CLOSE TO HOME: GROUND ZERO PEACE POLE PRODUCED LOCALLY

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Six weeks from now all of America, and the entire world, will stop and remember that awful day last Fall that changed our lives forever, shattering the bubble of security for many, and stealing a loved one or a friend from tens of thousands.

In Lower Manhattan, especially, where Al Quaeda hijackers perpetrated the crimes that have sought to overshadow everything since last September 11th, New Yorkers will gather to mourn the losses of more than 3,000 victims and remember their city’s skyline when it was still intact. Eventually, they will get around to rebuilding the sight where the World Trade Center towers stood, with memorials for the fallen and, inevitably, office buildings to capitalize on the most expensive piece of financial real estate in the world.
One of the memorial symbols making its way to “Ground Zero” is a Peace Pole, handcrafted locally by the company’s shepherds Kate Reedy and Dave Moffat, longtime Glen Arborites who now run the business out of their new pole barn on Wheeler Road. The Peace Pole intended for the World Trade Center sight will be assembled in early August and sent to the headquarters of the World Peace Prayer Society in Armenia, New York for its official unveiling on August 17. The WPPS will then present the Pole to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks in world history.
But when and exactly where the locally made Peace Pole will stand in Lower Manhattan is uncertain at this time, due to disagreements between numerous factions in New York City including the victims’ families and the mayor’s office. As The New York Times’ Edward Wyatt put it on July 22, “For better or worse, the developments of the last week have turned the process of deciding what will replace the World Trade Center into an old-fashioned New York brawl, pitting outspoken community groups against developers in a fight that is refreshingly reminiscent of life in the city prior to Sept. 11.”
However, Vincent Guerriero, Sanctuary Director of the WPPS, and Reedy and Moffat’s liaison on the East Coast, is confident that the Peace Pole will soon find a home at whatever kind of memorial is built on the sacred ground, though it may wait until after the dust settles.
“The idea has not yet been approved by the mayor’s office,” said Guerriero. “We will present it to the mayor with or without prior approval.
“This was a heartfelt idea that didn’t require any research (or waiting for the politics to play out). We felt compelled to submit the Peace Pole — not as a proposal, but as a gift.”
Much more lavish than the average four-sided Peace Poles seen all over Leelanau County, this one will reflect in price and design the immensity of what it represents for New York and the world. The Society of World Peace in Japan (which granted locals Carol and Joe Spaulding — the original Maple City Peace Pole Makers — the right to carry on the trade in the Western Hemisphere about 16 years ago) will foot the bill of roughly $30,000.
The September 11th Peace Pole will be a 12 foot-high hexagonal obelisk with the standard line “May Peace Prevail on Earth”, written in gold on a quarter inch of aluminum silver background, running down its six faces in 12 different languages — those of the victims in the attacks. Their letters will spell messages of hope from the familiar: English, Spanish and German, to the ironic: Arabic and Urdu. Joe Spaulding will construct the point of the hexagon, two feet of stained glass sporting the six colors of the prism.
At the urging of Guerriero and the WPPS, which Kate Reedy credits as the brainchild of the idea, the pole will be left hollow inside so that people can insert letters and messages into slits left open on each side. After all, it will be on display for the people.
Just after the September 11th attacks, the nearby United Nations moved the Peace Pole that Reedy and Moffat had just built for them to Ground Zero, on which people wrote messages or hung photos of missing loved ones. One day a handful of doves were released over the Peace Pole from a draped American flag.
And yet war continues. As the Glen Arbor Sun interviewed Reedy and Moffat in their pole barn, George W. Bush emerged as background noise to claim on National Public Radio that the Taliban had been routed but that the United States would continue its war in Afghanistan until Al Qaeda ceased to exist. The calls for war and the calls for peace were both direct results of the terrorist attacks.
“Maybe peace is an ideal dream,” says Moffat, who admits he joined the Peace Pole partnership for the business, though he’s proud of being part of the peace process. “Humans have always fought wars. But anything we can do to push the peace process along is great.”
“I just hope we can help in the victims’ families’ healing process,” says Reedy, who doesn’t know yet how she will react to meeting them when they travel to New York for the unveiling and the presentation in a few weeks.
Reedy says that through the business they have met plenty of people who lost family or friends, leading to a 50 percent increase in sales since September 11. They built a Peace Pole for Basking Ridge, New Jersey, for instance, a town that lost 53 people on that day.
More than anything, the terrorist attacks still reverberate far beyond their geographical targets, and not just because they led this nation into an ongoing war or because our imaginations can’t stop seeing those airplanes explode through the twin towers like a Hollywood movie on constant repeat mode. “It’s amazing how those events travel so far,” says Moffat, who used to tend bar at Art’s and now helps heal people who grieve over the new century’s failure at peace.