Visit to Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum

Saturday we took Mikey to the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum for the first time. Actually, we've been to the memorial once before; several years ago we were in OKC for something else and we stopped and saw the memorial. At the time, Mikey was old enough to understand what had happened but we weren't sure he was old enough to not get scared (and he was almost certainly not old enough to remember afterward), so we decided to wait for later. Yesterday was later! Mikey's nine years old now... plenty old enough to understand and process the information in the museum.

Most of the people who will read this already know what the memorial/museum is about, but just for anyone who wasn't as close to it as most of our family and friends were... the memorial is on the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which was destroyed in April of 1995 by two terrorists from our own country. The put 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate explosives into a rented Ryder truck, parked it outside of the federal building, and detonated it at 9:02am on April 19th, killing 168 people and wounding several hundred more. At the time it happened, it was the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

We arrived shortly after lunchtime. We didn't really want to go into the memorial grounds to eat our sack lunch, so we sat just outside the memorial on a bench next to the street and had our sandwiches. Cathy and I had forgotten, but we figured it out as we ate, that we were a few feet from the "survivor wall"... the only section of the destroyed building that was left standing (the building was so badly damaged by the blast that it was demolished a month after the bombing, but that one wall was left standing). The entrance to the memorial park on the side where we were is stairs only (there is a ramp on the other side, a block away), so we walked down the street twenty yards or so and entered near the "survivor tree." This tree was in the parking lot across the street from the federal building when the bomb went off. There are aerial photographs of the area from the 1920s that show this tree already there even back then, so the tree was over 70 years old at the time of the blast. The blast was so powerful that cars that were parked around the tree were demolished and caught on fire, and the building on the other side of the parking lot had its roof blown off and the bricks of the wall facing the federal building were physically separated... but the survivor tree is still there, alive today. It's quite a symbol for people who escaped with their lives that day, and the families that did not.

I won't try to tell you everything about what happened that day in 1995, and I won't even try to tell you everything about the memorial itself; you can get that information from Wikipedia, or from the memorial's own Web site. I'll tell you that the whole museum is arranged like a time line, starting at 6am, the way someone who was there that day might start the story ("It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day that morning...") and then continuing on all the way to the capture of the two perpetrators, and then through the history of the creating of the memorial and museum. The things that got me the most were the room where they have an actual audio recording of the blast (it's the taped record of a hearing that was going on at the time it happened) and the little room with the pictures of all of the people who were killed. There were some pretty amazing stories, too... a lady who was in a meeting when it happened, and all of her coworkers just disappeared from sight. A woman who walked away from the building dazed but unscathed, called herself a taxi, went to the airport, got on a plane, slept on the flight, and didn't even know what had happened until she got where she was going and saw it on the news. A doctor who saved a woman from dying in the rubble by amputating her trapped leg... with a pocketknife! Amazing stories. Hannah has no idea what was going on, but she was very good for a 21-month-old who was having to sit in a stroller for two hours. Mikey involved himself in the exhibit more than I expected; at several points he was really engrossed in a video or an exhibit. Afterward we walked across the streets to see small memorials set up by the churches on either side of the site, and then we went on home. (Hannah fell asleep in the car, so she got her nap.)

It was fun being together. It was fun learning about something new (newer to Mikey than to Cathy and me, but new nonetheless). It's not a fun subject to think about, but it was a terrific family outing. It was a great way to spend a pretty Saturday!