Backstage

9/11

Its two years today... The skyline still doesn't look right to me after all this time... It probably never will again...

Two years ago, I woke up, just in time for the radio to give the first report that a plane had hit the tower... There were no real details at that point, and being very tired, I thought "damn... how does some idiot manage to not avoid hitting the tower"... We lived in county without major terrorism issues then, so why would I consider that... So I got up to get ready to go to work, and turned on the TV to catch what I could before I had to run out the door... After a quick shower, I noticed there was footage of the burning tower on the tube, so I kinda stopped to watch for a moment, and right then, the second plane hit... I remember the anchor asking the co-anchor if that had been something from the first tower... To me it was obviously another plane, but then I was looking at a 32" TV, not a little prompt monitor they had... I instantly thought, "shit... fucking terrorists...".  Right on the heals of that thought was, "damn, I better get my ass in gear, its going to be a bitch getting around the city now"... I was, that day, scheduled to work on a changeover at the 26th street armory for fashion week... It never occured to me that a) they would close down the city access, b) that the towers would come down, c) the 26th st armory is an air defence armory and would be like kicking over an ant hill, d) life in the US had just changed forever...

So off I went... I was in my truck listening to the radio reports, stuck in traffic on the NJ turnpike... You could see the smoke from my apartment in central Jersey, and I could see the towers clearly from my place in the traffic... I wasn't stareing at them, just kinda glanceing at them when traffic stopped... In one of those glances, I saw the first tower come down... It didn't seem real... From the distance, there was no noise, just the slow motion disappearance and the cloud... My mind had still not registered the reality of all this... I took the time then to call my employeer for the day to give them a heads up I was going to be late, because traffic was a mess... Not long later, the radio said that the tunnels were closed... Perhaps they'd been closed before then, but I hadn't caught it... Then the second tower went down... I hadn't moved much more than a mile or two, so I had a good view again... There we all sat in our cars, trying to get to our little bit of the rat race... But every single person was in shock I think... The police had closed all the exits from the Turnpike, so we all had to just keep crawling north... The first exit open was Intersate 80, and only westbound... Theat was fine for me, my parents live up in that area... That's where I headed untill the traffic eased out and I could get back to my apartment...  Half my family had just flown over to England... So my father and I just sat there watching the TV, and replay after replay of the horrors... Eventually, I decided to give it a shot getting home... I took the western route that is longer, but would not suffer from the number of people that had gathered along the sides of the roads where you could see the skyline and the cloud...

I was fortunatle that day in that I didn't know anyone there very well... There were a couple people I had met in passing that were working up in Windows on the World... There was another person I found out months later that had grown up two doors down from me... There were a couple people I vaguely knew that lived down in that area of the city... They were fine... The two from Windows, and my former neighbor, were not...

The places I had been working that week got turned into other things... We were setting up the fashion shows for fall market week... There was a tent on one of the peirs that apparently got taken over for the EMT's and triage... The 26th st armory naturally went back to being an armory, as well as a shelter from what I was told... There were tents further up town that I was told were going to be used as a morgue... I didn't get into town for months after 9/11 so I'm not sure those stories are true... That's just what the people that had hired me told me at some point...  I know that all the equipment was basically trapped in the tents and armory for some time untill techs could get in there and get it down...

I'm not sure I've ever really resolved everything I felt that day... The horror... The anger... The sorrow... The fear... I do know, that for the most part, yes, the NY/NJ area took a hell of a hit emotionally, but living through that hell brought out the best in people... I do not want to think about the few people that refused to be human then... The manager at Starbucks that wanted to charge the EMT's and Firefighters for bottled water... (after hearing that I never set foot in a Starbucks again) I prefer to think back to people opening their places to help others, people donating just about everything and anything including their time to help...  I think back to the attitude that "yes... it hurts... but damn it, we're going to get through this, and not live in fear"... 

I still can see the images of the day clearly when I want to... They will live with me untill I die I suspect...