I was in New York on 9/11, and I made a decision that day that I have kept for ten years. I decided never to write anything about it. The deluge was so complete. I had nothing to add. And I was getting very sick of the way it was being talked about—it really never stopped.
I planned on keeping to that, and have been avoiding the coverage as much as possible. A few people online asked me if I was going to write anything, and I said no. Same reasons. But then I started looking at some of the replies—people telling me they were very small at the time, they found the coverage weird and confusing, could I provide any perspective, since I was there? So I tweeted a few things, and in the act of typing them, I found myself typing this. The trouble is, when I start talking about it, I feel the need to complete the story. I don’t want to add to the sheer tonnage of stuff out there. That’s not my goal. But I do think there’s something missing in a lot of this endless talk, and that’s about the basics of that day, and how they revealed some very good things about people.
This is what I remember. I have not looked anything up. I am simply telling it as it lives in my memory. I have not polished this. I’m typing and posting and walking away from it.
On 9/11, I had a day job working as an editor at an educational publishing company pretty far downtown. I was also married at the time. This is something a lot of people who read this blog don’t know about me. It’s cool. I was, and it’s all good. My former husband is a totally awesome person.* The only reason I mention this is because it’s very much a part of what happened that day, in my experience.
I was still at home, listening to the radio and ironing. My husband worked downtown. At the time, I thought he worked in the Towers. He had been working in the Towers previous to this, and as far as I knew, was still doing so. In actual fact, he had moved to another office in One New York Plaza, but on the morning of 9/11, I had no idea about this. I regarded every building downtown as very much like another.
He started work at 8 am, so he was in his office. He sent me an email that said something like, “Something really weird has happened. An air conditioning unit on the north twin tower has exploded and now we’re all watching it burn. It’s insane.”
And then a few minutes later he wrote, “Can you get me the dentist’s phone number?”
So I wasn’t really paying that much attention. I was still ironing my clothes and thinking I was kind of late and looking for the dentist’s phone number. Then the radio show I was listening to started talking about this small plane that had flown into one of the towers, and what kind of idiot pilot flies into one of the TOWERS?”
I sent an e-mail about this, but got no reply. I sent the dentist’s phone number as well.
On the radio, they started yelling. This was because the second plane had just flown into the second tower. The time between the plane and the second was seventeen minutes. Pretty much everything changed in those seventeen minutes. It went from, “Who is this moron?” To, “That fire is pretty big.” To, “A second plane went in and this is clearly intentional and probably an act of war.”
I grabbed the phone and tried my husband’s cell. Nothing. I tried the landline. Nothing. I tried again. And again. I sent e-mail after e-mail. In the meantime, the news was getting steadily worse, as the towers were burning out of control.
Pretty much everything from this point on was happening at once. It was just a rolling cycle of things happening and no one knowing what was happening next. Planes were lost in the air. The plane went into the Pentagon at 9:37. The first tower fell at 9:59. Flight 93 crashed at 10:03. The second tower collapsed at 10:28. (I looked up these times, only because it was hard to detangle how the events were coming down. Also to show just how fast it was all happening.) To describe that morning and surreal and insane doesn’t get anywhere near the truth of the matter. The second impact happened live on television.
My problem, from where I was sitting, was that I thought my husband was dead. I mean, there is no other way of explaining that, so there it is. I thought he was about 80 floors up, which is about where the plane went in to the second building. And that building was now gone. I wasn’t sure that this had happened, but it seemed that there was a definitely possibility that this was the situation. In fact, it seemed likely.
By this point, the entire phone network in NYC had essentially collapsed, for two reasons—a whole bunch of cell towers had just been taken out, and everyone on the planet was calling people in NYC. (They eventually started begging people not to call NYC.) I got two calls that morning, one from my mother-in-law and one from my brother-in-law. I had to report that I knew nothing, that I would contact them as soon as I did, but I had to keep the line clear.
Meanwhile, in this hour . . . what we didn’t know at the time was that the Mayor’s state-of-the-art emergency control center had been in (I think) World Trade 7, and was destroyed. So the Mayor was circling around downtown in a car, trying to find somewhere to give an emergency broadcast. They finally broke into a fire station and gave it from there. The Mayor’s broadcast was calm, firm, and simple. He gave walking instructions. Walk north. Go now. Cover your face. (I am sure this broadcast can be seen online somewhere if you want to see it.) It was the only totally effective and practical thing I have ever seen from a politician. There was just no bullshit at all. It was all instructions, nothing extra.
Meanwhile, reports were spreading that everything was blowing up downtown. There was a story going around for about an hour that gas lines were exploding, and that this was going to be a chain event, gas main after main going up. This story turned out to be false, but it circled around for a while.
I e-mailed someone I know who is a forensic fire investigator (he would later be involved in the 9/11 investigations) and asked him what to do, what I should tell my husband when and if he called? He was stuck down there. If the gas lines were exploding, what was the best advice? The only thing he could tell me, given the information, was that he should take some cloth, soak it in water, and wrap it around his face. This is what most people were doing—taking off shirts or whatever, soaking them, and tying them around their faces. (E-mails were also incredibly slow that morning, so I got this info hours after I sent the note.)
So I was at home, with a dead landline and a more or less useless cellphone, waiting.
I think—I cannot remember this clearly—but I think I switched off the news. I have a vague memory of thinking that it was probably something to be avoided at that moment, because it might disturb my mental state to the point where I would not actually be functional. My job, as I saw it, was to wait for the phone to ring again. I did remain online, because I figured if anything really major came up, it would immediately change the headline.
I went over to a cabinet where we kept the booze. I took out a bottle of good whiskey I’d been given as a gift. I poured about a shot and a half into a small glass, and I drank it all in one go. The idea behind this was that my system was flooded with adrenaline, and I wanted to take it to something as close to a normal baseline as I could get. I had to get rid of the immediate shakes and keep my head. Caffieene brings you up and alcohol brings you down. This was very basic and gritty and seems like something out of a Western, but it did the job.
I then sat on the sofa and waited. I don’t remember much about this except that I thought something along the lines of, “This has happened, and now you will see what happens next. And when that thing comes, you will deal with it.”
I can’t remember when the phone rang, but I think it must have been between ten and eleven. My husband was all right, but had seen it all. He had been in 1 New York Plaza, which is down the street from the Towers and is the next tallest building. They had all gone over to the window to try to see what was going on at the towers, when a plane flew directly past them—and I do mean directly. It flew more or less at the height of their window, right past them. They barely had time to process this, because in the next few seconds, it continued on and went right into the building.
They all turned and ran. As one. The left everything—bags, phones off hooks, computers on, they left it all and they ran. At the time of the call, they were holed up in someone’s apartment downtown (which actually happened to be closer to the towers than their workplace). Everything had gone white, and they were trapped in a huge cloud of crap, debating the wisdom of whether to stay or go. But the instructions in general seemed to be that everyone should get the hell out, and I was concerned about this whole “exploding gas mains” situation, so they decided to rip up some shirts, soak them, tie them over their faces, and leave. They began the very long walk uptown, and we arranged to meet in Midtown.
I lived in Queens, across the river from Manhattan. It wasn’t going to be a short trip for me. To walk to Midtown from my apartment was an hour, and hour and a half, it really depended on how far I had to go. It could be two hours.
The night before, I’d made a big pot of pasta and sauce, one of those things you make that you can nosh for a day or two. I got this out and forced myself to eat a large bowl. I was going to need something in my stomach, and pasta was good for that. I was going to be doing a lot of walking, and I had no idea when I’d get back home that night, or even if I’d get back home. I found my old backpack. I can’t remember what I put in it. I just remember it was anything practical I thought I’d need—probably a change of clothes, some medicine, some water, something to eat, things like that. I really had no idea what was going to happen.
And then I started walking. It was a pretty good distance from my apartment to the 59th Street Bridge. Not far from my house, I found a hack cab who was driving around in confused circles, and he agreed to take me to within a few blocks of the bridge. He didn’t know how much to ask for, so accepted five dollars and wished me luck and continued making confused circles. (The bridges had been closed off to all cars by that point, so whatever side of the bridge you were on when it all happened, you were stuck there. It was some time before they opened again.)
I got my first view of things from the 59th Street Bridge, which spans Queens and Manhattan on the east side at (as the name suggests) 59th Street. There were several thousand people walking toward me, as Manhattan places of business were being evacuated. I was one of the few people walking toward Manhattan. There was someone on the bridge with a cooler trying to give water to anyone who needed it. The people coming over the bridge seemed calm, really normal, talking to each other. Just walking home. From the high point of the bridge, I looked south, and I saw it. The towers were both down by that point. What I saw was a column of smoke, very dark and very, very high and wide. In fact, it was so high that at some point it hit something in the atmosphere that stopped it and it became flat and started moving sideways, so it kind of looked like an anvil. It is difficult to explain the size of it. It simply dwarfed everything.
I finally found him at the hospital. We tried to get in line to give blood, but there were already hundreds and hundreds of people in line. Every single hospital in Manhattan had hundreds and hundreds of people in line to give blood. Everyone was trying to give blood because they thought ten or twenty thousand injured people were about to roll into every emergency room in the city—so the hospital were grateful but they also had to push everyone out because they were trying to make room for these ten or twenty or thirty thousand people they were about to treat. Everything had gone into disaster mode—prepare the makeshift hospitals, roll out the spare cots, that kind of thing.
Because at that time, everyone still thought there would be survivors. This was not stupidity or misplaced hope. It only made sense that some people had gotten out and were nearby and injured, or there might be people trapped under the rubble—it was possible.
We went to four hospitals that day. We left our names on four lists. We also spent this time trying to track down friends, including my friend Winchester Grey, who worked quite near the Towers. There was no response on his phone. I think we finally tracked him down around four or five.
We walked home over the bridge, and all the way through Queens back to the house. I don’t remember anything about this walk. I only know that I had been walking for about five or six hours, and my husband for even more, and he was covered in crap from the air. We had partial phone service by that point. He made some phone calls. I sat on the sofa and passed out. I mean that. I just went out like a light. My body must have known that it could now stop, and it did. I woke up in the early evening.
The news reports we were getting in NYC were different from the news reports being given in the rest of the country. The NYC news reports were scrappy, and very much involved with dealing with what was happening, right now. It was not glossy and polished. Newscasters were trying to stay professional, but it was clearly getting personal, and they were out in the street, looking unpolished.
At the time, it was estimated that around many tens of thousands of people were in the Towers. I remember hearing all kinds of numbers that morning. At one point they were saying 80,000. They were hastily doing figures based on whatever information they could get their hands on. One of the quasi-saving graces was that the first attack occurred before 9am, so a lot of people hadn’t arrived for work yet. Most were on the way. So no one really knew how many people to look for, and a lot of these people were out on the streets, or had been booted off of subways, or had run away.
We walked to a friend’s house and went on the roof. Every ambulance in the city had gone down to the WTC. The first sign I saw of the reality of things was seeing them all come back in a row, unused. They were the only vechiles on the bridge, and they were endless. I started counting over five minutes after I got up there and I stopped at 66 because there was no point in counting any more.
Things didn’t end that day in NYC. Two incredibly huge buildings had just fallen to the ground. No one knew what the result of that was going to be. Explosions. Fire. Toxic substances. Chain reactions. Also, that part of lower Manhattan is basically swamp, so there was also this possible scenario with the Hudson sweeping in and flooding the whole area. There was basically no doomsday scenario that wasn’t floating around for at least 24-48 hours. No one went to work. There was no transportation. People were missing. Jobs were missing. Everything had stopped, more or less. NYC was closed. There were military on the streets, and fighter planes and helicopters overhead all of the time.
This is when the bomb alerts started. Pretty much every major building in NYC was evacuated between Wednesday and Friday, and this was all broadcast live. Nutcases from all over, sensing their moment of ultimate nutcasery had come, were calling the police and telling them there were bombs. This caused fear, irritatation, and a lot of anger. The night I remember vididly was the night someone was threatening to blow up the Empire State Building (I think this was Wednesday, 9/12), and all of the news networks were just showing live coverage of the building, and I just stood there, unable to even sit, filled with a kind of weird, formless rage that I find very difficult to explain. They were not allowed to have that building.
But here’s the big thing I remember about that week—there was a peace in New York. There was a spirit of total thankfulness for everyone who was helping. There were police cars on the street from other states, even as far as Washington, because all of these people had just driven there and were volunteering their time. Everyone checked on everyone else.
There were several centralized places where people would go to leave pictures of loved ones with their phone numbers. One of these places was Union Square. It was totally covered with these, along with candles and flowers. Because people had not given up. There was still a hope—ever dwindling, but it was there—that the crews were going to find people under all that steel. Or find people wandering the streets. So everyone paid attention. Pretty much no one was at work. There was still no subway. And things still might explode. A terrible stink blew over the city that remained for months—a smell I can only describe thusly: things were burning that you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt should not be burning. Computers. Plastics. All the stuff that goes into offices. And also people. That was the reality of it. And it was strong. It was so strong, in fact, that the first night it blew over our building I thought the building next door was on fire. So did all of my neighbors, because when I looked out of the window, I found that everyone was looking out of the window. There was a strange, Sesame Street quality to it, all of us leaning out of our New York City windows, talking to each other.
The dogs down at the site were starting to get depressed and confused because they never found anyone, so the crews would hide and let the dogs find them just to keep them sharp and hopeful. People stood by the side of the road holding up Thank You signs when fire trucks and police went down to the site.
After the bombs, came the anthrax threats. That went on for a long time. I once got off the subway to see hundreds of people running at me, being forcefully evacuated from a possible anthrax site. Weirdly, you got used to this sort of thing. “Anthrax,” you’d say, laughing and wondering if you’d been exposed to it. “Those bastards.” The anthrax stuff was again, mostly crazies on a Crazy Day Out. It was a good time to be a crazy.
Kitchens opened up to feed the volunteers, who worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for months. The site burned until, I believe it was December. I worked down there, doing the midnight to eight am shift on Halloween. I worked in the downstairs kitchen of a restaurant called Bouley Bakery—which was a swanky place, now being used as a food prep area for the Red Cross. This is when I first saw the site. It was lit up with worklights, so it was constantly day down there. I am unable to explain to you what it looked like, the twisted metal, higher than most buildings. I mean, it looked like something Michael Bay thought up for Transformers, except it was real, and it was filthy, and people worked there, without stopping, all the time. People were exceptionally good and brave.
And this, to me, is the part of 9/11 people should remember. An unbelievable amount of good came out.
And here’s something I do remember very, very vividly. It must have been the next day, and we were just learning of the huge sacrifice made by all the firefighters who rushed in when everyone was rushing out. People were showing up at fire stations and just giving them anything—food, flowers, whatever they needed. There was a tremendous sense of grace in the air. People were generous. People found whatever was necessary in themselves to remain as calm as possible. People rethought priorities. All those people downtown had names and faces and they all mattered. Everyone mattered. We suddenly remembered that. Everyone mattered.
And I stood there thinking that we were in a strange, hellish, yet wonderful place. We were doing all the right things for a few days, and I think I said out loud, to . . . no one . . . but I think I was talking to politicians or decision makers or some sort of interhuman sounding board (Twitter wasn’t around yet) . . . “Do. Not. Screw. This. Up.”
We did, eventually, screw it up. But not all of it. And I still remember how good people can be, and how calm, and how aware of others. I mean that sincerely. I saw it, and it changed how I dealt with the world.
So that is my 9/11 story. Having written it, I now post, and as promised, I walk away.
* I realize some people are going to want to ask me about this, but I can tell you now I’m not going to answer. I repeat that it’s all cool, but it’s in the personal files so, you know. No big or anything.
