Floating Papers and Gray Flowers: 9 / 11 in Remembrance

I was there. I have never written about it or been able to watch even one documentary about it. But it has been 25 years, and it’s time.

The first thing that caught my attention that morning was the silence as I stepped on to the street from the subway station near Wall Street. I seemed to have walked into a movie scene that was frozen in time. Cars were not moving, and the people had simply stopped in the middle of the street, and were all staring up, in the same direction. The New Yorkers, as a rule, don’t look up, but only to the space directly in front of them, as they are always busy, on their way to somewhere. This time was different. I followed their gaze and saw that in my estimation, a fairly nearby office building was on fire. In reality, I was almost about 4 blocks from the towers. It was difficult to assess the distance due to the amount of thick smoke and fire coming from the scene. Otherwise the sky was crystal clear and it was the most beautiful autumn Tuesday morning. 

I had no idea what had happened. Smart phones weren’t invented yet. I thought that there was simply a very bad fire nearby, and that I better get to my office. I figured they would eventually evacuate our office building if needed. But as I gazed upon the faces of the people on the street, clearly on their way to work, they looked stunned, and very serious. The New Yorkers have seen it all, and rarely react to anything, so I already got an inkling that this was no ordinary building fire. 

I decided to go to my office which was on the 16th floor of a 20 floor office building. In the elevator a coworker told me that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Neither of the towers had yet collapsed. 

As I got to my desk, I again saw something very unusual. I had a window view of the Brooklyn Bridge and saw hundreds of people crossing it by foot, leaving Manhattan. I started to think about leaving the building and following those people. 

But first I tried to reach my husband who was working at the ABC television station at the time. I couldn’t reach him because they were obviously busy covering the situation. I then decided to leave a message to the answering machine at home letting my husband know that I was ok and that I was trying get home. As I was leaving the message, I noticed some office papers floating directly past by my window. Again, this was highly unusual because I was on the 16th floor… 

The white sheets of paper floated past my window, very slowly, like some ghostly figures. It was one of the oddest, loneliest and eeriest sights so far. Those papers had been on someone’s desk less than 20 minutes ago. 

Right when I put the desktop phone receiver down, I felt the entire building shake so hard that I almost fell off the office chair. It felt like an earthquake. I was quite shaken by it. I walked to my two coworkers’ office across the hallway. Their office was closer to the towers and their windows faced towards them. We started discussing what to do next. I expressed that I wanted to leave the building, especially because I had seen so many people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. One of my coworkers made the point that we were most likely safer inside the building than outside of it.

As I started to respond, I looked past them and saw a huge, gray wall of dust and debris that was heading straight towards us at a stunning speed. The wall of dust looked so dense, it would surely break the windows. I said; “then what is THAT?”. My coworkers looked at the direction I was pointing, and without a word, we all started running. This was the stuff of Hollywood disaster movies. Except that we were actually experiencing it.

The entire building was quickly surrounded by light, gray dust. The windows didn’t actually break, probably due to our distance from the towers. We realized that taking the elevator could be dangerous, and took the stairs instead. One of my coworkers was breathing heavily behind me as we were running down the stairs. This is another detail that I can recall with unusual clarity, as if it happened just yesterday.

We stopped at the eighth floor, because people had gathered at a conference room to watch live TV. At that point the full severity of the situation really started to dawn on me. I saw that one of the towers had fallen and realized that this is what we had just experienced. On the way down, we encountered some people who were in shock and just sobbing in the stairs uncontrollably. Everybody had their own, unique response to this traumatizing event.

About 10 minutes in watching the live coverage with maybe 20-30 people in the conference room, we watched the other tower fall. We all gasped in shock. That too, felt like an earthquake, but slightly less so, because I was now 8 floors down from the earlier incident. But this time, the debris surrounded the building within minutes, and was so dark and dense, that as I tried to look out the window, I couldn’t see almost anything. The day had momentarily turned into night. The feeling was uncomfortably complete; there was no chance the towers would recover from this, ever. They had literally turned into dust.

This lasted for a couple hours. The dust settled a bit, enough to see out. Eventually I left the building with my coworkers. We covered our mouths and nose with wet fabric. 

Stepping outside was surreal, because every surface was covered with at least a few inches of gray dust and debris. There was no color anywhere to be seen. The world had turned from a beautiful autumn day into a war zone in less than half a day. I distinctly remember seeing a flower stance at a nearby deli, and all the previously colorful flowers were now gray. 

We walked past the thickest debris towards the river, and joined some other office worker groups and residents that the authorities were already directing out of downtown. At some point we walked through Chinatown. I remember the eerie silence as everybody, including many restaurant workers, were simply standing quietly in the middle of the street and staring past us towards the fallen towers. We, on the other hand, looked past them, towards uptown, hoping to get out of downtown as soon as possible. Uptown looked serene and beautiful, as it was an ideal autumn day, whereas the scene behind us looked like the gates of hell had been opened. 

I eventually got in touch with my husband with my very first cell phone. I had agreed to meet with him at his work uptown. He suggested that I not walk over any of the bridges, because the rumors were circulating at his TV job, that New York was under attack and that maybe the bridges were next to go. 

At some point I jumped on a bus that was randomly heading uptown. My coworkers and I just scattered to different directions to go home, one by one, without saying much. I had no bus ticket and nobody asked for it. Any vehicle that was still running at all, would just pick anyone they could to get everyone out of downtown. At that point I was running on autopilot and the memories are less clear. All I remember was the general sense of urgency for everyone to get out of downtown.

It still took me another few hours to reach uptown. I took a break from walking and stopped by a diner around 60th street and Broadway. I had water and a cup of soup. I was surprised how normal everyone looked and acted; people were eating and laughing. I wasn’t sure if they knew yet what had happened. It felt extraordinarily strange, because I felt so traumatized and numb, while the other customers behaved as normal.

I eventually met with my husband and together we took the subway home. I had never been so grateful to step out of the Bedford Avenue station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At home, I took off my dusty clothes and threw them all in the outside garbage bin, including my shoes. 

The Aftermath 

The financial district stopped functioning because all the utility services had been shut off for obvious reasons. But the office building that I worked in, had a generator of its own, so it was ready function again by the end of the week. I didn’t feel I could ever go back to the financial district, let alone to work, at first. But by the end of the second week, I went back to the office first for half a day, and then every day.

Getting back to the daily routine itself was actually comforting, which is why I chose to go back. It was also comforting to be surrounded by people who had experienced the same as me. Being anywhere else, with anyone else, did not reflect how I was feeling inside. I felt more sane with my coworkers than with anybody else. Oddly though, we didn’t talk about much what happened. It was a strange, unwritten rule that everybody seemed to have signed. We talked a lot about what might happen in the country next, but nobody talked about the actual event. Because there were no words. That is what a total loss of control feels like.

But when I did speak about the towers with other people outside the office, I could immediately tell if somebody had been there or not. Everybody had a story about where they had been at that moment. But unless you had actually been at the scene, particularly later on, I wasn't really interested to hear it. There was a big difference talking to people who had been there, walked through the dust, compared to those who had seen it on TV, even if they lived in Manhattan. It was as if we who were actually there, had been marked somehow.

There were of course many people who had experienced a lot worse than me, those who had barely survived. The firm I worked for arranged voluntary group therapy sessions for the workers. There I heard from a few people who were the last people to come out alive of the subway tunnels near the towers as they collapsed behind them. They were still in acute distress. Then there were those who saw people jumping out of the towers, escaping the fires. They too, were in their own trauma category. I realized that I could never fully really understand their experience, in the same way those who merely saw everything live on TV could never fully understand me.

The authorities soon claimed that the air was clean enough. We all knew that to be a lie, but it was comforting to pretend to believe that maybe the air wasn’t at least as bad as we thought. Yet, the fires alone didn’t completely stop burning for 5-6 weeks. It is difficult to comprehend how big the towers were. There was simply no way the air wasn’t filled with a combination of several toxins. The assurances from the authorities were more like a pat in the back, and like somebody handing you a bandaid, when you have been run over by a truck. We wanted to believe them, but in the back of our minds we all knew better. It was simply common sense. What was insulting was the authorities’ insistence that the air quality was just fine. It would have been better if they would have admitted that they had never experienced anything like this, and didn’t know anything for sure.

I recall even about three weeks in, every time when the wind turned to the direction of my office building, a sharp, burning smell so strong it made my eyes water, would reach inside our offices. We were handed regular face masks at work. The firm management of course only followed what the authorities had officially told them.

Most of us understood that we were taking a risk by staying to work downtown. The big (and small) Wall Street corporations were not ready or willing to simply shut down or move their operations elsewhere. Most firms had no contingency plans at the time, because what happened was too incomprehensible to even imagine. Remote work did not exist. The price tag of shutting down downtown was clearly too big for the city and the corporations.

There was also the feeling that New York is the symbol of freedom, and that it cannot, and will not ever be stopped. I was and am a proud New Yorker and shared this feeling wholeheartedly. It may sound foolishly proud. But actually, it is about the special feeling that every long term resident of New York carries. If you made your way there, and managed to make a living there; you are taking part of something special. This city doesn’t care where you come from, it only asks that you give it everything you’ve got. And then, you either make it, or not. But you will get you know yourself, and what you are capable of. You come to your own in New York, like millions of people before you.

But had the authorities been honest, we could have at least been more proactive getting proper facemasks, or at least have actual facts about the air quality. Then each person would have been able to make a more informed decision whether to stay in downtown or not. Two of my coworkers, who were not even in that day, passed away from cancer at a young age.

The rage I felt towards the terrorists that did this was oddly personal. THIS is the city you chose to hurt? The one city that would have allowed for you to express your difference of opinion, peacefully. I understand that to them, New York represented the ultimate symbol of western capitalism and everything it stood for. But to ordinary New Yorkers, this terrorist act was a dagger and an insult deep into the heart of this beautiful, tough mistress of a city that in our minds, represents freedom to everybody, everywhere.

New York is the one city in the world that asks not where you have been, but who you want to become. She welcomes all, even those who don’t agree with it. If you don’t like it, start working on to change it, but only by playing by the humanities common rules. Thou shalt you not kill.

Rockin’ in the Free World

About half a year later, I attended a concert by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at Madison Square Garden. As an encore, Neil Young performed the song he had written in 1989, “Rockin’ in the Free World”. It isn’t even a complimentary song about America, but rather ironically points out its flaws. Yet, that is precisely the point. The United States is based on the idea of freedom of opportunity; it is not perfect, but a work in progress, and the journey certainly continues.

At that moment in time that song perfectly captured what New Yorkers were feeling. The crowd started cheering with such vigor that the noise became louder than in any other concert I have experienced before or since. It became an entity of its own. I felt that we were chanting a sacred chant for the sake of the whole world: as if the freedom of all humanity was at stake. It was one of the most healing moments of my life. New York had taken a hit for the rest of the world, but it would never surrender the dream of freedom for everybody, everywhere - however illusionary and imperfect that dream may be. New York is built on the hopes of millions of people arriving there for centuries, looking to come to their own.

25 years later

It took me 25 years to write this down. Some of the moments of that day have stayed frozen in time and crystallized in my mind, like some strange talisman that carries all the world’s pain and wisdom inside of them. They have become almost precious in their odd, horrifying beauty, because they are a reminder of how little control we actually have over our lives. So why worry, about anything? But then, of course, life moves on, and nothing is that simple.

Today, on the 25th year of remembrance, I wish to remember and honor all the people who lost their lives that day, and because of it, still years after it. And to those who lived to tell.

You are all part of the story of New York, its hopes, dreams and its nightmares. It is a story that continues for as long as humans exist: a dream to start over, somewhere where you are only asked: who do you want to become?

Keep on rockin' in the free world.