Remembrance

It started out a beautiful sunny day in the Washington DC metro area.  While sipping my first cup of coffee I booted up my old Dell so I could start editing an article for a friend.  The phone rang about 9 a.m., my husband Jim calling from work.  "Someone flew a jet into the World Trade Center," he says with unease in his voice.  My first thought is it's a horrible accident.  He doesn't think so.  As soon as we say goodbye I switch on the radio.  The announcer describes the north tower with smoke billowing out.  Something disastrously wrong has happened.  

I walk the dogs.  Jim calls back at 9:15.  "The second tower's hit," Jim said.  "This is a terrorist attack."  Someone in his office has set up a portable t.v.  By 10 a.m., just after the Pentagon is struck I rush out of the house, heading for Goodyear.  I need to get our van's oil changed, and a fill-up.  Route 28, an outer north-south arterial road, is as busy as rush hour.  Goodyear's packed.  The t.v.'s on and all of us are huddled near it, watching, expressions grim, incredulity debating with reality.  By the time my oil's changed both towers have collapsed and Flight 93 has crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania.  

I pull out of Goodyear and head straight to the high school to collect my 14-year old daughter Claire.  The high school's crowded.  Lots of parents milling about in the office.  I get signed in then head up to the second floor, to Claire's history class.  

A tv's on in a darkened classroom.  There's no talking. The teacher gives me permission to take Claire.  I hug her in the hall then we head over to the grade school, for 11-year-old Molly.  It's also packed, noisy.  We go home.  I'd spoken to a neighbor earlier.  Her husband's an emergency room physician.  They are busy packing up to...I guess escape to Ohio, where his parents live.  Maybe he knows something, I wonder, maybe we should leave too...

I get the television out of the basement.  We were having a tv-free autumn.  Until today.  Finally find the aerial.  It takes me half an hour to set it up.  Claire, Molly and I watch the grim images.  “Why do they hate us so?” Claire asked.  I don’t know.

Jim calls again.  Government workers have been told to go home.  Jim walks from his office three blocks north of the White House to his ride pool driver Vickie's workplace, near the Convention Center. The streets of Washington are grid-locked with people--driving and walking.  Jim sees the smoke of the Pentagon, blackening the air in the distance like a general unease, everyone wondering where the next target will be.  Jim agrees with Vickie to wait a couple of hours until traffic subsides.  

The girls walk a block to our friend Doug's house.  They're looking after his golden retriever Bo.  His father is terminally ill, in hospital, in western Pennsylvania, near Shanksville.  We have two whippets so when they arrive back with Bo the girls take the three dogs go out to our fenced yard.  Junior gallops around like King of the Wind, showing off.  Bo and Emmy ignore him while they frolic, sniff the bushes, flop down on the grass.  For a short while they take our minds off the disaster befalling our world, and the uneasy District, 25 miles to the east.

Doug calls. He tells me about his father's regime then shares a rumor at the hospital, that the passengers on flight 93 had revolted against the terrorists.  And that plane was destined to hit either the White House or the Capitol.  It sounds wild, like everything else this Tuesday.  And it's only noon.  By afternoon the phone system is overloaded.  Family and friends who did manage to get through had to repeatedly redial.

Jim arrives home by 2 p.m.  He says it was the strangest ride he's ever had on Highway 66, near our house.  They were the only car on the road.  Normally a quarter of a million drivers use it throughout the day.  I realize I hear no faint hummmmmmm in the distance, no semis shifting gears, no sirens.  Normally a low level urban irritant, today one more sign of things going awry.

I tell Jim about the evacuating neighbors, wondering if we should go too, take the girls, the three dogs, go to a motel. "Are you kidding?" he asks.  "I have to go to work tomorrow."

Go to work he did.  There were soldiers with automatic rifles posted at every corner in that part of the District, and for weeks afterwards.  The FAA suspended all air travel indefinitely.  We live 10 miles from Dulles Airport, where Flight 93 originated.  Weekdays, at 6, 8 and 10 a.m., 3, 8 and 11 p.m. a jet a minute lands and takes off, plus many others throughout the day and night.  A nuisance most times but no jet sounds at all was eerie. Oddly I missed the roar of jet engines.

Slowly the extent of damages unfolded.  Doug's father died September 12th.  He was thankful his father never knew about what happened on 9-11.  Although I don't relive each 9-11 anniversary as thoroughly as I have here I always think about Doug and his father.

A woman from our church had been on her way to a business meeting at the World Trade Center that Tuesday morning only to get caught in traffic on one of the bridges into the city.  It took her three days to return to Virginia.  A man at church works in one of the high rise office towers near Interstate 395 across from the Pentagon.  He and several colleagues were on coffee break next to a window when they saw Flight 77 flying incredibly low in front of their building.  By the time they'd run around to the northeast side of the building the jet had crashed into the Pentagon.  

Another friend and neighbor who’s a computer expert at the Pentagon said it was the worst day of his life.  After the jet hit, amid the horror of death and mayhem, smoke and fear, he and his team had to work 36 hours straight to get the computer network operational again, in smoky, hot dangerous conditions. He was one of the heroes of 9-11, that accidental mantle few look for but somehow rise to meet when things fall apart.

A few years earlier I'd worked on a photo project at the Pentagon and enjoyed the stories the Air Force History office historian told me about the building.  It was marshy ground when Roosevelt saw the need to consolidate all the Armed Forces in one building during World War II.  It was four stories tall, one floor per force, Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and the Air Force added a fifth floor after the war.  It was built very quickly and poorly but had been undergoing extensive re-enforced rebuilding, to post-Oklahoma City standards, starting in the 1990s.  The West wall had almost been completed by 9-11 which had a profound effect on saving lives and the rest of the building from being destroyed.  Also fewer offices were occupied due to the renovation plus it was the ONLY part of the Pentagon to have a sprinkler system at that time.  

During the Cold War the center courtyard, complete with park benches and trees, had an outdoor cafe called Ground Zero.  Construction had started on the Pentagon in 1941, on September 11.

The most immediate effect of 9-11, besides sorrow and confusion, was to never again let my gas gauge get below half full.  Claire started saying, "I love you" every time she left the house, normally such thoughtful words but now tinged with disquiet.  Then I went to Chantilly Regional Library, where I usually go when I need to know something.  It's my favorite place in Fairfax County.  On days when I most long for the wide open plains of North Dakota or the forests of Minnesota I know if I ever end up back there I will long equally for Chantilly Library.  

My everyman's account of 9-11 will probably be the mildest you will read.  For this we are thankful.  Ten years later I'm still learning about people who lost everything.  There were window washers on the tower that day.  I cannot imagine what their last moments were like.  Also, two of the scores of desperate people who jumped to escape the infernos landed on firemen. 

I needed to know why the terrorists hate us.  I've spent a lot of time in the library's Dewey decimal system 300s stacks since then.  I'll share some of what I uncovered in my next blog.