As I don't drive, I was riding the bus to work on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. My routine at the time, since there was no direct route between the town in which I lived and the town in which I worked, was to take a bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and then another one from there back into Jersey to my job. That particular morning, I was running late and missed my regular bus to New York, and then there was a water main break on Tonnelle Avenue along the route of my bus to work, so instead of leaving the City on a 7:40 AM bus as usual, I didn't depart until 8:35 or so, and I missed being in New York when the first plane hit by less than fifteen minutes.
We'd almost arrived at my stop when I heard, over my earphones (I was listening to Elvis Costello at the time on my iBook), some loud but unclear announcement being made from the bus dispatcher to the drivers. I took off my earphones for a sec to hear the driver tell us that, apparently, a plane had hit the World Trade Center. That was all he knew, and it was all I knew until I got to work about ten minutes later. As I was walking toward the building, I saw other people looking into the sky behind me, so I turned, to see an incredible plume of smoke rising. (My office is maybe five miles from the site, though I can't see the actual skyline.) I still thought that it must have been a smallish plane, couldn't have been a jetliner, and that it was some horrid accident.
When I arrived at work, my co-workers were stunned, and waiting for me to find out what I could from the Internet. It was now maybe 9:30 AM, and there was very little info available on the 'Net, other than confirmation that SOMEthing had happened, and when the news came through that a second plane had hit the other tower, it became obvious that it had been no accident. As the morning stumbled along dazedly, more details, and pictures that couldn't be believed, started making their way onto the Web, and we learned that the Pentagon had also been hit, and that there were planes unaccounted-for that may have still been heading for targets. I realized that the Twin Towers would come down; I feared, however, that they'd fall over, not straight down. As horrible as it was that the heat made them collapse, I'm glad they were built so strong that they didn't topple over instead. But I knew there'd be a huge death toll...
My capitalist pig of a Company president finally agreed to let everyone go home in the early afternoon. No one could concentrate on work anyway, and the phone and fax lines were mostly down. I couldn't take a bus into or out of the City anymore, but one of my co-workers kindly offered to drive me home, and I accepted; we could see the horrible smoke still pouring into the sky along the trip. Several of my friends offered to pick me up at work also, knowing my predicament. I started thinking about my friend Alex; I knew she worked in Manhattan, but I wasn't sure exactly where, and as we only knew each other from the bus rides into NYC every morning, I didn't have any way of getting in touch with her. I found out several days later that she was fine, thankfully. In fact, incredibly enough, I don't know anyone who was there at the time, though I do know people who've lost friends or relatives.
Anyway, I got home OK, and made and received some phone calls, walked to Burger King for something to eat, and went to bed early. It was too numbing, and I knew that the world was going to be a different place after this. I just hoped that there wouldn't be too many more innocent deaths to follow.
Even now, it's sobering to read my own words and remember how that day felt, and the days and weeks after it. And my own story is unremarkable, one of countless, a bit more dramatic than some but so much less harrowing and painful than many others. We were branded by the events of 9-11, and that brand will never be fully worn away.
No comments:
Post a Comment