nmah222.xml

nmah222.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-19

I had just gotten back home to Iowa from a trip to visit relatives in New York. I was planning on spending a lazy Tuesday reading and cleaning up my apartment because I did not have to be back at work until Wednesday. I woke at about 9:00 CST and turned on CNN, as I normally would. Aaron Brown was standing on the roof of a CNN office facing the now smoldering WTC, when right behind him, live, the South Tower collapsed. My stomach knotted up the way it does when you're expecting to get bad news. I felt sick. My grandfather had been one of the first Port Authority employees to have an office in 1WTC, up on the 84th floor. I had heard stories of how he had been shown his office which was located toward the outside of the building, before the glass had been put in place on his floor. Like me, he was terrified of heights and clung to a wall, asking to be relocated away from any windows. "Thank God he's not around to see this," I thought to myself. It seemed like a hollywood action movie horribly and ironically come to life. I spent the rest of the day staring up at the eerily calm blue sky. Iowa is "fly-over" country for many transcontinental routes, and on a normal day, the sky is laced with contrails. The sky was empty that day, except for when the president's plane landed in Omaha and then returned to Washington.

I used to like to go take photos of the birds catching fish out of the Mississippi at lock and dam 16 near Muscatine. It was relaxing, and you could spend hours there seeing nature and watching cargo barges get locked up and down the river. Because of anthrax or other scares, the dam is now closed to civilians.

The horror of watching people who had no other option thrust themselves out of 90th story windows and float to the ground. That that should be something no one should ever have to see again.

No, I did not. I felt conflicted about it, it felt jingoistic to me, yet I wanted to express solidarity. I ended up getting an FDNY bumpersticker.