No Saddam, no car bombs by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 02-18-2003 The wind was cutting, blinding, remorseless. Now it was coming from the west, and I turned to put the snow at my back, and then it shifted again, whirling, twisting, coming from another direction, from the east or the north or the south. This was no lovely snowfall with fat feathery flakes dropping placidly on the city. This was a blizzard. On Broadway and Canal St., the shops were closed, all iron shutters drawn, the stalls of the great urban bazaar battered into silence by the arctic wind. A middle-age Chinese man in a heavy fur hat blinked away the snow and stared at the white emptiness. "No work today," he said. "Time to go home, sleep." In the coffee shop at 401 Broadway, there were four cooks, a waiter and the boss, and only one customer. Everybody talked about the snow, and about how hard it was to come to work. "We'll close up in about an hour," said the boss. "There's no point." Two Mexican men encased in the polyester armor of ski jackets came out of White St. carrying a 12-foot aluminum ladder. Both wore wool caps and gloves. A vicious gust of wind hit them as they turned the corner, turning one of the men, lifting the ladder from the other's hands. They started laughing, struggling for control of the ladder against the power of the whining wind. The drifted snow beside a marooned car reached their knees. "We got to work," one of them said to a stranger, the vowels of his Spanish seeming to freeze in his mouth. "I never saw anything like this in my country." He laughed again. "I got to tell my family." There was awe in his voice, but no sense of wonder, because a blizzard is driven by fierce power. It is not a walk through a Christmas card. Now a few lone cars moved downtown, and on a side street two kids with a wooden toboggan took turns pushing each other along the snow-packed sidewalk toward the Hudson. The cars vanished into the whiteness. The kids started to give up in the face of the ripping wind and the blinding snow. They turned their backs and stared at the toboggan. In need of assistance A half-block to the east, a homeless man stood against a wall in Cortlandt Alley, between White and Walker Sts., a spot beloved by West Coast movie makers for its stark narrow height, fire escapes, abandoned loading docks, shuttered iron doors. The homeless man seemed carved from blackened prehistoric wood. Snow was piled on his Navy-style watch cap, the shoulders of his dark heavy coat, on his unlaced shoes, on the plastic bag that held his earthly goods. "Are you okay?" I asked. He didn't answer. His face was filmy, as if sprayed with fine ice. "Can I get you some help?" No answer. The wind shifted again, then ripped into the alley, and the man wobbled. He leaned backward, finding the brick wall and then slid to a sitting position, one leg jutting at an awkward angle. I leaned down. "You oughta find a shelter," I said. "Get away," he muttered then, his voice phlegmy. "Get the f--- away from me. Get away. Get away, mu'fu." He went silent. Tears were falling from his eyes, but not from the wind. "You got a cigarette, man?" he said. "Get up," I said, "and I'll buy you a pack." He didn't look up, but he did try to rise. I gave him a hand. He looked at me, and his eyes were as old as tombs. He leaned back against the wall. Off to the right, outside an apartment building on White St., a woman was walking an old golden Lab, the dog energized by snow and wind into a counterfeit of youth. A security man huddled in the doorway of the building where the great 19th century photographer Mathew Brady once had a studio, smoking in quick rapid drags. In the Korean deli near Leonard St., I bought the cigarettes, but when I came back the homeless man was gone. Patience & fortitude The snow kept howling through the empty, immobilized city, piling against walls, coating the roofs of cars, turning City Hall into a wide, white pasture. Outside the federal buildings, the snow drifted against the ugly concrete barriers intended to ward off terrorists with car bombs. It fell steadily into the vast pit where the World Trade Center once stood. A few lonesome tourists walked on Church St., aiming digital cameras at the numbing emptiness. Around 1:30, the wind died, and the snow fell lazily into the streets and avenues, effecting a simple deception. The pause seemed like a reward for what Fiorello LaGuardia once offered as the essential New York motto: patience and fortitude. Then it was possible to walk more easily, opening my mouth to let snowflakes melt on my tongue, as I did as a boy in Prospect Park. I thought about the story called "The Dead" by James Joyce and could see the snow falling on the graves of my parents, and my lost laughing friends. Then the wind rose again, as if stirred by my sentiments into renewed fury, and the snow moved in a horizontal line, racing for the Brooklyn Bridge, for the East River, for waterfronts and shuttered cafes and the distant hills. The rest of the world was gone. No Saddam Hussein. No car bombs. No diplomats or cheap threats or material breaches. Just the snow and the wind. I walked back through Foley Square, crossing the snowy asphalt plain that sits above the earth of the old Five Points, where in the 19th century the black and Irish poor once huddled together against storms like this. They had no heat. They had no water. They had nobody except each other. They insisted on living. Up ahead, lights burned in the Tombs, blurred by a curtain of driven snow. I wondered where the homeless man had gone and remembered the old Irish salutation: May the wind be always at your back. Originally published on February 18, 2003