‘What Saves Us Is Hope’: In the Time of Covid, Remembering 9-11

Spontaneous. Urgent. Lifesaving. Twenty years ago, an improbable, impromptu argosy of dinner charter craft and fireboats, tugs and ferries converged on Lower Manhattan to carry out the largest waterborne rescue in history, evacuating a half-million men, women, and children to safety after the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center. Jessica DuLong was part of it – and in a preface to a new paperback edition of Saved at the Seawall, her book recounting those extraordinary events, she reflects on their meaning for our lives today. With her permission, and her publisher’s, we gratefully present a lightly edited version.