The anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks will always be tied to the anniversary of my moving to Nebraska. I'd only arrived a few days earlier, the bulk of my belongings still en-route from Boston. As the movers closed up the gate of the semi, the man in charge, a native of South Dakota cheerily shouted, "See you in America." It was a few years before I really understood that it was less a joke, and more an ideology that doesn't view the Northeast as part of the United States.
Everything would have seemed strange bordering on unreality, terrorist attack or not. I was unprepared to hear hunters in those first early mornings until someone explained Dove season opens on September 1st. We lived on a farm adjacent to a wildlife management area that permitted hunting. I got familiar with the various dates for deer, turkey, ducks by waking to the echo of shots that always sounded oddly metallic, as though a stray shell had hit the quonset hut.
To experience an event like 9/11, something new and terrible in a place that was so very old, ( if not exactly tethered in another time, had bits of life symbolically time-capsuled) was for lack of a better word, peculiar. Would it have felt the same in Boston, or Chicago? I can't imagine how it possibly could have. I must have seemed as a newborn, unceremoniously ripped from the dark, warm, and familiar into the sharp cool terrifying clinical brightness of a delivery room, or a Menards hardware store in Fremont, Nebraska. I was buying a bookcase to assemble as I awaited delivery of my things.
In 2001 there were no smart phones. I don't think I even had a mobile yet. En-route to Menards I saw a State Trooper make a u-turn, and go racing who knows where. Maybe an accident? A medical emergency? A child fell down a well? Who would have, possibly could have, imagined a terror attack on that scale? I arrived at the hardware store completely unaware that the beautiful September morning with the brightest blue skies I'd ever seen (we'd later learn there was a high pressure system over the country that resulted in most of the US having the same visual memory of the day) would be taking a terrible turn.
Someone set a small television set up near the front of the store and a few men stood wordless, expressionless, watching the far away images that seemed nearly impossible to translate into any familiar words. We describe people as being struck dumb, gobsmacked, wordless, but there's really no term that can quite capture the limitations of spoken language, and the wide understanding of situational silence. New York was alien, it might as well have been an island in Micronesia.
I saw black smoke first. The familiar voice of newscaster Peter Jennings talking about the Pentagon being hit. The Pentagon. It made no sense. The Pentagon, built to be impenetrable was alight. Hit with what? It made no sense. The live cameras cut back and forth, New York, then the first tower, Jennings announced, was, "Gone." Gone? Gone? How can a building be, gone? There was film. The images of that terrible cascade, floor by floor, gone.
I bought the bookcase. The cashier, in some state perhaps not shock but still very much a state of something, spoke in a tone better suited to whispering in church,
"There's another plane down now in Pennsylvania."
I bought the bookcase, the credit card processed as though Wall Street wasn't presently burning-that's capitalism, baby! An ordinary, the most ordinary thing. A purchase, information is wired somewhere, the Pentagon has been hit, the first tower is gone, there's a plane down in rural Pennsylvania, and I bought a bookcase at Menards in Fremont, Nebraska.
Listening to NPR (National Public Radio) on the long drive back to the farm it was starting to fall into a narrative that at least followed, even if still incomprehensible. At home I hooked up the small black and white portable television I'd thought to pack in the car, not the moving van. Peter Jennings was still there, fielding live telephone calls from frantic people seeking word about their loved ones. "She worked on the 25th floor", "He was at a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World." Within days the Missing leaflets would go up across Manhattan, but on September 11th, 2001 it was just people dialing in to ABC News and Peter Jennings, completely unprepared for that sort of live television trying to help. I watched, ate some powdered sugar doughnuts I'd bought at a gas station earlier that morning, something I've not eaten since, and put together the bookcase.
I've written before, how a plane flew low over the farm accompanied by fighter jets. Standing on the front lawn, looking up I didn't know it was Air Force One on the way to bring President Bush to a secure location at STRATCOM. I knew it was something, though in hindsight it was a terrible idea to run outside for a look. I knew they weren't crop dusters.
Unprompted, people went to donate blood. That was probably the last time I can remember the country acting together, as Americans. Short lived as it was, it did demonstrate we know how to be decent when the occasion calls. It didn't take long for conspiracy theories to start, but on September 11th 2001, people in the US, still slightly disoriented by the day's events, went to give blood.
I've lived in Nebraska 23 years this week. Social media and smart phones have obliterated any sense of ever being alone, far away, in a place where nothing happens, good or bad. My grocery store carries several varieties of Korean chili paste now, the world is much closer than it was on 9/11. I no longer feel the uneasy newness I did in 2001. I fit in, giving the "one finger wave" to passing cars, complaining about weather, the cost of fuel, and saying, "Ope, gonna just scooch by 'ya" in the aisles of Target. 9/11 and the wars that followed for two decades seem almost ordinary. A memorial, flags at half-staff, an ordinary day for those of us that didn't lose someone. Nothing to see here, move along now.
There's no point to this post other than noting how the two anniversaries are intertwined. The world that existed on September 11, 2001 will be foreign to people born after, both in technological advances, and in the national security changes that followed. There was no Homeland Security, no TSA checkpoints. I once rolled my eyes at the suggestion 9/11 was, "When everything changed." Perhaps not everything, that's a bit too sweeping. Still, of all the things that changed, the most striking is how we, as people changed. If only we might have held on to a bit of that terrible day when unable to do much else for others, people did the most human, decent thing possible, and gave blood. Fast forward to the present and we can't get people to wear a mask when they're sick.
It only took a few hijackers and a couple decades.
