There is not much I can say here that hasn't been said earlier and better. I can only relate my own experiences from the day.
I got to work right around 8:30 AM, as I usually do. I work in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Ridgefield is less than 2 miles from the George Washington Bridge but the traffic is really not as bad as I thought it would be when I took the job. It takes me about 35 - 40 minutes to travel the 25 miles from my house to work. I may have been a minute or two late this day because Bobby has started rebelling to being left at daycare. He used to be able to be dropped off with no problem, but lately he is being very needy and grabby and bursts into tears every time I even look at the exit of the daycare center. So it takes me a couple of extra minutes every day. Anyway, I unpacked my laptop and had logged onto our network by around 8:40 AM.
Even though you all know me as such an industrious young lad, I usually start the day by going to a handful of my regular web sites that I like to visit. I was at the ESPN Baseball Challenge fantasy dealy thing that I do. The message board at this site usually is filled with topic headings like "Which PS for tomrw?" and "Bonds hits 2 HRs". Today was a line that said "A plane just hit the World...". I clicked it and the body of the message was "...Trade Center". Snort. I laughed because the guy couldn't fit his whole topic in the title. "Hmmm," I thought to myself, "must have been some amateur pilot clipping the WTC with the wings of his Cessna." I figured that I could just go to CNN or MSNBC to see what happened. I opened up another browser window and typed in the URL for CNN. I got nothing. I typed in MSNBC. Nothing. I clicked one of my regular links 3WA and it loaded with no problem. Jeez, that's odd.
I start to hear other things in the background noise of my office. Lots more phones, lots of animated conversations. I pop my head out to find people streaming into the receptionist's area. We all move into our conference room. It holds the only TV in the building. It isn't hooked up to any cable. It isn't even hooked up to an antenna - either on the roof of the building or a pair of rabbit ears. Nothing. It turns out that wouldn't have made a difference, but that we didn't know that then. The only channel we could get was a Spanish language station. There were two anchors talking in rapid and amazed tones. We could only understand snippets of the broadcast. We heard "American airlines". We thought we heard "737". We still didn't have a good grasp of what was going on but we could see a big smoking hole in the side of the North tower of the World Trade Center. We were still all talking about what kind of accident it would take to have a large jet hit the towers. Then we saw the second plane hit.
The timing of things are still a little fuzzy for me. I'm not sure if we saw the second plane hit live or whether we were seeing a tape. People kept switching the TV to other channels and fiddling with the VCR and antenna connections in the back to try and get a different channel. It finally struck me that the reason we weren't even getting any snowy regular broadcast channels is because the antennas for all the New York area channels were on the towers. Someone else ran to get a radio. Just as the radio gets plugged in, we hear reports of a plane crashing into the Pentagon. We were all being forced come to terms with the fact that these were no accidents.
So we turned down the TV and watched the replay of the second plane hit the tower over and over again. The radio was tuned to either WCBS or WINS, both New York news stations. The news anchor was being rather flip. I think he was having trouble really processing the horrors that he was reporting, because he was announcing it the same way he might report on a parade or a political convention. He was very peppy and almost joking at times. He was switching between three or four reporters who were live on the scene plus one more in Washington D.C.. I guess the phone lines were still all open and on mike, because we heard one of the reporters scream "Its all coming down!" We all kind of looked at each other and then as one turned to the TV and watched the South Tower collapse into the streets of New York. At first, I was amazed that it imploded much like a building does when prepared for demolition. It seemed too perfect. I was initially happy that the top just didn't topple over taking a number of buildings with it. But then someone whispered, "there's no way they got out of there in time." Then I realized just what I had seen.
Once the concept that this was the work of terrorists fully entered my brain, all I could think of was "what kind of biological weapons were on those planes?" "Am I breathing it already?" ( My work, by the way, is 8.61 miles from the WTC. I didn't know this at the time, but I measured it on a map a couple of days later. I knew I was close, but finding it was under 10 miles was something of a shock) At just about the time these thoughts were running through my head, my boss, the vice-president, said it was time for all of us to go home. She said "I just want to be with my kids right now". That was fine with me. I felt the same way.
I blew out of their very quickly. To get home, I drive due west on Route 80 for about 19 of my 25 mile commute. Because of the way that 80 curves, I get various glimpses of the New York Skyline on my driver side and out my back window. I was listening to Howard Stern for my news coverage. I'm sure you have since heard of how good a job he did on the air all morning. I looked out my window and saw the terrible sight of one tower amidst a huge plume of smoke and dust. The road dips at that point and I lost sight of it. I heard Robin Quiver's voice from my radio tell me that the other tower was collapsing. I came up the hill and out from behind the trees. I looked, and just like that, the other tower was gone. I saw it one second and it was gone ten seconds later. Just smoke and dust I know that I was about 15 miles away from the scene and moving away as fast as I could. Yet all I could think of was that I was one of the last people to see that tower standing.
I don't have a clever or poignant closing paragraph. I haven't really even put much of my feelings out here in this account. Still, I felt I should document what happened that day, but I still haven't sorted out what it all means to me.
