By Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
The view from the top of Jupiter Lighthouse is a watercolor palette of blues and greens. The teal Jupiter Inlet merges with the darker Atlantic.
A canopy of verdant foliage, rather than buildings, dominates the coastline. And the azure sky soars away in every direction. On a still July evening, when downy clouds are clustered on the western horizon and the sky is beginning to blush with sunset, Chris McKnight stands on the black metal balcony rimming the top of the lighthouse. A teasing breeze ruffles his light hair. He looks out at the view, at the blue and the green, and smiles in appreciation.
He likes looking out to sea, linking the lighthouse he loves to the ships five, 10, 20 miles out who use it as a guide and a caution. He knows everything about the lighthouse and maintains it like something precious and beautiful. It is precious and beautiful to him, this beacon that’s stood for more than 100 years.
There was a time when gloom choked the light from his life, when shadows hovered at the periphery of his mind. He had a job leading others through smoke and fire, and horrific darkness, but for a long time he couldn’t do the same for himself.
Then he made a 180-degree life change, trading a Brooklyn firehouse for a Florida lighthouse, and he’s happy, and his work offers a different kind of safety now. He maintains a lighthouse that sends ships safely through the night.
And with the change, Chris and his family – his wife of 21 years, Chris, and daughters Erika and Laura – have found a welcome peace, something that seemed elusive to us all after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That day Chris lost 343 colleagues, including his partner, Lt. Glenn Wilkinson, and a piece of his heart.
A year after the attacks, burdened by memory and sadness, he retired from the New York Fire Department as a 23-year veteran.
The family needed a change, and they found it in Florida. His wife quickly got a job teaching English at Palm Beach Gardens High School, the girls enrolled in school and, after discovering he needed to do something besides be retired, Chris, who’s 49, found his way to the lighthouse.
And he found a way to live in harmony with the memories of those he lost, by coddling and spit-shining a beloved lighthouse, beacon to ships at sea.
“They’re always at the front of my mind,” he said of the firefighters who died Sept. 11. “They’re my brothers.”
He found his way into the brotherhood of firefighters on an unlikely path. He wasn’t fulfilling a childhood dream by becoming a fireman. Growing up in Queens Village, he had no idea what he wanted to do. His father worked for the Port Authority, first as a bus mechanic and then as a garage manager, so that avenue of civil service was an option.
After high school he went to college and earned 109 credits toward an accounting degree. But he felt ambivalent. He took the police test because his older brother was a policeman, worked at the airport one Christmas season, and basically floated around, searching for his niche.
When he was 22, he and some friends were hanging out one day at a bar in Queens called Bobby’s Place. A guy named Jerry came in with a stack of 20 blank applications for the fire academy.
Chris thought, “Why not?”
And he thought, “Being a fireman’s such a cool job.”
So he applied and was accepted. He trained for six weeks at the academy on Randall’s Island, where he got yelled at like he was in boot camp and had to run a 4:50 mile (he ran a 4:40). After graduating he was assigned to Engine 15 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He was on the job three weeks before his first big fire, at a warehouse. He remembers being not scared, but energized.
So he’d found his niche. His first station wasn’t busy enough, he said, so he transferred to one in Alphabet City that was a little busier. He transferred several more times before landing at Engine 238 in Brooklyn in 1990. By 1997, he was captain there.
He worked pier fires, fires in vacant buildings and factories, fires on the Fourth of July, fires where people still inside were high and had guns. He worked the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
No vacation
After 22 years of training and on-the-job experience, he was Captain McKnight, and on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was starting a weeklong vacation.
All his girls had left for school, and Chris was sitting at the kitchen table in their Long Island home. It was a gorgeous, sunny morning. He had the stereo on, a cup of coffee and Newsday in front of him, when his brother called.
“Chris. You gotta turn on the TV. A plane crashed into the Trade Center.”
He was just in time to see the second plane crash. It didn’t look real. It was a nightmare.
Still, he knew he had to get there.
“I have to go,” he told his brother.
Before he hung up he added, “This is going to be the worst day in fire department history.”
After taking the dogs for a quick walk, he jumped in his car, stopped at the gas station on the corner, filled up, said hello to Bill behind the counter, and sped off 80 mph down Queens Boulevard. It was serendipity that he didn’t have to touch his brakes once.
Arriving at his firehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Chris figured there’d be nobody there. But Greenpoint was the area check-in station for firefighters reporting in. They signed in and moved on to another checkpoint, closer to Manhattan. Then another.
Finally, Chris’ group of about a dozen firefighters made it to the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were desperate for a ride into the city.
More firefighters showed up. Waiting became torture. Someone had opened a hydrant, so the throngs of people who walked across the bridge, some covered in grayish-white soot and debris, got a cooling spray of water.
Then, miraculously, a New York city bus pulled up nearby, at the end of its line. Several firemen rushed over and implored the driver to take them back over the bridge. Without hesitation, the driver turned his bus around.
“When we got over, it was like a war zone,” Chris recalled. By that point it had been an hour and a half since the second tower came down.
Armed police let the bus full of firemen through, and the driver headed straight for the devastated World Trade Center. He got them within three blocks of the wreckage and the firemen poured out . . . into an unfamiliar, alien world.
Gray ash hung in the air and plumes of black smoke billowed up and out from the wreckage. Sheets of white office paper drifted to the ground like snow. The firemen stopped to put on gear, then headed toward the fallen buildings.
They stopped at a corner, wondering whether to go right or left. A fireman rushing by said the fire department command post was on Broadway, so they veered that direction. They ran into another fireman who told Chris he knew the guys from Engine 238 had gotten to the WTC before it came down. He said one of them was staggering around after the buildings collapsed, mumbling, “Everybody’s dead. Everybody’s dead.”
The words sank in for Chris, but didn’t truly register. He couldn’t absorb that kind of news.
And he had to keep going. Firefighters train relentlessly to make bad situations better – and this was as bad as it got. His training kicked in, and Chris headed straight for the Broadway command post. His group ran into a battalion chief, who just happened to be another one of the guys who’d filled out an application for fire academy that same day as Chris, 22 years before at Billy’s Place.
At the command post, fire trucks stretched a mile down Broadway . . . with nobody in them.
“It was really eerie, trucks everywhere and no men,” Chris said.
The post was a chaotic hive of men searching for their companies and chiefs organizing a herculean rescue effort. All afternoon Chris searched for survivors. He joined a bucket brigade to remove debris. The heat was almost unbearable.
At 5 p.m., he found a phone and called his wife, who wept first with relief and then with sorrow for her devastated husband. She hadn’t had a single call from another company wife, reporting a safe husband.
At 10 p.m., Chris stopped for a rest. Everywhere, firemen were covered in fine gray dust, searching often in vain for their companies. He finally asked himself, “What am I going to do tomorrow? I have to go tell five wives they lost their husbands. How am I going to do that?”
Just then a fireman came running into the command post and shouted to Chris, “The guys are alive!”
All but one.
Missing man
Orders for the firemen of Engine 238 had been to go to the 71st floor of the first tower. Wilkinson, who was in charge since Chris was off duty, had halted the drive toward the inferno so one of the men could use the bathroom. As they were going through the turnstiles between a nearby hotel and the WTC, they heard a rumbling. It was the first building coming down. The force blew them backward over the turnstiles.
The men formed a human chain to get out. Wilkinson called a head count and came up one short. He shouted orders for the others to continue and ran back into the debris, searching for his friend.
When the second tower came down, Wilkinson, 46, was crushed. The man he’d returned for was safe. He’d been blown a different direction by the power of the first tower’s fall.
Chris and Glenn had been partners for four years. They knew each other’s kids, Chris had stood by Glenn when Glenn’s wife, Marge, battled cancer. Now, he had to tell her the worst news in the world. It was a visit Chris didn’t want to make until the death was official, until rescuers had found a body.
At 3 a.m., Chris returned to Engine 238’s firehouse to regroup and get the company organized. He prepared to drive out and tell Marge the news.
She spared him the trip.
“Just tell me the truth,” she pleaded when she called at 5 a.m.
“Glenn was killed,” Chris said. It was the worst thing he could tell another person, and he knew it.
Glenn’s body was found a few hours later. In the following days and weeks, other firefighters told Chris he and his company were lucky they had a whole body to bury. They knew it was true, but they hardly felt lucky. They knew they were fortunate to have lost just one man, but that didn’t make the loss hurt any less.
On the afternoon of Sept. 17, Chris donned his navy blue dress uniform and stood at the front of Our Lady of the Snow Roman Catholic Church in Blue Point, Long Island, to eulogize his partner.
“Glenn was right on the scene,” he told the grieving audience. “A hero in the truest sense of the word.”
It was hard for him to get the words out.
On the curb outside, Chris was among hundreds of firefighters to salute Wilkinson’s casket.
It was only the beginning. He stood at attention and snapped a salute to passing caskets dozens of times in the days and weeks that followed. In between regular shifts at the firehouse, he went to funerals, sometimes as many as three a day. Some days, he had to choose between two at the same time. He knew 60 of the firefighters who died, 20 as close friends.
He was in mourning. He was depressed. He had survivors’ guilt. The job he loved didn’t feel the same. There was a hollowness now, an ache in his chest.
The outpouring of support from the public was nothing short of miraculous, but it couldn’t soothe his deepest grief.
He reported to Staten Island to sift through WTC debris, searching for something, anything that could comfort the mourning families. It hurt him to know that a task as horrible as finding a human finger could be a salve to broken hearts.
In October, Engine 238 responded to the crash of Flight 587 on Rockaway Beach, Queens. Chris stood on the edge of the crater and handed body bags down to the rescuers in the hole.
“Human carnage was not part of the job description,” he said.
All that fall and winter he slipped deeper into the gloom. His wife remembers him coming home from work and sitting in front of the computer for hours, watching the planes hit the towers over and over, listening to mournful Enya CDs and weeping.
At Christmas, his wife and daughters were putting up the tree when she ran upstairs to get more ornaments. By the time she got back, Chris was taking ornaments off the tree.
“We don’t deserve this,” he told her.
Saying goodbye
That spring, Chris began to think about retiring. He’d put in 23 years, been named captain, faced horrible situations and made them better. He’d made friends and lost them. He was tired, and the job he’d loved for so long now made him sad. It was someone else’s turn.
His daughters had been begging him to retire. In the summer, he asked his wife, “Would you mind if I retired?”
She said absolutely not.
They didn’t want to stay in the rat race of New York, so as a family they offered choices for new homes. Chris suggested Oregon, because he loves running and that state is known as a runner’s haven. His wife questioned the possibility of bears.
Laura suggested Malibu. Erika came up with Florida. But where? Tampa? There were pro sports teams there, but it was too unfamiliar. Boca? Too much like New York. Jupiter? His wife had a good friend from college there, so after a vacation to Jupiter, the family decided they’d found their new home.
They sold their house on Long Island, the handyman special Chris had renovated almost entirely, bought one off Indiantown Road and moved in. His wife and the girls – Erika is 16 and a junior at Dreyfoos School for the Arts, Laura is 14 and a freshman at Palm Beach Gardens High School – settled in quickly.
It took Chris a little longer, but getting away from New York and the family’s fresh start improved his perspective. He didn’t come to Florida to forget; he has no desire to do that.
On the family room wall hangs a framed poster with photos of all the firemen who died Sept. 11, and he can look at their faces and tick off unique traits for so many: Billy Burke, nicest guy in the world, never married; Edward Day, replaced Chris at the firehouse where he made lieutenant; Vernon Cherry, a great singer, planned to leave for Broadway. . . .
Memories of those men, that day, are always fresh in his mind. But in the solace he found here, he rediscovered that life is a gift. He joined running clubs, went kayaking and scuba diving, met the neighbors. Still, he needed more to do.
He worked as a waiter at a country club for a while, which was fine because he likes people, but it got old. About that time, the Loxahatchee River Historical Society was looking for a new co-director of the Jupiter Lighthouse. Jamie Stuve, executive director of the society, heard about Chris from a friend and called him.
She liked him immediately. “He’s been such a great addition to our beloved lighthouse. I was just bowled over by him and his whole family, how they support one another. I appreciated his honesty, and there was just a special quality about him.”
Without realizing it, the lighthouse was what Chris needed. He’s adopted it, knows every contour of its curving walls, can fix anything that breaks and takes pride in keeping its steps swept, its paint fresh. He leads visitors up the 105 spiral steps many times a day, tossing lighthouse trivia over his shoulder, impervious to exertion, whip thin for good reason.
Where once his workdays and nights where punctuated by fire and smoke and imminent danger, now they are serene. Where once a rowdy firehouse crew demanded his attention, now a ray swimming a desultory path along the Jupiter Inlet can steal five or 10 minutes.
Where once the light he knew best was the evil kind that radiated from an out-of-control blaze, now he knows the brilliant light from the Jupiter Lighthouse, shining out to sea.
As the sky turns dusky blue and floodlights illuminate the lighthouse’s red body, Chris stands below and contemplates the light as it rhythmically sweeps by. It rotates, constantly, flashing out to sea from a quiet island on Florida’s noisiest coast.
If the night is dark enough, it glows like fire, but Chris doesn’t mind at all.