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2002-09-11

My first awareness of what was happening came by way of a phone call from my wife after the first plane hit but before the second one. I immediately turned on a portable radio I keep at the office to confirm what was happening and then sent a brief "all hands" message (now unfortunately lost) to my colleagues in the Office of Space Science here at NASA Headquarters. I then went down to a conference room that had a TV to watch the unfolding events. An image came on taken from the roof of the White House that showed a huge plume of smoke in the background, and the commentator remarked that it seemed to be coming from the Pentagon. I remember remarking something to the effect that if this was true then we should be able to see it from the window in our office suite that looked due west toward the Pentagon. I stepped out to look and confirmed in a second that it was true: the Pentagon had been hit as well. The rest of that morning is now a blur of watching TV, talking to my wife by phone, emergency staff meetings, and hearing the announcement that the Government was closing for the day and that we were to evacuate the building as soon as possible. However, by then the local streets, as well as the freeway that I would need to use, were in gridlock so I decided to just stay put until things cleared out. I went down to our in-building deli to get some lunch and bought a bottle of water for the trip home whenever that might be possibe. Finally about one o'clock the streets looked clear so I retrieved my car and started out. Never had I seen the streets of Washington so absolutely deserted: it was as though everyone had simply evaporated. That memory itself remains in my mind as one of the most dramatic of that day.

My route home crosses the Potomac River on the 14th Street bridge where I then exit onto the Washington Memorial Parkway to head south. When using this cloverleaf exit the eye sweeps across the entire east face of the Pentagon (indeed, one of the few places where it can be easily, though briefly, seen from a car on any of the major highways), and the smoke from the funeral pyre from its west side formed an ugly black smudge against the otherwise brilliantly clear blue sky.

As I type this rememberance I'm listening to the recitation of the Gettysburg Address at the One Year memorial service in New York City. Some have disparaged that these words by Lincoln have been overused but in my estimation never before have they been more appropriate or meaningful, and indeed trying to find new ones appropriate to the occasion stikes me as a exercise in hubris. They're now reading the names of all those who died there, which will take the order of several hours according to the radio announcers. It's amazing how many of these names are distinctly not the usual sounding ones that we tend to recognize as "American." Clearly an enormous number of non-U.S. citizens, or at least recent U.S. immigrants, died that day, and I'm not sure that this fact has been properly recognized and advertised - the acts of barbarism that day were really against all peoples of the world and not just those of the United States. More and more I feel myself as a citizen of the world and not just that of one country. Maybe that's a consequence of working for NASA where I'm constantly exposed to various images of our Earth from space, images of our own Milky Way galaxy that show millions of other stars like our own Sun, and then the images of the myriad of other galaxies in the depths of space itself. Good grief, we can't even claim to be speck of dust in our own cosmic neighborhood much less one in the larger scheme of things. I'm led to recall those plaintive words by Rodney King, to the effect 'Why can't we all just get along?' I'm also reminded of Carl Sagan's wonderful essay entitled THE PALE BLUE DOT that I recast in free verse last year after the attack, and which I now use to end this memoir.


THE PALE BLUE DOT

- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996, concerning the image of Earth as it appears in a ?portrait? of the Solar System, taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from deep interplanetary space.
**********

? We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us.
On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who
ever lived, lived out their lives on it.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager,
every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilizations,
every king and peasant,
every young couple in love,
every hopeful child,
every mother and father,
every inventor and explorer,
every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician,
every superstar,
every supreme leader,
every saint and sinner in the history of our species,
lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sun beam.

? The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals
and emperors
so that in glory and in triumph they could become the
momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of
one corner of the dot
on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner
of the dot.
How frequent their misunderstandings,
how eager they are to kill one another,
how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance,
the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

? Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity ? in all this vastness ?
there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
It is up to us.

It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add,
a character-building experience.
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than
this distant image of our tiny world.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly
and compassionately
with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot,
the only home we've ever known.