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I originally posted this in 2011 on the anniversary of this fateful day in history.
Below are fuzzy night photos of the WTC taken with my Palm VIIx on July 11, 2001, while on a business trip.
I had deleted them because of the quality, but fortunately hadn’t emptied the trash on my computer. On September 11, as I watched the buildings on fire, I thought about these pix and retrieved them from the trash.
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I remember visiting the World Trade Center not long after it first opened in 1974, (I was 11), and seeing the world from 110 stories high, the wind brisk and chilling, but the sight was beautiful. During my years living in NYC, I ate in the restaurants of the lower concourses of that complex, and rode the subway to the train stations of those buildings, and enjoyed the being on the streets teeming with the people that embody the energy of the Big Apple. Those same people that had to flee for their lives, fear for loved ones, and witness unspeakable horrors. In 2001, I attended my 20th reunion of Stuyvesant’s class of 1981 on October 13, 2011; the site was still on fire and cordoned off for blocks; the pilot of my incoming flight dipped the wing of the plane so that I, along with the other passengers passengers could see the horrifying, gaping flaming hole of Ground Zero. Some of my classmates participated as first-responders.
Stuyvesant Class of 81′s 30th reunion is next Saturday, September 17, 2011.
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Helplessness
On September 11, 2001, I was at my desk working (at Duke University Press in Durham, NC, in my current position), and someone in the hall yelled that the World Trade Center had been hit (or there had been an explosion; it wasn’t clear at the time). My first reaction was to find a web site. CNN.com was down because of high traffic. I managed to get the front page of MSNBC.com to load, but it froze on the full page shot capturing a plane going into one of the towers. No text would load.
The sense of helplessness, knowing I had a lot of family in NYC was overpowering. So much so that I actually picked up the phone and started punching in the Brooklyn phone number of my mom. I needed to speak to her.
I stopped dialing…my mother died on May 4, 1997 in Durham, NC.
She hadn’t lived in NYC for years. I wanted to speak to her in this moment, just to hear her voice in this time of desperation, need to connect — to know she was ok. I hung up the phone, and just sat and my eyes welled up with tears. My overly-rational mind was trying to grasp for a reason to understand what I had just done.
So I called my brother Tim in Delaware. We were on the line for a short while; honestly it was a lot of silent moments interspersed with updates from on his end. I told him about nearly dialing Mom and he said he had the same overwhelming urge to hear her voice as well. We hung up, knowing the lines needed to be clear for emergency calls, but we were both painfully aware that this national tragedy was personal in more ways in one.
I later learned family and friends working in NYC had to make that long trek on foot away from lower Manhattan, across the Brooklyn Bridge (and for some an incredible walk all the way to Bed-Stuy, all covered in the toxic dust in the wake of the buildings’ collapse.
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You CAN Go HOME.
((((hug))))
Pam –
You say it better than anyone else.
I feel privileged to have you share this with me.
Our loved ones who have passed on are just a memory away.
And, we can honor their memory by doing the right thing.
You do that with your outreach, Pam. Fight the good fight.
The photos have a surrealistic quality to them, as if they were pixelized on purpose. They are more beautiful then you realize.
boy, that instinct to call Mom is so universal, felt the same way.
I was 7 blocks from the White House at my office that morning and arrived just as the 2nd plane hit. I heard as soon as I got through the office door that the 1st plane had hit and quite frankly I thought my co-workers were being a bit ghoulish as they headed up to the 6th floor (my office was on 5) to watch the only tv in the office. Then I heard about the 2nd plane and headed up myself. I remember how surreal it was as co-worker after co-worker headed into the room to see what was happening, and we would all turn and say, oh, it’s a terrorist attack, like it wasn’t as shocking as it was – I think we were all still trying to process it.
I never thought of myself as living in a target, but shortly after Bush spoke I headed back down to my office on 5 to figure out if my 10:00 AM meeting was going to happen. I was in the stairwell when American 77 hit the Pentagon, which was not more than 3 miles as the crow flies from my office. Apparently all the windows on the south side of the building flexed in and out with the concussion of the explosion.
I think the need to reach out was universal that morning. As I came out of the stairwell I heard the receptionist paging me – I knew immediately it was my sister in New Hampshire. As I got into my office I learned about the Pentagon, and pandemonium really broke out. There were reports of bombings at the Metro station, the State Department – we didn’t know if it were better to leave or to stay, and only then did we learn about the 4th hijacked plane. I spoke with my sister briefly, but didn’t know what we were going to do; soon thereafter you couldn’t get a call through, and I still feel for her up in NH with two little kids, watching the horror unfold on a 9 inch black-and-white portable TV (she kept the main one on cartoons all day, so my 4 and 2-year-old nephews would not know what was happening), having no way to talk to me or find out if I were ok.
We did evacuate the building about 10:15, in part because the Saudi government had an office in our building, and there was concern about retaliatory attacks. It took 2 1/2 hours to get the 7 miles home through that horrible gridlock, and I can still feel what it was like to be stuck in traffic on L St, wondering whether a plane hitting the White House would spread debris that far away, and then hearing the Air Force might shoot down the plane we still expected to arrive and remembering the pictures of Lockerbie and the destruction large flaming pieces of airplane can cause.
When I finally did get home, you still could hear nothing but military craft – fighters in the air and helicopters patrolling above Walter Reed, just south of my apartment. On Thursday, when we went back to work, there were the National Guard on every corner and I began counting the number of plate glass windows I had to pass in the 4 blocks from the Metro station to the office, and how much destruction a suicide bomber could do.
Perversely, I bought a house in DC proper in 2003, after both 9/11 and the sniper. Once the shock wore off I was d-mned if I was going to let any kind of terrorist keep me out of my Capital city.
Thanks for sharing, CPT_Doom. Reading the “I remember where I was on 9/11″ stories can helpful in understanding that there was an very real need to connect. And that means it can pour out in what seems like crazy, irrational ways. It’s obviously part of us.
It is one of those moments you can recall as clear as day. I was sitting in my cube at a tech company outside Dulles airport. We couldn’t get CNN to load, or anything else for that matter, so we all went down to the gym and watched on TV. It was pure shock to see the towers come down on TV.
My dad worked (still does) on the National Mall, and I remember my mom calling me in utter panic because she couldn’t get him on the phone. As CPT_Doom said, there were so many rumors about what was going on in the city; nobody knew what to believe or think. I finally managed to get in touch with him and then call my mom back.
My partner had started a brand new job the day before, and his day started late. Since he’s one of those people who doesn’t listen to the news, he had no idea what was going on until he called me on his way to work. We all went home early. I fell asleep in front of the TV that afternoon, I think from the sheer emotional exhaustion. I can’t even imagine what it was like for those directly affected.