The last time I was in Manhattan was 1999. My friends and I had gone down to the WTC one morning, hoping to go up to Windows on the World. The line-up was incredibly long, even at that hour, so we decided against it. Before we left, though, I remember standing at the foot of one of the towers and looking straight up in amazement at the sheer size of it…
The morning of 9-11, I had a part-time admin job at a hospital. I arrived at work just after 9 and my friend who worked there, who had also been on that NYC trip with me, turned from her desk and said a plane had just hit one of the towers. I had an unusual hobby in those days: commercial aviation disasters. My interest in the subject had stemmed from a flight crew training and management viewpoint, and had grown into a general interest in commercial aviation policy. So I knew a few things about technical and mechanical issues with jets at the time. I knew, too, that folks are often quick to assume it’s an act of terrorism when a plane goes down, but that there are so many other factors that can lead to accidents. Knowing of my familiarity with this subject, my friend knew I’d want to know what was happening. But like a carefully directed stage play, no sooner had she told me of the first plane, then someone else walked in through another door and said a second plane had just hit the other tower. This was immediately followed by the entrance of yet another person, who simply said, “They’re calling it an act of terrorism.” And of course, we knew that it must be so.
After listening to the radio and hearing about the other planes involved, I went down the hall to a patients lounge where they had a TV, just as the second tower fell. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then everyone in the room gasped in horror as the smoke cleared and suddenly those massive structures were no longer there. It was beyond surreal. I couldn’t help but wonder who had been in the line-up for Windows on the World that morning…
We have a good friend in the East Village. Spent the next several days trying to get hold of him to no avail. The trunk lines to NYC were completely clogged every time we called. Finally, toward the end of the week, he managed to call us to let us know he was okay, thank goodness. He had been spending all his time helping out at Ground Zero. He and another friend posted a website with dozens of spooky photos of the surrounding streets all covered in white ash. One of the strangest things, he said, was the absence of planes in the sky that week, and how eerily quiet New York was.
I basically stopped watching television after that week. I just couldn’t stand the blatant propaganda, hype, and fact-twisting blather that was being spat out over the airwaves. What little I did watch was restricted to the BBC and CBC, who seemed to be the only services offering something approximating balanced journalism. These days, I do not watch TV at all and I haven’t missed it one tiny bit.
Whatever the awful politics surrounding that disaster, and the terrifying fall-out that ensued in other parts of our world, let us send peace and love to everyone who lost someone that impossibly bright, sunny morning, conditions that pilots refer to, ironically, as “severe clear.”
