It's different when you're there.

I don't gawk at accidents or seek out the macabre. But in the case of the World Trade Center, I needed to be there. If for no other reason than to convince myself that it really did happen.

Intellectually, I know what happened; emotionally, it still seemed unreal. I felt driven to make the trip to the city of my birth to see for myself. It was as though I couldn't fully comprehend the immensity of it until I could see it with my own eyes and not thru the eye of the camera or the words of eyewitnesses.

I was there yesterday. I'd made a trip back east for the holidays and made sure to make time to go to Ground Zero and see for myself.

It was a strange experience. It was a mixture of the immensity of the destruction, the change to the city, the reaction of the police, the memorials to the dead and the people who were there to look at the aftermath.

It all started on Sept. 11 with "looking": The early TV reports about the North Tower and then the realization it was not an "accident" but part of a bizarre attack on a country, a people and a way of life. It was an attack on us.

When I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, it looked unreal. The sky was too clear and too blue. The plane, looking almost cartoonish as it circled around and flew into Tower 2, was caught by cameras doing the unthinkable.

The flames, the smoke, the collapses and the death were not only unthinkable, they were unbelievable.

Except for one thing. It was true. Those lives were lost in ways too horrible to contemplate – in ways so awful that the media chose to avoid the details.

For all the media coverage, it's impossible now to get to Ground Zero. Even my contacts were unable to help me get right to the scene. But it helps to be a New Yorker, it helps to be a bit pushy and it helps to have Italian relatives! It probably didn't hurt either to be female! Hey, whatever works!

As I made the rounds of checkpoints, police barriers, and guard gates, I came upon a man who, as it turned out, was very well connected in City Hall. A few cell-phone calls on my behalf – you mean you came all the way from California and you don't have an address or a phone number?!

The last tower structures are down and the fires are out. There are occasional billows of steam as the cranes continue their relentless scooping, turning and dumping. Surrounding buildings are singed and gray. Gaping holes are draped in plastic.

Take the subway and as soon as you're out of the station, there are thousands of people making their way along police barricades. Along the sidewalks are souvenir vendors – fire and police ball caps and knit caps, T-shirts and sweats, flags and pins, and photographs – stunning scenes of before and after. Each in their own way, capture memories and miseries.

For blocks, along the chain link and wood fence blocking access to the site, are hundreds of flowers, candles, letters, teddy bears and dolls, hats, T-shirts, flags, personal mementoes and pictures of the lost. They were so young. There are letters and notes from every state and scores of countries.

There are volunteers, even on the freezing day I was there, who tend to the flowers and the memorials. There are large, white banners and felt-tip pens so visitors can sign in memoriam.

On one curb is a metal pole with a shabby, dusty bike, chain-locked to it. There's a neck scarf tied around the handlebars and a sign above calling it a memorial to the messengers who died that day. The owner of this bike never returned to claim it. It remains as he left it.

Many of the tourists ask the police how to get closer, to see more. Some respond with typical cop gruffness. Several tried to maintain civility as they say there's nothing to see – that it's not a tourist attraction. It's a place, one cop said, fighting back tears, where his friends died and it's not a place to sightsee. "Lady, there's nothing to see." That woman turned away and didn't understand.

But most impressive, was the silence. Several thousand people – all ages, nationalities, languages – moving along the street and memorials. They looked. Took pictures. Signed the banners. And they were quiet. They seemed to understand it's a place which honors its dead.

In his farewell address that morning, Mayor Giuliani said it best, that a "soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial' is needed, for just as Gettysburg, "the dead shall not have died in vain." He's right.