Five years ago today, I was in Hartford, in my second day of a week-long CICS class that Travelers had sent me to. It was boring as hell, and I wasn't getting much out of it. The first hint I got that anything was out of the ordinary that morning is when I read news online that a small plane, probably a Cessna, had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. Kind of crazy, and doubtless tragic, but not earth-shattering.
The building in which the classes were taking place was largely a training facility for Citigroup financial employees, so there were televisions set up on every floor just opposite the elevators, and they were tuned to a channel that showed stock prices and discussed the stock market. When I left the classroom for the 9:30 break and headed for the bathroom, I noticed a large crowd of people around the TV, so of course I wandered over to see what was happening.
Planes had now flown into both towers. There was a lot of silence. Nobody knew how to react or what this meant. The entire country was a bit slow on the uptake - something like this doesn't sink in immediately. Also, there were many false reports online. I heard that there was a bomb at the Pentagon, that multiple planes were headed towards Washington, D.C. and Camp David, and that two planes had crashed in Seattle. The websites of CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, and eventually even BBC were inundated with traffic and became quickly inaccessible. My main source of news became Yehoodi and Swingmonkey, two swing dance discusson boards that I frequented, one based in NYC. There, we scrambled to make sure all our friends in NYC (some of whom worked in the towers) were okay.
I also found time to email a girl I'd just gotten to know a couple weeks ago who worked in Manhattan to make sure she was okay. Her name was Linda, and two and a half years later, I would marry her.
That Friday, we were all still shaken. I'd made plans to drive down to NYC and meet up with Linda to go out dancing, where we'd planned to celebrate my birthday. Our first date. People told me that I was crazy to drive into the city three days after 9/11. I went anyway. Along I-95, there were people standing alongside the highway with flares and candles lit. Flags were hung from nearly every overpass and from many cars. In NYC, we danced, and tried for a time to forget everything that was happening. I slept on Linda's couch that night. The next morning, from just outside her apartment, you could still see the massive plume of smoke marking Ground Zero.
Many people we knew had seen terrible things. Linda's cousin was in the 60th floor of the first building hit, but made it out okay. Linda saw ash falling from the sky that day. What I remember is the ferry ride across the Hudson on what must have been 9/22/2001. The pillars of smoke were still there. And as we walked through the city, the "missing person" posters lining every wall made me want to cry. These people weren't missing - they had died in the towers.
This is my own personal experience of 9/11, which I feel compelled to write about five years after the fact. You can read others here.
We didn't believe it at first. We got a TV hooked up, and sure enough, there it was. Burning. And I remember snorting and saying, "How does some moron fly a plane that big into a building that big?!" At that point, the building was still intact, and the second tower had not been hit. I thought, 'wow, blasted tragedy, probably a couple-hundred people died.'
We all shook our heads, and there, right before our eyes, the second plane hit. And pandemonium broke out. Soon we heard about the Pentagon, the plane in the field. The we heard about nonexistent crashes. Into the Washington Post... that the Prudential had been targeted but it had failed, the Sears tower in Chicago...
We were sent home. The streets were silent. Eerily so, considering how many people were out, looking up into the sky as if awaiting the hearald of their own disaster.
I remember thinking, when Al Qaida and the Taliban took responsibility, "Let's blast that f**king place to glass and build a parking lot." The same knee-jerk response everyone else had.