October 11, 2001:

All flights to Bermuda had been cancelled thanks to a freak storm, and dozens of Bermudians in transit from all parts of the United States were stranded in New York's JFK airport.

Having endured body searches, interrogations, and check-in lines that snaked around the outside of the building, no-one was looking forward to going through the same process the following morning.

Nevertheless, we took our airline vouchers and caught shuttles to nearby hotels to settle in for the night.

Some of us were already feeling edgy - it was, after all, the one-month anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. We were stuck in New York, of all places, on a day when new cases of anthrax were being discovered in the city and reports of threats of bioterrorism attacks were rampant.

While checking in at the hotel, I bumped into a Bermudian I'd met a couple of years ago through a mutual friend.

He, along with an American expat living in Bermuda, had decided to make the most of their unexpected night in New York and visit Ground Zero of the World Trade Centre disaster.

"Why don't you come and see it? This is a story you'll be able to tell your grandkids," he said. Hesitating for a moment, I nodded and went to my room to change into some warmer clothes.

A half-hour later, four of us piled into a cab and began the 45-minute ride into the city.

Stuck in traffic while on the Brooklyn Bridge, we looked out onto the New York City skyline, still beautiful although now radically scarred. The Empire State Building, whose nighttime lights shone in the colours of the American flag, was now the most recognisable part of the city's landscape.

The four of us began sharing second- and thirdhand stories we'd heard about the disaster, our conversation punctuated by bursts of Police sirens: a nearby day-care centre whose children missed being killed by minutes; stories about what we thought when we first heard the news; word about the Bermudians who were feared dead; and wondering, in the wake of the attacks on Afghanistan, when and in what form the inevitable retaliation would come.

Our cab driver, a man who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, rubbed his forehead and stared out the window.

I couldn't help but wonder whether his discomfort was based on the slowed traffic, or the experience of having to endure yet another conversation in which he may have felt targeted and hyper-visible.

As our taxi crawled toward the metropolis, the smell of smoke hit us like a wall as soon as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. Police cars were everywhere and traffic was being diverted away from the site, but we still decided to try and get as close as possible.

The cab driver dropped us off on Broadway, and we began walking the ten blocks that separated us from Ground Zero.

I was discomfited by the thought that New York had been used as a model for Gotham City, since now life seemed to be imitating art.

New York and New Yorkers were still clearly shaken by the event, and the entire area surrounding Ground Zero had a dark, surreal quality about it. Despite whatever urban violence has disrupted the metropolis in the past, no-one ever expected downtown to resemble a rubble-filled battlefield.

It was close to 11 o'clock at night, and a steady stream of traffic rumbled slowly past us - sanitation trucks, police cars, and military vehicles. We were able to get about two blocks away from the site, and the blinding lights from the work crews illuminated the biggest American flag I'd ever seen.

Ground Zero looked as it did on the news - completely unreal. The edges of the crumpled buildings forked into the sky like a row of jagged teeth. Although I'm not really familiar with New York's man-made landscape, the gaping hole left by the absence of these two buildings was palpable.

As I stood on the corner of Broadway and Fulton, I tried to imagine what it must have been like to see chunks of the World Trade Centre raining down towards you, since the Twin Towers were twice the height of the monster skyscrapers which have been left standing.

Visiting the site, I also understood why the smell of smoke hung so heavily in the air a full month after the attack - a bluish plume of smoke was still rising from the twisted metal at Ground Zero. But a sweet scent also rose into the air from flowers and candles left by mourners, and battled weakly with the overwhelming stench of the burning wreckage.

Dozens of candles were piled around each other, wax seeping through the cracked glass and dripping onto a carnation here, a photograph there.

These places - in full view of Ground Zero - resembled makeshift altars.

The leaves of flowers wilted from the heat of the candle flames which illuminated photographs, the frozen faces of women and men who had become ash.

Writings and photographs lined the streets across from a nearby church. Poems, eulogies to the dead, and praises to the brave covered the boardwalks and fences around the area.

Many of the shops along Broadway were open for business, seemingly untouched by the disaster.

But a fully-operational Bank of America could be next door to a jewellery store ravaged by the impact of the blast - the inside of the shop completely covered with a thick layer of grey dust, chairs and tables turned on end.

Visitors to the site, relatives and sympathisers, wrote messages to and for the dead in the dust coating glass shopfronts.

Overwhelmingly, the messages expressed grief and support. Children from a nearby elementary school sent drawings with simple writings at the bottom: "I hope you are safe, I hope you don't live near there."

But some gave indication of the rage many Americans feel towards Osama Bin Laden. And an even smaller number of messages called for peace, including one scribbled across a posterboard reading: "Act with compassion, avert the apocalypse."

Others who came to pay their respects and to see the site of the tragedy walked quietly along the street, stopping every now and again to look at the cranes towering into the sky.

One woman began to cry, and a military man wearing a thin mask crossed over the metal partition to hug and comfort her.

A clock was striking midnight just as we began walking back towards open streets to find a taxi back to the hotel.

Although the four of us spoke quite a bit on our way into the city, we were fairly silent on the ride back as each of us mulled over our own particular thoughts.

One month had passed since the attack, but New York City was still deeply wounded despite attempts to return to normal. It can't be easy for New Yorkers to simulate standard routines while circling and attempting to avoid a huge graveyard right in the middle of their city.