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Friday, September 13, 2024

September 11,2001

 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.


 




8 comments:

  1. thank you for this post!
    even here 9/11 changed "something"...... a lot.
    want to hear my story - still present?
    we sat in a cave in a small mountain area - weserbergland. we were there to do some rockclimbing, a small group of friends. it was raining. only the next morning, when wandering into the next village for some food, we learnt about the attack - we met an other group who had listened to the car radio on the way to he woods....... and could´t believe them.
    later, in the villages little shop with pub the TV was on and we were standing in front of it like the man in your hardware store.
    we all lived in berlin back then and were somewhat relived, that we did spend the night in a rock cave in the middle of nowhere - who knows? and discussed what would happen now? world war III? we all did grew up with the scars of WWII - on people, families, buildings, landscape........
    war came - in the orient. thousends of people fled theire homes and stranded in europe - and the fascists took their chance. did you see the latest election results? its frightening!
    not to mention that war right on our doorstep......

    xxxx

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    1. I did see the election news, I am so sorry. People always want someone to blame and will vote for anyone promising to get rid of the imagined problem.
      I'd like a nice cave away from everyone for a while.

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  2. You and I have something in common. I had just made a cross-country move with my husband in 2001. That September, he and I were still surrounded by tall stacks of moving boxes in our new apartment and not yet feeling settled. I distinctly remember how confused and groggy I was on the morning of the 11th when my husband walked into the bedroom with a gravely concerned look on his face and said, "Something happened in New York that you need to know about."

    He didn't elaborate. I got out of bed, turned on the TV in the living room and sat on the floor because there was no furniture to sit on. Surrounded by twin towers of U-Haul boxes on either side of me, I watched some news coverage of the planes hitting the real Twin Towers and couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

    During the commercial break, I switched to another channel, and they were talking about a plane hitting then Pentagon and a plane going down in Pennsylvania, and I remember thinking that the journalists must have gotten the facts wrong because how could four planes go down in one day???

    Nothing made sense, so I made some coffee and then came back to the living room so I could sit on the floor and drink it between the twin towers of moving boxes in front of the TV. There are no words to describe how shocked I was when the caffeine activated my brain cells and I understood there really were four planes that went down in three different cities. And I looked at the boxes on either side of me and felt suddenly claustrophobic, like the world was closing in on me.

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    1. Oh wow, that's a coincidence. So 9/11 is a double anniversary for you too. I wonder what it is like for people born on 9/11. they've probably spent their lives hearing about it every time they're asked a birth date.

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  3. And once again, I forgot to sign my post. It's Emily.

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  4. Such a poignant, well-written post, Goody.
    I was at work at the time and was actually told what had happened by a business associate. My stepson was in Boston at the time. We knew he would be flying to New York at some point, but we had no idea when, so basically he could have been on one of those planes. Although we did have mobile phones, it was impossible to get through, so we spent a sleepless night waiting for news, which finally got through early next morning. It was my 40th birthday on the 12th, but I didn't actually have a birthday that year. That said, a friend of mine has his birthday on the 11th . xxx

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    1. That must have been agonising.

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  5. Thank you for such a thoughtful and well written post. I can remember I was off work sick that day. Himself was working in a warehouse at the time doing the graveyard shift so was home sleeping and I was downstairs watching tv so as not to keep him awake with my coughing. I remember he got up and we just sat in stunned silence watching as events unfolded.

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