Walt Michael ’68, artist-in-residence and executive director of Common Ground on the Hill, played a classic selection of traditional folk melodies in New York’s Arrow Park Sept. 30, at a private memorial for families of firefighters fallen on 9/11. Other members of Walt Michael & Company included Steve Bloom, Robert Caswell ’04, Evan Stover and Tom Wetmore.

“We played melodies that have lived for centuries and carry their own power and emotion,” says Michael. “Families said the music set up an environment for the event they found to be really peaceful and wonderful.”

Steve Bloom drums as families
rows across lake to plant
memorial tree.More than 100 spouses, parents, siblings and children from 37 families took part in the private gathering. They planted trees near a lake in memory of their loved ones, buried a memory box, and received a totem pole from a delegation of Lumi Indians from Washington.

“In many instances, mourning families have not recovered their loved ones’ remains. This is where their spirits now dwell,” says Michael. “Now these families have a place to reflect, a place where a tree is living and growing, a place with no politics nor horror attached to it.”

Arrow Park is located in Sterling Forest State Park, in the Hudson Valley. The tree-planting tradition for firefighters who died on 9/11 began in 2002. Since then, trees have also been planted to honor soldiers killed in Iraq. The park, considered a bereavement center, has held programs for children who have lost loved ones, suffered abuse, and whose families were killed in Sierra Leone, Africa, during the civil war between 1991-2000.

You can read more about Common Ground on the Hill at www.commongroundonthehill.org.