My 9/11 Story

Living overseas, I've actually missed most of the media-encouraged remembering of the five year anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington, but I've heard a few podcasts and read a few stories online. In the interest of contributing to the overload -- and since I lived in Washington on 9/11 -- here's my story:

I was heading for Milwaukee the morning of September 11, where I would be working at the National Newspaper Association's annual convention and trade show. My flight, as I remember, was due to depart around noon, so I was home watching the Today Show that morning at a time when I usually would have been on the subway on my way to work.

After the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I called my boss and told him to turn on the TV. While we were talking, the second plane hit. It was all so strange, and my mind -- like so many others' -- hadn't really caught on to the terrorism angle yet. Looking at my watch, I thought to myself that I should probably leave for the airport a little early, as there might be extra security checks that morning.

At that point, I never would have thought that the airport would be closed and that some of my coworkers, who were already in Milwaukee, were going to be stranded in the midwest for a few days. One of those coworkers is from New York; her father worked in the World Trade Center. (He was okay, fortunately.)

So, I grabbed my box and my suitcase, hailed a cab and headed south through the streets of Washington, bound for the airport. The cabbie was listening to WTOP, Washington's all-news radio station. He appeared to be Middle Eastern, and I found that I didn't know what to say to him, even after he said it was a terrible thing that happened in New York.

We were on the Rock Creek Parkway and had just rounded the curve by the Kennedy Center when we saw the huge plume of dark smoke rising across the river. Although we didn't know it at the time, a plane had hit the Pentagon just moments before we came around the curve. The top of the plume was still well-defined, and the crash had not yet been reported on WTOP.

This was where I made my second foolish decision.

"Do you want to go home?" the cabbie asked.

"Nah, let's keep going," I said, partly out of a sense of duty to get to Milwaukee, and partly because I wanted to see what was going on, rather than watch it on TV.

A few minutes later, he dropped me off at the airport and immediately picked up a new fare. They had just locked the doors to the terminal, and the guy who grabbed my cab was one of the lucky ones who could get out of the area quickly. My cab must have been one of the last ones to get onto the airport property before they shut down the access roads and herded us all to the Metro station, where I waited with my box and my bag for a train to show up. (I had avoided Metro that morning specifically because of my box and my bag, and here I was, with both of them, waiting for a train.)

I tried to call Mom, I tried to call Shelly, I tried to call my boss, who was only five or six miles away, but none of my calls would go through. Eventually, a train showed up, we crowded on, and went just two stops, stopping before the Pentagon. We went back above ground, where Metro was organizing buses to another subway station. The roads were chaotic that morning, and my bus driver had to pick his way through side streets and alleys to make any progress at all. The trip between subway stations, which should have taken 20 minutes or so, took nearly three hours.

Once aboard the bus, I finally was able to get a call through to Mom. Not knowing how long it would take to complete another call, I had her call Shelly and my boss, just to let them know that I was okay. I've thought back on this many times since 2001 and thought, of course I was okay. I wasn't at the Pentagon, and there were no other attacks in Washington, so why wouldn't I be okay? But being on the bus, all I knew was rumor from those people who managed to make phone calls: a bomb had exploded at the State Department, a plane had hit the White House, the towers in New York had collapsed and people had jumped 90 stories to their death.

That evening, walking down Connecticut Avenue, talking to Shelly on the phone, Washington was eerily quiet. There were few cars on the road; people were walking and talking to each other, watching the fighter planes overhead. I began grinding my teeth in my sleep, a response to stress that lasted for three or four months afterwards, and doing some permanent damage. I watched Sabrina, the Teenage Witch Goes to Europe, or something like that, on TV Friday night, simply because it was the first non-9/11 program to be on my non-cable-equipped TV since Tuesday morning.

I eventually made it home, some five hours after I had left for the airport. It was a traumatic day for me, but it was nothing compared to what others went through.