story3745.xml

story3745.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

There is so much to document about all of this experience, one person writing a few paragraphs can't complete the picture. Hopefully this will be useful or interesting to someone.

I didn't lose a loved one. I had a friend who had a close call. The first part below is her story.

Instead of going home to New Jersey, she stayed at Battery Park City (next door to the WTC) at a friend's house because she was going to see me that day. She called me as I was going out the door to ask if we were still meeting later, and, had I seen the news? She said it was on tv but she had just heard and seen a plane go right overhead into the Trade Center. She nervously discussed with me whether she should leave and get a bus. I told her I didn't think there would be busses but to get out of there, pick a direction and just get away from it. She said she was going to walk towards the river. I said no no! Thinking she'd be trapped there. It turned out exactly the right way for her to go. She called me back, still in the building about 5 minutes later saying they had been told now to evacuate. I didn't hear from her again that day and I was sure by the timing of the phone calls that she'd been out in the street at the time the first tower went down. I reasoned she only had my place left as a place to go for the night (since no one was leaving Manhattan) and when she didn't show up I was very worried. (no phone service in Manhattan) I was able to reach upstate New York by phone and Boston could call in to me (on my land line) I reached my friend's husband by phone (finally) the next day. She was home! She told me I wouldn't have wanted to see what was happening in the street at the base of Number One. She said she joined a group who was running and they were in the midst of everything coming down on them. She watched a woman with a baby carriage running with everyone and later saw the carriage empty. She hoped that had meant the woman picked up the baby to continue running. Their particular crowd ran until trapped against a high wall. But two men in the crowd broke a restaurant window and took out chairs that they piled up to the wall and helped everyone over. Just as they all got over and fell onto grass on the other side, the black cloud came. She said everything went dark and she couldn't breath. She said finally she pulled her shirt up over her face and her mouth was full of dust. In the dark she fumbled in her purse and put her ID into her pants pocket so her children would know what happened to her. But she said, then, the air cleared, especially because they were West of the wind blowing the smoke. Everyone in the now grey grass got up and bolted for the river. It just happened a fire boat was coming by. There was nothing else there but water. She said the group started jumping over the wall into the boat. She said people were hurting themselves in the jump, but she jumped in also. She was afraid the firemen would make them get back out but instead it immediately hauled them across to New Jersey. She said she waited many hours and then she had trouble breathing so she was taken to a hospital. They took all her clothes and gave her new ones and had her scrub thoroughly.

Earlier, I stayed on the upper east side, I went outside and saw throngs of people silently marching up Third Avenue, (in the East 80s) having left their mid town and down town jobs. I was still at the stage where this all felt like a virtual reality movie. There was zero traffic (that only occurs on Third Avenue on its noise street fair day) The people in this procession were saying very little. So it was an eerily quiet march, all to the north, broken by the sound of fighter jets going over. This parade went on until about 2 PM. In the meantime I went to a grocery store (I, like many in NY keep no actual food in the tiny kitchen. We eat out. Why we got food? I did to squirrel it away if we got stuck in Manhattan. I suppose we thought this would be a long siege.) The customers in the store had already half emptied all the shelves. It was a very quiet and understated panic. People were polite and patient, even in their desire to stock up for "a year", it seemed. Also the lines for the check out were taking up to an hour and 45 minutes, so everyone standing there decided to shop even more as they stood next to the shelves. Huge baskets were winding all the way through the market. One woman I actually knew was hussled to the front of the line because she had left 2 small children in her apartment upstairs, having come down for some quick basic supplies. Finally, the store procured from who-knows-where some of the best check out people I've ever seen. I wondered if they were trained for emergency check out, maybe Reserves?, because they ran the cash registers faster than any I'd ever seen. Finally after 2.5 hours I was out of there. Then, that night, what did everyone do? Instead of cooking all that in apartments, everyone went to the restaurants. They were packed. Every outdoor caf? was seating to the brim. The weather, as you recall, was beautiful. Again, it was a different sort of experience, because there was still no traffic on First and Second Avenue. And people were kind and speaking to strangers and gathering a little.

People in the law office where I work lost colleagues and family members. Some lost people on the planes. I went to work Wednesday, because I could easily walk the mile or so. There still was no public transportation. People were making every effort to keep things going as usual, but it was more like a Saturday, with very few people at work, as was the case in the city as a whole. That day and the next there were many bomb threats and various scares. And a kind of glumness. On Thursday around noon, I looked down from high windows in the office and saw a throng heading up Third Avenue (again?). Apparently Grand Central had had a scare. That was the state of things for a while.

Our offices, like many mid-town businesses, immediately opened conference rooms and extra spaces to temporarily provide offices for those misplaced. For really only a very short time we had these filled with some of the lucky folks. I was impressed with how quickly new permanent places were found or provided. I was also impressed with how the court system dealt with having to be closed. Letters were sent by e-mail amending statutes of limitation and with updates on how to work with court opening delays. Smooth as possible. Many brought in, or printed off line images and sentiments of the WTC all posted, and we all had better, brigher label ribbons every day it seemed. Then the pins with the flags. That lasted quite a while. A couple months.

To calm the daily dread, I finally made my own survival packs which I still have. One for my car. One for the office, etc. After I made them I felt like a weight lifted off of me. It was an action, I suppose. Something so few of us could figure out to do. Later, our office supplied small survival packs to every person.

Over all of this was our view of the the huge cloud of smoke to the south, as everyone could see on TV. Eventually I made my way by subway down to pay my respects, two weeks late, early, before work. I felt compelled to be there. The people going to their jobs down there (that I saw), almost to the person, walked along avoiding looking in the direction of the disaster. There were few smiles. And I was glad I went. It helped take away the virtual movie feeling because there it was, undeniably. The now famous fa?ade was lit by gold sunrise that day. The site was the embodiment of some huge wrath.