September 11, 2001
I have to stop letting my brother wake me up early in the morning.
Joel did it the morning of the Challenger explosion (it was a teacher workday for us), and on September 11, 2001, he called me before my alarm went off to let me know that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Jenn and I got up and watched on television, confused as to what was going on, until an airliner crashed into the second tower.
Like everyone else in America, we didn’t know what happened next. So, I got in the car and drove into work.
Normally, my commute took me along some of the busiest highways in America — the 10 miles from our North Hollywood apartment to downtown LA, where the LA Times building is, for instance, can often take up to an hour driving the 101 during rush hour. Not on September 11. My car was one of a handful on the road; it was emptier than on Christmas morning. I scanned the radio as I drove, but no one knew anything more than they had known before I’d left for home.
It wasn’t until I was driving past the Orange County airport that I felt scared for the first time. Previously, I’d felt dizzy, disoriented, but now, driving along, I couldn’t help but wonder if one of the planes would be falling out of the sky, or diverting course on final approach to take out a densely populated Southern California city. I needn’t have worried: Like the roadways, the always-busy airways of the area were empty and eerily silent, but I had the strongest sensation of feeling a massive airliner suspended over my car by a giant hand, ready to drop when I was least expecting it. I even peeked up through the sunroof a few times.
When I got to Blizzard, the office was open — that is, it was unlocked and the alarm was off — but almost no one was there, other than a few people who lived outside Orange County and had a long enough commute that they had started driving before anyone would have been in the office to say whether or not the company was open today. Those of us there looked at each other a bit until upper management types (I honestly don’t remember who) essentially threw us out and told us to go home to be with our families.
Other than the five month period between me returning from Egypt and starting work at the Potomac News, I have never lived in New York for any great length of time, although we visited one of my father’s old fraternity roommates there regularly when I was growing up. But I find myself thinking about what happened on 9/11 all the time, especially the people aboard Flight 93 and the firefighters and police officers who died in New York City. I had been scared of imaginary airplanes falling on my head, but the FDNY casualties ran into a collapsing building, knowing they were going to die, on the off-chance of saving a stranger’s life. Those aboard Flight 93 knew they were dead, but chose to save the lives of people they would never know by facing it head on.
I wish I had some great revelation about what it all means in the long run, or that it had somehow transformed me into a better, more noble, more selfless person. But I think that mostly happens in movies.
But it’s still September 11 for me, nearly every day. I’m not scared now — indeed, rural America is a singularly unattractive target for terrorists — but I find myself mourning all the lives lost that day and the days after all the time.
Not forgetting is the very least we can do.
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