Friday, Sep. 05, 2008

Made 'for the brothers'

ISSAC J. BAILEY

As Peter Ortel chiseled the face, he thought of the Twin Towers crashing.

As he chiseled the oversized hands - and the ax in the left - the retired New York City firefighter thought of the men he knew who died that fateful Tuesday morning seven years ago.

As he crafted the face of an everyman firefighter, Ortel couldn't forget. He placed a tear beneath the right eye of the wooden firefighter.

He carefully, steadily dug into the 18-inch piece of bass wood, shaping a banged-up flag and draping it over the right shoulder. The flag pole was topped by a bald eagle with a banged-up wing.

As he crafted the belt and radio and safety harness and flashlight and leather "New Yorker" helmet, Ortel couldn't help but remember.

He knew some of the 343 New York emergency responders killed by terrorists Sept. 11, 2001. He had worked with some of them. He knew some of their sons had perished.

That's why the world-renowned woodcarver finally had to do what one of the members of the firefighting family had asked him to do.

"Can you do something for the brothers?" Ortel was asked, even as the gray soot still covered thousands of faces at the attack site, even as bodies were still being pulled from the rubble, even as the list of the estimated dead grew, then receded but didn't recede enough.

He had been retired from his "Big Blue" rescue squad for 14 years but still attended dinners and banquets and knew the wives of active firefighters - wives he and his wife spent hours comforting as uncertainty reigned in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

They knew he had made a name for himself in the world of woodcarving. He did caricatures, did them so well he won first place in a world competition a year before the attacks, the first time a caricature sculpture had ever earned such recognition. It was akin to an animated movie winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.

His works include a man and his "dirty water hot dog" stand spilling mustard and ketchup on a cop's shirt; a champion boxer with a fat lip, a flummoxed smile and swollen eye holding a worthless trophy; and a duck falling in love with a duck hunter dressed in camouflage duck gear.

He's carved elongated faces with elongated smiles into the sides of golf balls, with his wife, Madelyn, giving them even more life with paint.

His works make little kids laugh and big kids wonder how he is able to make such a thing out of wood.

"I like to carve funny people, people doing stupid things," Ortel said.

But the firefighter sculpture wasn't funny. It was painful, so painful he couldn't begin it - or do any other carving - for two years after the attacks.

"Who am I to represent them?" he asked himself. "I froze."

"He was in a two-year depression," Madelyn Ortel said.

But once he began, he couldn't stop; he had to get it right.

"He was able to mourn through this piece," she said. "It was a good release for him."

He asked a firefighter to model the uniform. He took pictures from every angle to make sure he got every detail right, like the set of four buttons on each end of the special suspenders firefighters wore that morning as they rushed into burning buildings.

Then he practiced with clay.

Then he moved to the bass wood, choosing it because it is like pine but without the grain.

And he carved, sometimes for 20 hours in a day, for two, three months.

"I tried to show the strength without making him look like a superhero," he said.

That's why he made the hands larger than usual, but not too large.

That's why he carved debris and rubble upon which the firefighter stood, to note that they weren't able to save everyone, even though they gave up their lives trying.

That's why the eagle's wing and the flag are banged up, "because we took a hit but we are still here."

ONLINE | For past columns and to read Bailey's blog, go to MyrtleBeachOnline.com.

An earlier version of this story had an incorrect time for the memorial mass.