Where I Was

On September 11, 2001, I woke up, showered and got dressed for work, groggily pulling on a pair of navy dress pants and a french blue shirt.  I had been putting in long hours at the office for weeks -- working past midnight most days, including the weekends -- because I was preparing to go to trial on a big case.  I was living with my then-boyfriend, E., in Gramercy Park, a residential area filled with sidewalk cafes, bars and shops.  From Union Square, which was a few blocks south of us, you could see the Twin Towers off in the distance.

I worked downtown and rode the subway every morning to the station that was two blocks from the World Trade Center.  That morning, around 8:40, I shouldered my briefcase, put on my headphones and descended into the station outside my building.  At 14th Street, I switched to the express train.  When I got on, I noticed that this weird guy, who I'd seen before several times, was a few feet from me.  As was his usual routine, he stood right up against the doors of the train, his face pressed against the window, and stared out, muttering to himself and blotting his profusely sweating brow with a handkerchief.  He always made me nervous; he seemed like the type who was on the verge of taking out a gun and killing everyone on the train.  At the next stop, I got out and ran to the next car. 

The train sat for a few minutes with the doors open.  Just as the passengers were starting to get irritated at the delay, a woman came running down the stairs into the station.  She was screaming something unintelligible.  I took out one of my ear buds and listened.  She yelled something about an explosion.  She was hysterical and crying and she looked around at us helplessly.  Everyone on the train stared at her.  Someone gave her their seat and she sat down on the bench and rocked back and forth, sobbing about how "it just blew up -- BOOM! -- just like that." 

The doors sucked shut and we were moving again.  As we approached my station, the conducter announced that we would be skipping that stop because of a "bomb threat."  The woman started screeching again and we all looked at each other, baffled.

At Wall Street, I got off the train and headed up the stairs.  As I emerged from underground, I noticed that paper was falling from the sky.  Whole sheets of paper, thousands of them, drifting downward.  I looked straight up and saw the steeple of Trinity Church above me, surrounded by this snowstorm of paper.  Then I saw all the people standing on the sidewalks, gawking toward the Western sky.  I stopped and looked.  I saw the Trade Center, its top floors engulfed in flames, a charcoal black plume of smoke blowing parallel to the ground like a scarf in a stiff wind. 

I stared at the sight for a while and thought to myself, how on earth did the fire jump from one tower to the other?  I turned to the person next to me, a woman in a pink shirt who was shielding her eyes with her hand, staring at the blaze and shaking her head silently.  I asked her what had happened.  She said a plane had hit the World Trade Center.  I looked up again.  Man.  Some pilot must have been trying to make an emergency landing and hit the buildings. 

A moment later, my instincts took over; I suddenly felt that I was in grave danger.  I imagined the buildings toppling over sideways, crushing everything in their path, including the spot where I was standing.  I needed to call E. and warn him what was going on.  I grabbed my cell phone out of my briefcase, but I couldn't get it to work, so I headed for the office.  When I got to my building, scores of people were standing outside the lobby, gazing at the towers in disbelief.   

As I rushed to my office, I passed a conference room where someone was watching CNN.  I heard something about terrorists.  Confused and frightened, I started to cry as I dialed my home number.  E. picked up the phone.  "What's happening?" I asked desperately.  "It's like the end of the world down here."  "I know.  A group of terrorists hijacked two planes and flew them into the Twin Towers.  Into the Pentagon, too," he said.  I hardly heard him.  I said, "I have to get out of here.  Oh my God, the buildings are going to fall and we're going to die."  He told me to run uptown; he would meet me at Canal and Broadway.  He was leaving right then.  We both hung up.

I ran out of the office, trying to compose myself.  I had to go closer to the towers to get to Broadway, and I found myself wading through ash and debris and glass and paper -- there was so much paper.  I raced on.  I went past City Hall, where streams of people converged into a mob of thousands, moving steadily uptown.  Taxis and cars were stopped in the streets, honking at each other; none could go any further.  A few vehicles had simply been abandoned.  I saw a camera crew go racing by on foot, enormous television equipment hefted onto their shoulders. 

As I made my way up lower Broadway, I passed a group of women who were holding hands and praying as they walked.  I heard them praying for the people inside the buildings and for the people they had seen jumping from the upper floors.  "Dear Heavenly Father, the first man to jump was wearing a white shirt and dark pants, and we pray for the eternal peace of his soul."  I felt like I was going to throw up, but I kept moving as fast as I could, thinking only that I had to get out of there before things got any worse.

Somewhere between City Hall and Chinatown, I heard it.  A sickening sound of popping and cracking and shattering and moaning.  It was behind me, and I knew.  I glanced over my shoulder in time to see a cloud of smoke and dust and debris overtaking the streets, and I ran.  I sprinted away from it as fast as I could, gripping my briefcase in my arms as if it could be used as a life preserver.  Suddenly I was at Canal Street, but I kept going because the cloud was moving through us, shrouding us, even this many blocks from the Trade Center.  And then I ran smack into E.  We grabbed onto each other and kept running and running, until we reached Union Square, where we we stopped to breathe and I completely lost it. 

We trudged on as I cried into his shoulder.  We went to a friend's place around the corner from our building.  As we entered her apartment, she looked up at us and sobbed, "This is it.  This is it.  It's happening.  It's going to be over for us.  I got water and batteries.  I don't know what to do.  Should we get money?  This is IT."  I fell onto her couch and put my face in my hands.  I couldn't listen to the things she was saying; I couldn't hear them, even though I thought they might be the truth. 

The news was on, as it would be constantly for weeks afterward, in  apartments across the city.  I stared at the TV and took in the words that were coming out.  Terrorists.  Box cutters.  Flight 93.  A fallen tower.  Thousands of people.  I just didn't understand it.  I'd seen the footage of Beirut on TV when I was little and I'd visited New York months after the first Trade Center bombing; but those images and news blurbs had never sunk in as connected events with some larger meaning.  Terrorism was never on my radar screen -- to me, it was something that happened in far-off places with gutteral languages and yawning deserts.  I guess that's the point, though, isn't it -- none of us, even our president, contemplated anything like this.  It wasn't comprehensible.  And in a way, it still isn't.

There, in that sunny little apartment that day, we watched the second tower fall.  Then, I managed to get a phone line out and call my parents.  My dad was calm enough; but when he heard what I had been through, how I had literally run for my life, and how terrified I was, he offered to drive up from Georgia and meet me on the other side of the George Washington Bridge (cars were no longer allowed into the city) and drive me back home.  I wanted more than anything to take him up on that offer, but instead, after he had conferenced in my mom so she could hear my voice, I stammered out that I would be all right and then I reluctantly hung up the phone.  Then I ran to the bathroom and got very, very sick.

That night, after we went back to our apartment and I emailed friends and family to let them know we were alive (the phones weren't working), I got in bed and somehow managed to fall asleep,  A few hours later, I woke up screaming.  I had dreamed that I was on one of the planes that went into the towers.  I was so scared that I jumped off the bed and cowered on the floor, covering my head.  I was breathing uncontrollably fast and I started to get tunnel vision.  It was my first panic attack.  E. coaxed me up off the floor and calmed me down.  I lay awake most of the night, and drifted off sometime around dawn.  I woke again and it was light outside.  I was panicked and sweaty.  I looked out the window and saw a van on the street.  I was convinced it had never been there before, and that it must be a car bomb.  I started shrieking again and sat on the side of the bed crying and repeating over and over, "It wasn't there before; I know it wasn't there..."   

On September 12, E. went to work, just like always.  He left me, a huddled, freaking-out mess, at home and alone (my office was closed, as was virtually everything below 14th Street).  I sleepwalked through a surreal day in which I ate lunch (or, more accurately, stared at a plate of food) with our neighbor friends and saw Chris Noth and a cast member from "Road Rules" at the restaurant.  Everyone but me seemed a little subdued but otherwise normal; whereas I felt like I had seen the apocalypse and wanted to be hiding in a fallout shelter somewhere surrounded by canned goods and a stash of M-16 rifles. 

The days after that blur together.  I bought a pair of shoes (?).  I stared, weeping, at the walls and walls of "Missing" posters that flanked every street.  I still remember the poster for a middle-aged gentleman with a white shock of hair and a Santa Claus beard, his hale and hearty face grinning off the page.  Of course, he was never found. 

I went to dance class one day, hoping it would get me out of my traumatized head for a couple of hours.  Afterward, I met some friends in Central Park, but our quiet gathering ended when a police car drove onto the Great Lawn and told us to evacuate (which, like many things around that time, sent me into a massive panic attack).  Every two minutes, they were evacuating something else -- the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center.  And every time, it scared the shit out of me.

When my firm reopened the following week, I took the subway downtown, to the same stop we had passed on that day.  When I got out onto Fulton Street, I looked over at the smoldering wreckage where the World Trade Center had been.  It was just...gone.  Winded with shock, I walked numbly toward the office, staring at the ash that covered everything in sight and taking in the eerie silence of a city without cars or buses.  Occasionally, the silence was broken by a Hum-Vee driving by, a camouflaged gunman atop its flat roof.

Even from my apartment over a mile away, I'd been able to smell the smothering odor that emanated from the site.  It was like burning rubber mixed with putrid toxic chemicals and other things that were too awful to consider.  But downtown, so close to the site, it was overpowering.  People left work after an hour or two due to crippling headaches and nausea.  It was months before that air of death left the office. 

Despite the gruesomeness of it all, the city underwent a transformation that day, and not just in its skyline.  We all know about the lines of people wanting to donate blood or volunteer to help relief workers at the site.  We've seen the footage of the millions of American flags that appeared overnight across the city, and across the country, as the nation galvanized against its new, horribly revealed enemy.  But even more notable, although more subtle, was the way New Yorkers began to look at each other.  No longer dodging around people in the daily sidewalk slalom, people nodded or greeted others and offered help when the slightest need was perceived.  Subway riders talked to one another and, when another passenger exhibited some kind of quirk that suggested a potential for violence, people exchanged looks of, "If the shit goes down, we're taking this guy out before he can do anything."  Suddenly, we were part of a community of ten million people.  And it was remarkable to experience.

Today, things are pretty much back to normal, whatever that means.  I no longer jump a foot when I hear a plane overhead.  I feel ok on the subway (for a while in 2001, I stopped riding it altogether and took cabs or the bus; but even then, I would sometimes have a panic attack and have to get out long before my stop to hyperventilate on the sidewalk and cry until I could face the rest of my commute).  I do more than sit and refresh CNN.com on my computer all day at work. 

The shadow of that day lives inside of me, as it does in all of us.  I remember the details of it with anguished clarity, and I do not need Oliver Stone to recreate it for me.  Sometimes I truly cannot believe that those buildings, and all those people, are just gone.  I think of how the day must have unfolded for the victims, and I want to lay down and stare into space for days in renewed grief.  When the images are shown on television, I change the channel or cover my face with my hand.  In "Fahrenheit 9/11" when the sound of the plane hitting the second tower whoomped across the dark theater, I cowered in my seat and started shaking uncontrollably, and crying. 

Sometimes I wonder if I am terribly naive to sit on my couch and watch "Felicity" and go about my life when, at any moment, it could happen again.  And it could be much, much worse.  I wonder if I am insane to continue living in this city, which will always be the first target for terrorists out to shed blood on American soil.  I wonder if I am going to die underground one day in a subway bombing or gas attack.  I wonder if I should move to a place where the risks are more commonplace, where people die from car accidents and cancer, not as unsuspecting victims of lunatic fundamentalists.  But I know that, if everyone fled like that, our world would cease to operate and, as the hackneyed phrase goes, the terrorists would win.  And I'm not willing to surrender so easily.

Comments

[Allison]

I'm really glad you wrote this.

[Laura B.]

Oh my god. I just don't even know what to say. I cannot believe you went through that - you were right there. I cannot believe anyone went through that. I cannot grasp what happened or that the towers are gone. It is all just unspeakable. I didn't even live here at the time, and I was a mess over it. I try not to think about what could happen next.

[thisgirlremembers]

Thank you so much for sharing your story with all of us, harrowing though it must have been to revisit. I was on the other side of the country and yet knew, too, that everything had changed.

I was born in the late 70's and grew up with the luxury of believing that the world was, inevitably and rightly so, getting better and better all the time, that we'd actually learned from the past and wouldn't be so stupid as to repeat its mistakes. The loss of that naiveté in the aftermath of what happened that day, and in the years that have followed, is something that I still grieve.

On the other hand, the most inane consequence for me is that I've had to quit using the radio setting on my alarm clock, because every time it goes off when djs are talking, or sometimes even on the ads, my gut reaction is to bolt out of bed in terror. I first sensed that something was wrong on the morning of the 11th because of the panicked voices that woke me up instead of music. It's funny how the little things stick with us. There was no music for days.

[climberguy]

A beautifully written, moving essay. Thanks for writing it.

[Crissy Wagner]

Thank you for sharing your story. Beautiful and moving. I wish I could reach across the country and give you a hug.

[Jenny]

Although my experience was not as direct as yours, I live in Washington, DC, and so I very much understand the intensity of "being there" in real life on September 11th. My bike ride to work takes me within a 1/8 mile of the Pentagon, and my usual time for biking by was about 9:45 -- but on 9/11, I went in early, and missed seeing the plane, thank heavens. But I live on Capitol Hill and work in Virginia -- I didn't know where to go, I didn't know whether home would be safe. When I finally did bike home, the shock of seeing the smoke rising from the Pentagon was like a knife in my gut. I biked as close as they'd let me and said a silent prayer for the victims. Then I biked home through the eery silence of a deserted city.

I think the people of New York and DC are those who are most constantly reminded of 9/11 -- not only because we lived through it, but because we see the aftermath of the new security measures, we experience directly the increased security alerts that are constantly changing, we worry about our subway systems and experience the delays when a station is shut down because somebody accidentally left their lunch behind. My husband and I also questioned whether we were crazy to keep living on Capitol Hill, such a clear potential target -- but the funny thing about living in DC is that you always know you're the center of the bullseye, anyhow. And, like you, we weren't ready to change everything and let the terrorists win. We love where we live. There are times when the new security makes me crazy, but it's still worth it to stay where we are.

[lawyerish]

Allison - I just realized, I don't know if you ever heard all of that, at least in that much detail. It's much easier to write than to tell.

Laura - It was horrible, but I know it could have been much worse; after all, I did not lose anyone that day.

Thisgirl - I absolutely share your grief for that sense of hope and innocence with which we faced the future before. Although I still have great hope and optimism for what's to come, there is that taint now that we will always feel; we'll be fighting this war for the rest of our lives, on one front or another, whether ideological or physical.

Climber - Thanks for reading and commenting. It really means a lot.

AW - Hug received and appreciated. :)

Jenny - Thank you for sharing your experience. I have heard so few accounts from DC. It was truly a shocking image, our center of defense broken and smoldering. I am glad that you're safe. We'll just keep on loving where we live and rolling with the punches, won't we? What else is there to do?

[-R-]

I can't imagine... your story is so vivid, and yet I still can't really imagine what it must have been like.

[GuinnessGirl]

Lawyerish, I read this last night and then twice again today. I still don't quite know how to respond, because there really seems like nothing would do your story justice. I can't even fathom what it was like to have experienced what you did; nor what it was like to recover from it. I'm glad you did, though!

Two of my closest friends were living in Manhattan at the time, and I remember how awful it was for them during the aftermath. I went to see them a couple months later, in December, and the three of us had one of our wildest nights out on the town together. I swear we were truly, actually celebrating life and doing our best to live it loudly. I'll never forget that.

[GuinnessGirl]

Oh, PS, thank you for the link over on your blogroll!

[Kari]

Harrowing and haunting post. I remain awed by your writing ability.

For the rest of the country, it was entirely surreal, almost like waiting for the other shoe to drop in some random U.S. city. My building was evacuated that day, as were most, but by and large, we just didn't have the experience you all did.

I never saw the towers in person, having made my first trip to NYC in 2002. When I finally made my way to the footprint, I was humbled and numb - perhaps realizing that I would never fully appreciate the magnitude of the chaos and destruction felt by the city of New York.

I have a soft spot for NYC for many, many reasons, but primarily because the place is so amazingly resilient. It is, in many ways, the heart and soul of this country, even though the lifestyle could not be more different than almost anywhere else in the country.

In any event - fantastic post. I had to read it three times.

[chirky]

I have chills & tears in my eyes. Thank you for sharing your story.

[Meril]

Very touching entry. I still hate subways and dont feel like flying. I try not to let the fear win but some days the fear gets best of me.

[Stinkypaw]

It is with tears in my eyes that I thank you for sharing that horrible experience that changed the world as we knew it...

Very compelling and most importantly I'm happy to read that you will not surrender!

[Susie]

Thank you for sharing your experience of September 11th. I am so glad that you made it home safely.

It is striking how people respond so differently to the same events. On September 11, 2001, I had just returned from maternity leave to my job as an attorney at a firm on John Street. A few minutes after 9:00 a.m. that morning, I got off the subway at Fulton Street. As you already said, so many people were stopped on the street staring westward at the huge fire at the top of the north tower. I didn't know what had started the fire, and I went to the office. Once there, I heard only sketchy accounts of what was happening, because we had already lost internet and phone service. Unlike you, I never imagined that the towers might fall, so I stayed in the office with everyone else. Once they did fall, it was like a nuclear winter downtown. We couldn't leave because the air was unbreathable. Around noon, we left with surgical masks and started to walk north along the East River. The wind was blowing in from the east that day, so the air was relatively clear as we made our way to Grand Central. From there, I was able to catch the subway to the Upper West Side.

When I think of people like you or me who had to walk away from downtown that day, I think of a new mother I met a few months after the tragedy. She and her husband were living in Battery Park City at the time. Her due date was September 12th, but she went into labor the morning of 9/11. While in early labor, she and her husband walked (the streets were gridlocked at that point) to two (or more?) different hospitals, but were refused because of all the WTC victims. Ultimately, they walked far enough away from downtown that she was accepted as a patient at a hospital. Her son was born that evening.

[Juliness]

What an incredible story. Thank you for reliving it again as you shared it with us.

[Tammy]

I'm a new reader of your blog.. and all I can say is... Wow. I am speechless. I don't think I've ever read a more clear description of how it was... up close.. on that fateful day.

Thank you for sharing it all with us.