Six Years Later
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
It was almost 9 in the morning. I was stalling a bit over some breakfast, since I was heading to PC Magazine to drop off our latest ad files and I knew traffic would be insane. The TV was on showing CNN and as they repeated the lead story of a plane crash at the World Trade Center I said to myself “damn, some poor bastard must have had a heart attack or something flying a Cessna…I hope nobody else was involved”. The WWII era crash into the Empire State came to mind – one of those crazy things. Sad, but we hear awful stories every day and it just seemed like a regular day’s bad news hitting the airwaves.
As I stood there in my living room watching the screen showing smoke pouring off the building and the reporters filling time with supposition and conjecture there was suddenly an image of an explosion filling the screen. In my mind I rationalized. “Someone must have turned up footage of the initial crash and they forgot to take off the LIVE graphic”…then I realized that the angle was all wrong. It really WAS the other building and when they replayed it I could clearly see that another plane had slammed into the other WTC tower.
Some folks think I’m a cynic and I’ll be the first to admit I’m quick to sarcasm and more often that I want to admit I can be damn quick to judgement. At that moment, however, the prospect that there was malice in the surreal reality I was watching did not occur to me. I quite literally shouted to the TV “the beacon must have failed…why the hell isn’t ATC re-routing the approach!?!?”. I was certain, absolutely positive that the Kennedy or La Guardia approach had suffered a catastrophic failure and somehow, despite the absolutely clear weather and visibility the pilots had failed to take evasive action.
Considering that what I had just seen was deliberate carried so many implications. We’re at war. How many more planes could there be?
Then the profoundly panic inducing thought that I had seen the second plane. It had a blue tail. The blue tail of a United Airlines plane. The same airline my sister was a flight attendant for. The same airline she was currently flying, en route from LA to….New York.
I don’t know how many times I called her phone, but realizing that there was nothing I could do I left. I actually went to my meeting, driving in a haze listening to the news reports flooding in and the chaotic attempts to explain the unexplainable. It seemed everyone was in a state of emotional confusion. Rage, sadness, shock…all those and more on the faces of people that had no more grasp of the day than me. I went on to work, partially out of rote duty but also because it made sense and at the moment nothing really seemed to.
Like most offices that day, very little work was done. We gathered in the conference room, using an old rabbit ear antenna to get a local station’s feed of the news footage. In the meantime I called my sisters in laws and my parent and lied through my teeth. “She’s fine” I said, “the cell phone system is completely overwhelmed – she’ll call when she can”. I wanted those words to be true so profoundly that I could FEEL the want in my gut. The irony was that Trish had called me the day before to tell me she was fine. “Uh…ok” I had said – having no idea that an earthquake had struck in the Los Angeles area and that she had awoken to her room shuddering from the temblor. “I’m flying back to New York tomorrow”, well she was always flying from Here to There and quite honestly I frequently forgot where she was on any given day. Day to day life, suddenly a repetition that had taken on completely different significance.
There we were, gathered in that conference room punctuating the shocked silence with an occasional outburst of “someone is going to pay for this”, the bravado of the impotent focusing on retribution because we could do nothing to change the cold truth that they (whoever that THEY was) had hit us first and we could only sit and watch. Then what already seemed a nightmare grew exponentially worse as the first tower fell. I had watched a building implosion years before and the sight of a 11-story structure folding into itself was stunning – but this was the WTC…110 stories of a living, working, functioning city unto itself and it was collapsing unimaginably before our eyes. All I remember is gasping, simply not believing that massive tower turning to rubble. We wept. For that moment – one that is sadly rare in our society – we regarded each other as fellow human beings, removed our masks of position, status or propriety and just wept. The second tower falling was like a blow – in my mind I had already said “they’ll rebuild it and repair the other one”…but it was not to be. They were both gone.
In my head I did math…how many people worked in those towers? Thousands…tens of thousands. How many people had I just seen die? It was nauseating. Then the reports of more planes. Evacuations in DC, the White House, the mad scramble for control that was not to be had. The blur, for me, ended around 1:30p. My sister called…her flight had diverted to, amazingly, DC and then the airport itself was evacuated due to uncertainty of the intent of other flights. She had borrowed a phone from a fellow traveller (I’ll always owe that kind stranger a debt of profound gratitude) and finally said the words I had longed to hear that whole morning…”I’m ok little brother”. I could feel the weight of worry, of dread, of not KNOWING lift from my shoulders. I cried. Many, far too many never got that call. Many others got calls none should ever hear, their loved ones calling to say goodbye.
Much changed that day. As they tend to do, changes brought both wonderful and terrible things…but this is not the day to debate, it is a day to remember that in the face of profound tragedy and evil we also saw the best of humanity. Brave firefighters, police and EMTs rushing in to help with a selflessness that is humbling and inspiring. We saw one of the largest cities in the world shed it’s tough image and show a humanity and unity that gave us hope instead of despair and dignity in response to barbarism.
I’ll never forget.