We were camping in Yellowstone.
>> Sunday, September 11, 2011
I breathed in the morning mountain air, sipping my coffee on my walk through the campground. We were 23, a couple of weeks into our months-long road trip to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary, and we were camped out in Yellowstone National Park with some new friends we had met a couple of national parks ago. Mid-week and off-season, the park was quiet, but as I walked past a middle-aged couple a few sites down from us, they called out to me.
The World Trade Center has been attacked. The towers were stuck by planes. They've collapsed.
It wasn't registering. I didn't understand what they could be talking about, but I ran back to our site to relay the news. John turned on the radio in our old Honda wagon to get word. The details are fuzzy now, but I remember sitting in the passenger seat, stunned and confused, door open, listening to the car radio with a sickening feeling in my stomach.
No television. No internet. No smartphone. I don't think we even had cell reception out there. It was just us and the mountains and our two new friends, one Australian and the other a Brit. They were already talking about getting out of the U.S. They didn't want to stay if shit was going to go down.
It was days before we saw any television coverage. We stopped in Idaho at John's aunt and uncle's, and after weeks of camping and road trips - only having been in the company of the mountains and trees and rivers and each other and our Aussie and British friends - we reeled from the culture shock of 24-hour coverage airing replays from the attacks and immediate aftermath.
I wonder, still, how differently I have (or haven't) processed what happened that morning, having heard hours afterwards rather than as it unfolded. Watching re-run coverage, as if it was a movie. Having soaked in the news prior to watching the images. Living those early days in relative isolation, as opposed to surrounded by the immediate solidarity of communities around the country.
There's a lot to think about surrounding 9/11. Ten years out, the day can't be remembered without stirring up conversations that lead to politics and war and questions and not enough answers. But I'm going to hold off on those conversations, and instead I'm just going to remember the lives that were lost that day, and the many, many, far too many lives that have been and continue to be lost in the ten years since.
Will you share with me here? Where were you, who were you with, when you heard?
5 comments:
I was walking home from class-- stopped by the mailroom and someone told me.
I had to work that day and one of my clearest memories is rocking babies to sleep (I worked in a daycare), crying as we listened to the news on the radio.
i was living in hawaii so my ex and i were awoken by the phone at five am by friends calling from california. we sat in front of the tv all day in shock. once i went to work that afternoon (i was managing a cafe) it was painfully obvious that living on an island has its drawbacks. there is an element of distance that people live by because you feel as though none of it affects you. the biggest reaction i saw was that everyone wanted to move on, not talk about it...it was so far away that it didn't really affect us. that's when i realized i had to leave the island.
*and i know that not everyone felt this way but there is definitely a level of disconnect that living in paradise brings with it.*
A newly minted New Yorker (I moved here from GRap in April, 2001), I was two blocks north of the Towers on 9/11/01. From my 11th floor office I saw, and felt, the plane hit the South Tower. Then from the street in front of our office (where we thought we'd be safer), I watched both Towers burn. I saw people waving, begging for help, before some of them them jumped when it became too much. I heard them hit the pavement.
And then we were evacuated by the FBI and I walked home. I felt the Towers fall (it felt like how the recent earthquake felt) and got bad information from a dude listening to his car radio at 23rd and 5th that "they" were attacking Chicago, Washington, LA, and that my friend who worked in the Sears Tower was in danger, if he wasn't already dead.
Cell phones weren't working, so I couldn't check on my friend in Chicago, or my family in Michigan, or my brother in Germany. When I finally made it home I emailed everyone I knew to check in. And then I slept. And then I woke up and watched the news, and I cried. And then I slept again only to wake up and smell the horrible smell that permeated NYC for weeks and months afterward.
And now the new tower is going up...
I was a brand-new freshman in college -- two weeks on campus. I was getting ready for my com 101 class when I saw the first bit of news.
By the time my 9 a.m. had ended, we knew it was more than an accident. We heard that Chicago was next. And it was a long day of trying to get a hold of my police officer mother and firefighter father. My heart still reels.
I was student teaching at a high school in my area. I walked to library to get a resource just as the first plane hit. I rushed back to the classroom to turn on the TV and we witnessed plane two. There was a young man in my class who's father was in NYC for business and was supposed to be at the towers - no one knew that. He was very quickly escorted out of the classroom. His father survived thankfully. A day we'll never forget.
Post a Comment