I wasn't going to. There's been an endless parade of speeches, and documentaries, and clip reels. There have been speeches and memorials and finger pointing galore.
But the thing is, it happened to me, and it belongs to me, and it's been messing with my head in various ways over the last few weeks, so I'm going to talk about it.
If you can't handle another endless rumination on where we are, five years later, no harm, no foul. I'll still love you in the morning. Hopefully, you'll still love me.
It's hard even now to talk about what happened and not feel both self-absorbed and as those I'm treading on someone else's toes. In a way, I experienced it at a distance -- I was still working nights at the time, and I was asleep when it all began -- but it changed, fundamentally, every part of my life -- where I lived, where I worked, what I did, and everything in between. Even so, I feel as distant from it in some ways as someone in Alaska or Iowa.
I was one of the lucky ones -- I was in New Jersey, safe in my own bed, when the first plane hit. I was due in Manhattan -- a city to which I did not return for nearly a year after that day -- for a meeting at 2PM that afternoon; when my father called to wake me up, moments before my editor called to do the same thing. I thought he was joking. I was furious that he'd pull such a stupid prank so early in the day. It wasn't until I heard the commotion outside the apartment that I thought I'd better take his advice and turn on a television set.
Our newspaper offices were in the World Financial Center, next door to the World Trade Center. In one of the most surreal conversations of my life, my managing editor called to 1) check my name on some giant company list as "accounted for" and 2) to inform me that I was to head to our offices in Central New Jersey where they were setting up an alternate newsroom. Ironically, we'd just had a whole year of planning for such a problem; our worries had been for Y2K, though, and we'd set up a complete back-up newsroom in North Jersey that turned out to be completely useless -- no one could get to it.
Everything about that day seems slightly unreal to me, in retrospect. I was still sleep-deprived and befuddled as I drove across New Jersey -- the only car on the road that wasn't an emergency vehicle or an Army convoy. It was a beautiful day -- cloudless, sunny, perfectly calm, and it was eerily silent. Central Jersey is in the flight path of at least three major and two regional airports; I'd never gone so long without seeing or hearing an airplane. Every station on the radio -- news, NPR, hip-hop, or classic rock -- was broadcasting wall-to-wall news: bulletins, updates, confusing rumors. My cell phone would ring and then fall silent, as friends and family tried frantically to get in touch, as I drove between overburdened cell towers. Every time, it startled me, and every time, the connection was broken long before I ever picked up a call. And all along the highway, electric signs blinked: New York City Closed. All Roads North Closed. Civil Emergency.. It seemed like a bad joke.
One of the strange things about being simultaneously in the midst of and removed from that day's events is that I have weird, fragmented memories of what happened -- and almost no visual images at all. We were trying frantically to put out a newspaper with no newsroom; hastily-set-up tvs blared wall-to-wall cable news, but no one looked up at them. We shared computers, even chairs, as exhausted IT guys struggled to set up desks on the fly. Our senior editors had hiked across the Brooklyn Bridge and set up a war room in someone's apartment kitchen; we farmed out copy editing and pre-press to newsrooms across the globe. For nearly forty-eight hours, no one left that room, except briefly -- we grabbed naps under desks and on ratty, discarded couches; we showered in the men's room, because the ladies' had no locker room; someone had a hundred pizzas delivered, and they disappeared in minutes. We were determined to put out a paper that almost no one in our main delivery area could or would receive. We were focused on that and nothing else.
We're generally a scattered and farflung organization -- many of the people I worked with every day I'd never met in person. My situation was further complicated by the fact that I'd started a new job only four months before, and had spent much of that time arguing with old-school editors and reporters to embrace the coming of the electronic age. Suddenly, we were all thrown together, cheek by jowl.
I remember one of our reporters, a guy who was best known for his impressive collection of filthy jokes, breaking down as he tried to turn his experiences into a coherent story. He'd been in the WFC when the planes hit, and had -- as reporters are trained to do -- raced across the street to the World Trade Center to get the story. He was stopped by a cop who told him, in cinematic NY cop fashion, that "Buddy, it just ain't worth it." He was convinced that cop had saved his life. He was convinced that cop had died moments later.
I remember one of our senior editors, a grumpy man wont to answering all internal phone calls by growling "what the f--- do you want now?" into his extension, coming by and patting me awkwardly on the head. "I just, you know, want to touch people. To make sure they're really there," he kept saying.
I remember reporters and editors -- a sarcastic group mostly known for their ability to find the black humor in every situation -- breaking down over and over again as they struggled to report the things they had just experienced -- waiting in vain for ambulances that never came at hospitals all over Manhattan; being swallowed alive by a blizzard of paper and office supplies; scrambling into pleasure boats pressed into evacuating the lower tip of the island. No one had a context for what was going on.
I remember flashes of the personal, too. There was never any doubt that I was fine; my father had spoken to me that morning. Nevertheless, when my mother finally got through on the phone at the office, she burst into tears and demanded I quit my job and come home.
After hours of uncertainty, I got an e-mail from a college friend's aunt in Alaska -- my friend's husband, a Marine stationed at the Pentagon, was alive; would we start an e-mail chain and pass the word? My best friend -- a high-school teacher at the time -- finally got through late in the day; one of her students had an older sister at a downtown investment bank, had we heard any news? It was moment after moment of fleeting connections with friends and strangers.
When I finally left that Friday, my whole world had changed. I couldn't get back to my house, not easily -- I ended up, at my mother's insistence, at my parents' for the weekend. My mother hadn't turned the tv off since it happened; I had hardly seen a single frame of video or film to back up the terrible things I'd read and heard. I sat on the couch in my parent's living room, drained and sleep-deprived, and hadn't even realized I'd started to shake until my father abruptly shut off the television and declared the house a news-free zone for the weekend. It was weeks before I really saw any footage at all.
In the aftermath of September 11, I had to give up my apartment and move in with my parents. For nearly two years, I commuted back and forth -- over 120 miles a day -- to our makeshift offices in New Jersey while I waited to see where I'd be working, and if my job was secure. My new job became a new job again, as we changed focus and attempted to rebuild our offices, our networks, our comfort levels.
Nearly eleven months later, I found myself in a conference room, picking through dusty boxes of personal belongings only to discover that the only thing that had been salvaged from my "new" space in our NY offices was a coffee cup that had to be thrown away because they couldn't guarantee that it hadn't been contaminated with human remains.
But it still feels like I escaped unscathed. I didn't have to live in the city for months as it struggled to rebuild. I didn't lose a loved one, or a even a job. But still, it affected -- it still affected -- so many parts of my life.
Around me, co-workers and friends struggled with far greater levels of upheaval -- people with homes and children waited in limbo for months, commuting from Connecticut and Staten Island and Brooklyn to New Jersey. Hardcore city dwellers learned to drive, and called, frantic and hysterical, at the first sign of snow. A good friend, who had shared the desk next to mine since I started at the paper, lost her baby brother -- an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald -- nine days before his wedding to her best friend's baby sister; a happy accident of fate turned unthinkable tragedy. In light of that, a little quarter-life upheaval seems like nothing.
Still, I feel like I an deeper connection to what is, admittedly, a national tragedy -- a blow against our country that every citizen felt. I've moved from angry to baffled to saddened to angry again as I've watched politicians and pundits use the effects of it to advance their own agendas. When they suggest that 9/11 widows are "lucky" in some way. When they insist that grain silos in North Dakota deserve more Homeland Security protection than the Statue of Liberty. Or the Liberty Bell. Or the Lincoln Memorial. I think that's why I nearly bit the head off someone last week who suggested that it was "unpatriotic" to disagree with President Bush -- about anything -- "in this time of war." I know it's why I'm offended every time someone suggests that we give up something -- free speech, open courts, checks and balances -- in order to keep us "safe." I've already given up quite enough, thank you.
As Somerset Maugham once wrote, If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. In the past five years, the terrible blow against our country -- against my country -- against me -- has been used time and again to try to convince us to protect America by giving up the things that make us most American -- our Constitutional principles, our sense of fair play, our belief tomorrow holds promise -- not terror -- for all its citizens.
I hadn't meant to make the personal political; I'd only meant to talk about a sharp and visceral memory. But if George Bush can do it, so can I. Five years ago, we came together as a country, we learned or re-learned that patriotism has a place for everyone. Today, I can only hope that our long-lasting legacy, our final response to such heart-breaking events, will be to re-learn that patriotism has many faces, but that it always serves America, and Americans, not politicians and their parties.
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