Letter From America.(touring Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island where World Trade Center debris is being moved)(Brief Article)

The first thing I notice is the smell. It isn't just the caustic scent of burnt steel and jet fuel, familiar from the World Trade Center. It's something human, the odor of death. The next things I notice are the mountains of gray dirt, stretching as far as I can see. A crane scoops from a pile and spreads it out; FBI agents swarm over it with shovels. These aren't mere piles of dirt at all. They are the pulverized remains of the Twin Towers and all that was inside.

Buried in the heaps of rubble is the story of that day--September 11. There are watches that still tick, telling the time. Others do not, like one stopped eerily at 10:08, the moment its wearer's life ended. There are passports, driver's licenses, bracelets, rings, wallets, guns and the broken bronze torso of a man, with no head or feet. It's a Rodin sculpture once on display at Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that lost hundreds of employees in the tragedy. It lies now on its side, not far from a pile of airplane parts, muddied and weirdly vulnerable, unnervingly human. The detritus of all these lives is overwhelming. Fighting disbelief, I take a deep breath.

It is cold and raining as I begin my tour of the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, the place that's now home to more of the World Trade Center's remains than lower Manhattan. Wreckage from Ground Zero is excavated and brought here to be sorted through and eventually buried. I was one of thousands of people who watched the buildings collapse from just a few blocks away. Now, exactly four months later, here I am watching huge cranes feed their remnants into giant red boxes, called shakers, which separate small pieces from larger chunks. The loud rumble of demolition machinery permeates the air. Front-end loaders scoop pieces from the shakers and dump them into a giant sifting machine. Conveyor belts carry the fragments past law-enforcement agents, who are bending over, hunting for human artifacts. I stand beside them, hoping to pick out a body part, perhaps, or something that might give someone, anyone, a sign of a lost father or wife, lover or son or daughter. But everything that passes by is that same ash gray color, that same chunky dust. However intently I stare, I cannot tell whether I am looking at a rock or a piece of a building or a door hinge or a human bone.

My guide to this netherworld is Richard Marx, an FBI agent from Philadelphia who has been at Fresh Kills almost every day since Sept. 12, building this city of workers and machines to sort the 650 tons of debris that arrive daily by barge, more than a million tons so far. His ...