It was a beautiful, cloudless, blue sky of a day. My fiancé, Liz, and I had driven through the Battery Tunnel from Brooklyn, excited to be married in less than 3 weeks. I dropped her off at 23rd Street and continued up to work at 57th Street, where I worked with my father in a small office. At about 9:15, the phone rang with the news.
I am not a 9/11 victim, nor particularly, am I a hero. This is a story about New York, and the surrounding rest of the country, as it pulled together that day and night.
My office manager told me that her mom called. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center Towers.
I was stunned. Two planes into one tower? One into each? I pictured a couple of small planes hitting a building. Then i turned on the radio, and AOL, back in the days of dial-up modems. I called Liz to tell her what I knew and told her to turn on the radio.
A friend in San Francisco found me on AOL. She asked me what I knew. I told her that if she was watching TV, then she had a better view of it than I did.
I was stunned that the first tower collapsed, about as stunned as the reporters attempting to describe it on the radio. Couldn't imagine it. I tried to imagine a skyline with just one tower. Then the second one fell, too.
Such a beautiful, cloudless day. I tried to keep working. West 57th Street was so removed from downtown that we could have been in Nebraska, as far as the effect on us was. I had lunch at the Moonrock Cafe, downstairs on 57th Street, and it was as if nothing had happened. Life went on as if there were no planes shredded by the towers, and vice versa - except that all the Starbucks were closed.
I went back to work after lunch, but Like most New Yorkers I felt compelled to do something. There was a call on the radio for blood donors. I ran to St. Lukes Roosevelt down the street. A three hour wait. I went to the Red Cross on Amsterdam. A four hour wait. everyone else wanted to do something, too. Unfortunately, there would be no survivors to pump the blood into.
My ex-wife got through to me on my cell phone as I walked back to my office. She and my children lived in Vermont, and were worried sick that we were okay. My son had left a panicked message on my voice mail. I called him back to reassure him that we were okay.
I went back to work. There was a call from the Red Cross for grief counselors. I am a Master Practitioner of NLP, so I walked back to Amsterdam & 66th, to the Red Cross, where we were all herded into a large room. Eventually, I was put on a van to a Hudson River pier, where they created a makeshift morgue. We were to counsel people coming to identify bodies. It was there, looking south down West Street, that I first saw the smoke. It reminded me of the volcano in Hawaii. "Yes, replied a policeman standing near me, "except with the volcano, we know what's in the smoke."
I had no idea what to say to someone under those circumstances, and I don't think any of the two dozen or so fellow counselors did either. It had been a Primary day in New York, that Tuesday in September, but the primary was quickly postponed. One of the other counselors joked that one of the candidates who was likely to lose was behind it all. Gallows humor.
As you might imagine, nothing happened as planned, and by about ten that night, we were told that no bodies would be brought there that night, and we were dismissed. I walked back to my office, where Liz was waiting with my dad. She had walked up from 23rd Street. My dad lived in Jersey, and was going to find a hotel for the night. Liz was working for a small start up where everyone else was on the road, and became a clearinghouse of information for those calling in to make sure everyone was okay. They were.
We got our car and started to drive home. The only bridge open across the East River was the Tri-boro, up north at 125th Street. What was most striking as we walked to our car, and then started back home was dozens of strange looking fire trucks from as far away as Pennsylvania and Delaware, and probably further. They, too, had felt the need to do something.
There were long lines at the bridge, where there was a checkpoint. Uniforms with flashlights that searched around the cars, but no one was complaining. It was all understood. Everything had changed.
We got home after two hours of additional checkpoints and detours. The sidewalk around our apartment on that warm September star-lit evening, not far from Prospect Park, was covered in ash and yellowed, brown edged, greasy scraps of people's lives and businesses. We could not take a step without stepping on a scrap of a ledger or a fragment of a computer printout. What we will never forget was the smell of burnt bodies, that stayed in the air for weeks.