I: Manhattan Refugees
(originally written as email to Chicago-based friends on
the evening of 9/11/01)
It's almost too weird to process.
I was walking through Times Square when the first plane hit World Trade; the news hadn't even hit the crawls that run across the sides of buildings. (The last one I remember reading was about Michael Jordan's impending return.) It was supposed to be primary election day; someone had just given me a button saying, ³Vote for Mr. Peanut² attached to a bag of Planterıs Peanuts.
As I reached the streetside Good Morning America studio, the monitors there went to an "ABC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT" placard and the next image was smoke coming out of one of the towers. I couldn't hear the audio, but I assumed, since it was smoke from the upper floors, it was a fire of some sort.
As I approached the office where I freelance, I saw a group of people pressed to the glass of a restaurant, watching a TV. I asked a woman if she knew what had happened. She said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I still assumed it was an accident (and at that point I was picturing, say, a little Cessna going out of control).
But when I arrived at the office, I heard it was an act of terrorism.
And then another plane hit the other tower.
We found a TV and crowded around it in the conference room. We were watching the buildings burn, listening to announcers discuss whether today's primary election could be cancelled while the screen showed an image of the burning towers as seen from a helicopter--when the first tower collapsed before our eyes.
In a puff of smoke, it just ceased to be there. "Is that live?" someone asked, stunned. A moment later, the announcers realized what had just happened and said without inflection, "One of the towers has just collapsed."
A tremor-in-the-Force emotional shock wave rippled through. "It's gone--just gone," I remember saying to someone. About half of us ran out of the room, to make calls, or just because we couldn't bear to look. Some people fled to find family members. I exchanged hugs with a colleague, and headed over to Rob's office--I figured if the city was going to blow up, I at least wanted to be holding his hand at the last. "Be careful," he said. Because at that point, who knew what might be next.
On the street I saw a woman, a poet, I know only from SF conventions. I touched her arm and said hello. "I'm in shock," she said, touched my arm and we each went on.
From the middle of 6th Avenue I could see, 80 blocks away, the remaining tower's top, smoke pouring from it. People were stopping as they crossed the street to see. But as you all know, it imploded too shortly thereafter, which we saw on the TV at Rob's office, ending a discussion of whether the other tower would be rebuilt.
One of Rob's colleagues had seen one of the planes hit the building from the train on his way to work. "Which one? First one or second?" He didn't know. "Was the other tower burning?" He didn't remember. It was all too strange to process.
We went up to the 8th floor terrace of the Time Life building. The street below was weirdly normal, except for the clots of people near the Fox News crawl and windows with TVs, and the occasional scream of sirens headed downtown.
One of Rob's colleagues was trying to find out if her brother was on one of the planes; he was flying from Boston to LA today. She had no information when we left. We have a friend whose brother works down there; we still don't know his status. We do know that a friend's brother-in-law, who works in World Trade, heard the impact of the first airplane, and he and his coworkers fled the building just in time to see the second plane hit. The fact that they escaped at least gives hope that some people did get out of the buildings in time.
Everything closed. Including most public transit. Which was fine with us: under the circumstances, a train ride in a tunnel under a river didn't strike me as desirable. We decided to walk across the 59th Street bridge to Queens, but at first, with news reports that there were other hijacked planes unaccounted for (as many as eleven reported missing at one point, and no indication where they might be pointed), we kind of wanted to stay indoors on a low floor near the stairwells. I counted doorways to the fire exits in case we lost lights. But after a while, we just wanted to do something, go somewhere. So we headed out.
A sea of humanity headed uptown on foot, spilling off sidewalks into streets that had very little traffic. This must be what Sarajevo was like at the beginning, I thought, with people used to comfort and privilege and convenience reduced at least for a time to exodus on foot.
We passed a post office blockaded with trucks, edgy-looking postal police standing in front. We joined the crowd streaming onto the bridge, filling the pedestrian lane, and part of the traffic lane. Some lanes had been opened to outbound traffic; trucks and large cars were studded with people catching rides on bumpers. Old people, young, people with canes, jeans, suits, heels, even a pair of fluffy yellow bedroom slippers, streamed across the mile-long bridge. A news photographer climbed onto a pylon to take photos of the Manhattan refugees. Hardly anyone talked. As we reached the center of the bridge, we could see the gap in the skyline where the towers had been, now just filled with smoke. It will be really weird, we concluded, once the smoke has literally cleared, and that gap in the skyline stands out like missing teeth.
The thing is, it's a beautiful day here. Sunny. Warm. Except where the sky is streaked with smoke.
In the distance, on the Queens side of the river, a sign board's scrolling ads had been replaced with one word: "Peace."
We heard a plane overhead. Everyone looked up, faces lit with anxiety. The sound of a thousand people holding their breath. A bridge full of thousands of people would make a hell of a target. ³Better be military,² someone muttered. The plane passed and a thousand people exhaled.
Those thousands of people streamed off the bridge into the streets in Queens. Police with bullhorns made announcements about transport from atop their cars. A fire truck from Massapequa--out on Long Island beyond where we live--tore through, headed into the city; someone said "Fire truck" and the sea of pedestrians parted immediately.
Hundreds headed for the subway station, so we decided to keep walking. We wondered, during the time we were walking, what else was happening, what other places might not exist when we finally heard the news again.
We finally decided to hop a subway to Forest Hills, Queens, a community of big houses and wooded streets. Forest Hills was weirdly normal. As we sat in a bagel shop, a radio softly muttering news in the background, a man outside unloaded boxes of soup mix from a truck. A letter carrier pushed her cart past. The only clue to the strangeness of the day was in the fragments of overheard conversations: a woman breathlessly, tearfully, recounting seeing a man on fire, another trying to reach friends and relatives to say she was safe.
The city is remarkably resilient. Transit outside Manhattan was back up and running almost immediately--we had no trouble getting a Long Island Railroad train home from Forest Hills, and by the time we got home, transit in all five boroughs had been restored. Things will probably be closed tomorrow, but it will be mostly out of sympathy rather than the inability of an American city to function.
Still, we are wondering whether we can find it in ourselves to get on a plane Thursday night to come to Chicago. Partly out of fear of what we have seen can happen, despite the security measures that have been giving us a false sense of safety.
Partly because, in the wake of all this, it's really hard to leave home.
V: Coming of
Age in an Imperfect World