’s highest reservoir at a thousand meters above sea level, sat right up Route 138. The lake sits on the West Fork Mohave River, not far from the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs for 2,653 miles from the Mexican to the Canadian border.

Standing there in the Chevron lot I knew none of these names and trivial details. Only later would I learn about all the things we were passing by. All the things I was missing.

Calabasas, CA: Too Young to Remember. Too Moved to Forget.

Dr. Bob Dworkoski spoke quietly, eyes taking everything in. ‘It’s hard to put into words. This is just a moving, powerful experience.’

The Headmaster of Viewpoint School went on to explain that he ‘didn’t know how having this sculpture come to campus would work out.’ Watching his students reaching into a box of paper and pens, writing down their thoughts and climbing a stepladder to slip their notes into the heart of the cross it was clear that the message – some message – had gotten through.

What does 9-11 mean to someone who was five years old at the time? To someone who was too young to have any memory of that day? To someone who didn’t even exist ten years ago, and only knows of a place called New York from TV?

Holding an almost impossibly heavy chunk of steel from the World Trade Center in their hands, the students seemed to grasp, to some degree, the horror of that day.

As time goes by these young men and women, these rough-and-tumble boys and giggling girls, will journey into adulthood. As they do, they will gain some kind of clearer understanding of just what happened on that terrible morning – and how the world they would eventually inherit had been changed forever.

Brentwood, LA: Official Unveiling at Leslie Sacks Art Gallery

This morning we found ourselves in the middle of a lights-flashing police cruiser and fire engine escort, winding down the canyon road and out onto the Pacific Coast Highway toward Brentwood and Leslie Sacks.

Reverend Georgiana Rodiger led a prayer and blessed the cross with holy water from the Jordan River. (Yes, that Jordan River.) Jon offered his thoughts, expressing his hope that everyone who looks upon this cross will reflect on their own lives and think of their place in a world that is much bigger than any of us.

I read the names of the firefighters stenciled in gray on the backs of their heavy yellow turnout gear. One of the men, white-haired and tanned, with weathered skin and deep eyes, was named Yamashiro.

Afterward we got to talking, and I found out that years ago his parents had emigrated from Japan and settled in Hawaii where they grew pineapples and sugar cane for a living. He knew a few people back in Japan, though he didn’t visit much. I wondered if he’d felt more affected by Japan’s disaster of a couple months prior than he had in the aftermath of 9-11. He was in the unusual position of being in the middle of the two disasters, both geographically and in terms of his past and present heritage.

I didn’t broach the subject. It didn’t really matter. I wanted to know more about the trip his parents had taken, leaving their country to start something new in a place far from home.

The California Coast: Firemen at Malibu Bluffs Park

Jon parked at the edge of the grass and was soon surrounded by a dozen or so members of L.A. County Fire Department Squads 71 and 88. They were dressed in dark blue pants and sweatshirts and fleeces. They were friendly, they were glad to help, and they had no idea what was going on.

“Something about this cross?” one of them asked. “And 9-11?”

Their faces tightened and their eyes narrowed as Jon gave them a quick explanation. Without any further conversation they all jumped in, lifting the cross off Jon’s truck, carrying it out to the middle of the field and laying it down.

“I didn't know what this was all about,” said Bob Fidani. “None of us did. But this is amazing. Really. Thank you so much for inviting us down.”

“No one will ever forget,” said fellow fireman Dave Salhus. “But memories do fade. Driving this cross-country is going to make a huge, huge impact. It’ll remind everyone what 9-11 was all about.”

For some, 9-11 was about terrorism. For some it was about America’s sudden vulnerability, or our altered position in the world, for better or for worse depending on one’s particular view.

For Bob Fidani and Dave Salhus and the rest of the men there that evening, and for firefighters all across the country, 9-11 was about making that ultimate sacrifice. Giving in order to make this country great. Being our best when times are at their worst.

Official Press Release: St. Peter's 9-11 Cross

Jon took the hunk of Trade Center steel from my hands and put it back on his workbench. “We’ll leave in about three days,” he said. “After the unveiling.”

“Be weird to leave before the unveiling.”

“Wiseass. I mean right after. On Wednesday. Lee wrote up a press release for it. He’s putting it out first thing tomorrow morning so we pretty much have to get this thing done by then and hit the road."

“Press release, nice.”

“Yeah, I think it would be cool to get a little attention. Oh yeah, that reminds me. I hired a PR firm to help us get in touch with people in the cities we’re going to.”

“You mean like DC and New York?”

“Yeah, plus a few other places. We should sit down later and plan out a route. I’m thinking we go through Nashville.”

Three days. That would make it May 18^th. We’d be on the road for four or five days, a week at most. Even if we took a little longer my wife would be fine, staying with my mom, having some help with the boys. Still, her spoken sentiment of ‘Take your time! Have fun, and be careful!’ would only hold up for so long. A cross-country trip with an old buddy sounded great. But so did figuring out the rest of our life.

Artist Jon Krawczyk and 9/11 Memorial Cross

Begin Pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Catholic Church, N.Y.C.

Unveiling and Departure Wednesday, May 18, 8:00 AM

Los Angeles, CA – May 16, 2011 - Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk has completed fabrication of a fourteen foot tall stainless steel cross incorporating fragments of steel from the World Trade Center. These relics of 9/11 were provided by the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, presently under construction at the site of the World Trade Center. The base of the cross will serve as a podium for a stainless steel book, still in fabrication, whose pages will be engraved with the names of those who perished as a result of the 9/11 attacks.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 memorial will take the place of the cruciform I-beam girders found standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center, then moved to St. Peter’s Catholic Church near Ground Zero. St. Peter’s, the oldest Catholic church in New York, was damaged in the attacks of 9-11.

Krawczyk’s 9/11 Memorial Cross will be unveiled at Leslie Sacks Fine Art, 11640 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles (Brentwood) California 90049 at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, May 18th and depart for the East Coast immediately thereafter.

Krawczyk, accompanied by long time friend and author Kevin Kato, will shepherd the artist’s 9/11 Memorial Cross by open truck to Shanksville, Pennsylvania (the crash site of United Flight 93), and the Pentagon in Washington DC, stopping along the way in Santa Fe, Indianapolis, Memphis and Nashville before placing the cross in storage until the original Ground Zero girders cross, now standing at St. Peter’s, is moved later this year to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Artist’s statement: “When installed, the cross will be polished to a mirror finish so each and every onlooker will see himself or herself reflected in it, hopefully thinking about those who sacrificed before them, and then considering what their own sacrifice will be. But before they think, I want people to see the beauty first – the beauty of existence, the beauty of the cross, then remember the destruction and find a better way.”

Costs of the 9/11 Memorial Cross are underwritten by a group of anonymous donors, the artist and Leslie Sacks Fine Art. Jon Krawczyk is represented by Leslie Sacks Fine Art.