This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: "Surreal" was the word that came to mind as two former St. Louisans who now live in Boston described their experiences this week.
University City High School classmates Gail Smith and Ellen Dewald Greenfeld ended up in Boston, and now live near each other in the suburb of Wayland.
Both graduated in the class of 1966. Smith is a retired bank securities compliance officer. Greenfield is a development officer at Harvard’s School of Business. Both described this week in their adopted city as surreal.
Greenfeld pondered aloud the fact that in the midst of Patriots Day and the exuberance surrounding the Boston Marathon – the race for which any true marathoner wants to qualify – there was such senseless murder and wholesale carnage. When she spoke of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy killed awaiting his father’s arrival at the conclusion of the 26.2-mile race, she began to cry.
“How did this happen?” Greenfeld asked. “What was their motivation?”
Greenfeld talked of the fact she has children living and working in Boston and how, on such a beautiful spring day, and in the face of warm sunshine, she could not process the reality of the continuing horrors.
She worries about her family and worries too that the copy-cat phenomenon, in which savagery such as the Marathon Bombings beget other violence and terror, will come into play.
“It is beyond horrific,” she said of the week, “and leaves you numb and very, very sad.”
Gail Smith lives near the Greenfelds in Wayland, but for years lived in the “Cs” of alphabetically arranged Boston, at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Clarendon Street, just a few blocks from the Marathon’s finish line on Boylston Street in front of the Public Library.
“So we know that area extremely well,” Smith said, “and although I don’t know anyone who was injured, the bombings are psychologically damaging, like 9-11, but closer and more personal to us.”
Smith ticked off things closed or postponed in the last 24 hours because of the violence, but spoke emphatically of the indomitable spirit of her adopted city. For example, she said the Boston Bruins played the Buffalo Sabres in a packed TD Garden on Wednesday night, but what she found more striking than attendance was the singing of the National Anthem.
“Usually people don’t sing,” she said, “they just applaud when it’s over.” On Wednesday night, however, she said the singing was emotionally robust.
Smith is a volunteer at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on Huntington Avenue, and she was scheduled to go in on Tuesday, but stayed away, afraid she would not be able to get in the building.
She found, however, that the museum not only opened but also was free for the day so “people could have a quiet, thoughtful place to go,” she said. That, Smith said, is further evidence that the grand, historically and culturally rich and indisputably American city “is actually one big small town.”
Other former St. Louisans were feeling the effects of this week's events as well.
'Shelter in place'
Jabari Asim, an author and writing professor at Emerson College in Boston, was on lockdown with his wife and children – off school for spring break -- in their home in suburban Newton, just three doors down from the border with Watertown, where Friday's police presence was concentrated.
“It’s relatively deserted,” he told the Beacon in a telephone interview. “The only traffic I see is people coming home from jobs they had gone to before all this started.
“This was garbage pickup day, and it hasn’t been picked up. I don’t see any evidence of mail delivery.”
He said the family got an automated telephone message in the morning from the chief of police, saying they should remain indoors and stay away from their windows.
Asim, who was a writer and editor at the Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post before joining the faculty at Emerson in 2010, said his family had celebrated his daughter’s 18th birthday the night before the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street, where the explosions occurred on Monday.
He said he was not so much concerned about his family’s safety while the manhunt continued as he was about the possibility of future explosions in the city or on the transit system he takes regularly.
“I’m more concerned about Boston than this leafy suburb where I live,” Asim said.
“You don’t think about the transit system while you’re on it, but the fact is it is very vulnerable, and it could be easily infiltrated.”
Power of social media
Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri system, posted on Twitter Friday morning that he was joining many people in the Boston area, following the suspect search while the area was on lockdown.
“Here in Boston with my family watching the updates on the manhunt – unbelievable!” he wrote. “City of Boston & Police united – prayers for everyone.”
Paul Ha was for many years director of the Contemporary Art Museum in Grand Center and is now director of the M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. He lives in Brookline.
Ha echoed the notion of surreality that Greenfeld and Smith mentioned. “It has been horrible for everyone not only those of us at M.I.T. and people of Boston and now Watertown but also all of America,” he said.
“I’m hopeful the police and F.B.I and other authorities will resolve this soon with no other casualties.”
Ha said digital media has been a godsend. He received his first notice when M.I.T. texted the Institute community about a disturbance on campus. Ten minutes later, he said, another texted alert came, saying, “Stay inside.” He then went traditional and turned on a television for a riot of stories on the confusion, some of them delayed.
“Twitter,” he said, “was far more immediate.”
He has kept Twitter and Facebook going constantly while receiving texts on his telephone as the alerts have continued. Early this morning, around 1:30 a.m., he went to bed. “When I woke up about 5,” he said, “all of it was still going on.”
'No cars, no people, no nothing'
For Martienne Cotter of De Soto, who said she visits the area every month to see her boyfriend, this trip was definitely different.
Cotter told the Beacon that she was holed up in West Newton, right next to Watertown. “It’s like Kirkwood is to Webster Groves,” is the way she put it.
But she didn’t know what was going on until a friend sent her a text message Friay morning.
“It woke me up,” Cotter said, “and it said you better not be leaving the house. Then I turned on the news and saw what had happened overnight.”
She said she never received any official notification of a lockdown, but based on the news reports she was watching, switching from channel to channel, she did not plan to go anywhere.
When she arrived on Wednesday, Cotter said, “everything seemed normal. But yesterday I went for a long jog, and there were a lot of police on the streets staring at me and anyone else who was out. I also saw some National Guardsmen. It was definitely not what you would normally see.”
Outside, she said, the scene was deserted. “There is no one outside at all. No cars, no people nothing.”
How did she feel? She said she was following what she thought might be a Twitter account set up by the suspect, though that could not be verified. Still, what she read made her “a little nervous.
“He’s been warning police not to approach. It makes it sound like they have him surrounded so that makes me feel a little better, but it’s also possible that he’s not there and he’s on the loose, so that makes me a little nervous.”
Later in the day, Cotter said an email saying that she heard helicopter traffic overhead.
Given the circumstances, she said she was staying put.
“We had so many plans today,” Cotter said, “but they’ve all been canceled.”