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2002-08-19

My wife and I had an apartment in Parc Place on Rector Street, about a block and a half down West Street from the base of the twin towers. We looked cattycorner over to them when we sat at our dinner table by the window in our 3rd floor studio apartment.

For us, New York was our work home. Every weekend we commuted back to our real home in Atlanta, or occasionally to visit Lori?s family and my relatives in lower Delaware. We actually spent more time in New York than in our ?home?, but I never considered myself a New Yorker and always longed to get home to our house, yard, and dog in Atlanta.

We had been doing this routine for quite a while. I am an independent consultant and had a few clients in the New York/New Jersey area that I?d work at for months at a time. Lori was a consultant for one of the big five and had been on several stints in New York as well. It was nice when we both could be in New York at the same time, as we could actually live together during the week as husband and wife.

We had spent eight months on and off living in the World Trade Center Marriott nestled between the base of the two towers. It was a nice place, but any hotel gets old real quick. You can?t have much of your own stuff there and you get fat from eating restaurant food and not getting any exercise.

We had some nice times in the hotel, though. I remember a day it snowed and we ate in the hotel restaurant. The restaurant had a glass ceiling and you could look straight up at the towers. We briefly walked out to the freezing, snow-swept plaza with the now damaged-and-moved fountain and statue of Atlas holding up the world. (I don?t think it is called that.) It was always amazing looking up at those towers from the restaurant. I can?t imagine what the view was like the morning of the attack.

In March Lori finally got on long-term expenses and we found our apartment. We had a nice summer there. I liked being by the water a lot more than I liked the times we had stayed or lived in mid-town. The area was very vibrant in the summer. There were always joggers and bikers going by the river and volleyball games and free concerts going on. We spent Fourth of July walking around the city because it fell on a Wednesday.

I really warmed to New York last summer. I ate down by the water at least every other night, and there was always a large crowd of young people out at the bars and restaurants by the yacht basin. One day while I was working at a client in One Chase Plaza, I left work early and detoured through the World Trade Center Plaza. There was a free concert going on, so I rushed home and changed and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to good music played right below the towers. I had a couple beers and sat by the fountain, getting cooled by the air rushing away from the water.

That day was one of those days when I really felt alive. Walking home through the Winter Garden, down the marble steps and out by the yacht basin, I felt like a Roman must have felt, walking through the grandest city of its time.

I did a lot of these things alone. As an independent contractor, I always did a good job of working forty hours a week and rarely any more. I?d work longer if needed, but didn?t feel compelled to put in overtime just for appearances. Lori as a salaried employee was working seventy hours-plus most weeks, and it was ticking me off. She received no economic benefit from all of the extra time, but her company kept piling it on her and billing her out by the hour. We had several arguments over her work schedule, and most nights she would get home at nine or ten, long after I had eaten. She finally agreed that after her current project was done, she?d leave her job and find something that gave her a little more life balance.

In August I was done at my Manhattan client and started back at a previous client I had in New Jersey. I rented a car every week at the Newark airport and commuted back and forth from our Manhattan apartment to New Jersey every morning. It was a reverse commute from everyone else, so it only took me about 45 minutes or so each way. I garaged my rental car below the World Financial Center next to our apartment building.

On Tuesday, September 11th, I got my car out of the garage a little before 8AM and drove out of Manhattan. I always drove on Liberty Street, made a left on West Street by the towers, and headed north to the Holland Tunnel. After the tunnel, I had about a half-hour ride to Livingston, New Jersey to my client?s site. As always, I was listening to the radio coming in to work.

Shortly before I pulled into the parking lot, I heard that a plane hit one of the Trade Center towers. Like probably everyone else at first, I thought it was probably just some idiot who rammed his Cessna into the building and it wasn?t a big deal. It was interesting news, but nothing to worry about. I commented to the security lady as I walked into the building that a plane had just hit, and she barely acknowledged me.

As I got to my cubicle, I overheard someone say it was a passenger jet that hit one of the towers. As breaking news occurs there is always a fair amount of misinformation that gets spread, so I wasn?t sure whether to believe the report. I tried logging on to CNN and Fox News websites, but they were responding very poorly. I tried calling Lori but couldn?t get through. At that point I was curious but wasn?t worried about Lori.

Someone yelled over the office that a second plane had hit the other tower. I started trying to call Lori repeatedly on her cell phone but couldn?t get through. I started getting a call or two from my mom, dad, and Lori?s parents on our status but didn?t have anything to tell them yet. Most of my friends and relatives thought I was in Manhattan as well.

There was a big television down near the cafeteria entrance, and everyone started to gather in front of it. I went down and saw the news and it started sinking in that it was really happening. Once I verified the second plane had hit I knew it was a terrorist attack. I went back up and tried to call Lori again. This time she had managed to leave a message for me that she was okay, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Other people I worked with had asked me what was going on with my wife and I let them know she was okay.

I started hearing reports from people coming back from the TV that people were jumping from one of the towers. I chose not to go watch it, and started to settle into work. I figured the worst was over and tragic as it was, I needed to get back to work and get on with the day. Some people were calm about it but a few people were crying. In that area of New Jersey, a lot of people knew people in or near that area. I started calling people back to let them know I had heard from Lori.

I never thought a tower would collapse. Someone said there was an explosion and something was happening. A few minutes later someone said the first tower had fallen. That I could not believe, so I went back to the TV. I went back upstairs to call Lori again. I tried several times to reach her but couldn?t get through.

I was only somewhat worried at that point, but my apprehension was growing. On one hand, I knew that a horrible attack had taken place and I knew hundreds or thousands of people had just died. But on a personal level, I was only worried about Lori. Lori can be paranoid at times, so I figured she would be as far away as possible from the Trade Towers by then. I had no idea she was only a block away by the yacht basin when the first tower collapsed.

I believe somewhere around that time I heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon. There was a lot of misinformation flying around then. There were rumors of eight planes in the air and of planes being shot out of the sky by air force jets.

I got through to Lori?s cell phone and left a message for her to get out of there. I said something like, ?Lori, call me as soon as you can. Do NOT go to work. Get out of there. This may not be over. Take a ferry to New Jersey if you can. Just get out of there.? Her cell phone was buried in dust at this point, but I didn?t know that.

I didn?t hear anything else from Lori that morning. I received calls from friends and relatives all over the place. I told them I had heard from her after the planes hit but not after the towers collapsed. Her father and I called each other several times asking if the other had heard from Lori. I got a call from one of her work colleagues asking if I knew whether she was okay, as she hadn?t made it in before the towers collapsed. The silence from Lori was getting me very worried. I was calling constantly trying to reach her, as well as listening to the news. I couldn?t concentrate on anything else.

I knew I couldn?t get back into Manhattan at that point, but I didn?t know that I wouldn?t be able to go back into the city for days. I couldn?t go back to our apartment so I just stayed at work. One person was trying to organize a work meeting, but finally gave up. Others were starting to leave work. I was in a weird state where I really wasn?t sure what to do or where to go. Keep working or leave; and if I left, where to?

A buddy of mine, Paul, invited me to come over to his house to wait for word, so I finally left. We went to his house and had a beer or two while watching the news. My friend was trying to be entertaining, but I only had hearing from Lori on my mind. Somewhere around 12:30 to 1:30, I finally heard from Lori. I may have heard from Gerald first; I can?t remember.

Lori said she was at someone?s apartment and that she couldn?t get out of the city. I told her it didn?t matter when she got out, but that she would get out eventually. She told me she had lost her cell phone and computer. We both assumed the apartment was probably destroyed. None of that mattered and wasn?t even a consideration. I knew eventually we would be reunited and it didn?t matter if it took a few days.

I felt a ton of bricks lift off my chest. I started calling people back letting them know Lori was okay. I could finally start thinking about everything that was going on. I felt sad for all of the death and destruction. I thought about the people jumping. I felt rage against the perpetrators. I wondered how long it would take to get back to normal.

I think the thought process I had that day was similar to many people?s. At each event, I kept thinking the worst was over. A plane hits the towers. NY will have a big black eye on a tower but life will go on. A second plane hit; same thing. The realization that the planes were hijacked passenger jets. I fly twice a week and can imagine the horror those people must have had in there last few moments of realization. Or the horror of the tourists who chose that morning to go up to Windows of the World. Then the people started jumping from 80+ stories up onto the concrete and granite below. That is the worst, I thought. I imagine the people in their office having their morning coffee, only to burn to death or jump to their deaths less than an hour later.

If the towers hadn?t collapsed, all of that wouldn?t have had a tenth of the impact on me. When each tower fell, I was in disbelief. Those buildings were so big. They survived the impact, so why did they collapse? And when the plane struck in D.C. and the other plane went down, I was wondering what in the hell was going on.

But for the moment I was stranded in New Jersey, and Lori was stranded in New York. I thought we would both be there a while, and Paul had already offered for me to stay as long as I needed to. We went and ate lunch somewhere, and stopped by the liquor store to buy beer. Some redneck was saying how he was going down to Patterson to beat up Arabs. We went back to Paul?s house.

We were talking with his neighbors and rehashing the same thoughts. We were going to war, and this time everyone would be for it. If the terrorists thought that Americans were afraid to loose a few soldiers, they were going to learn that this time casualties were no object. We expressed the disbelief and sadness of all those people dead. We thought ten thousand or more people had just died. We couldn?t believe the towers were gone.

Lori had called again and we talked some more. She was going to try to get out of the city. I told her if she could get anywhere on the Jersey side, I?d come get her and we?d head straight to Delaware. We had already agreed that we were not coming back to work that week.

Paul and his neighbors wanted to go somewhere for dinner. I reluctantly agreed but took my rental car in case Lori was able to get out. I had just ordered when Lori called my cell phone. She was getting on a ferry to Hoboken. I told her I was on my way but I had my doubts I could get that close to the city. I cancelled my order and started driving. As I got closer, the road was closed for emergency vehicles only and I kept looking for a route towards Hoboken. Lori had given me the cell phone of one of her traveling companions she had jumped in a cab with and I told her I couldn?t get there.

She had gotten to New Jersey and they had actually found a cab that could take the back roads to Newark. I was having a difficult time getting there as well, and I told her to try to get to Metropark. As I drove closer to the city, I finally saw the smear of smoke on the horizon rising from lower Manhattan. I never got close enough to actually see the city that evening.

At around 7:45PM that night, I finally pulled off the Garden State Parkway and into Metropark Station as Lori was trying to call me again. I saw her and her two companions and flagged them over. I hugged and kissed Lori, then turned to her two friends. Lori had told them we would drop them off at their houses down the Turnpike and I was happy to oblige. Lori was shivering and wet from being doused by a decontamination hose when she got off the ferry at Hoboken. She had on someone else?s girlfriend?s clothes from where she had gone right after the tower collapsed.

We drove a few exits to where the two men lived. One of the men had been on the 47th floor of one of the towers when the first plane hit, and he had gone to his friend?s business who was an optometrist in Midtown. We dropped them off. It was amazing how calm most people were during that day. Most people just dealt with the situation. I didn?t witness any hysterics aside from some sobbing during the newscasts back at work.

We stopped at a rest stop and we bought Lori a sweatshirt to wear and got some food, then continued our drive to Delaware. There was so much to talk about that our conversations were jumping all over the place. Lori couldn?t believe what had happened and how close she was. She filled me in on the rest of her story from that day.

She was still getting ready for work in our apartment when the first plane had hit. She heard all of the commotion and had looked out to see papers and debris coming down. She heard it was an airplane hitting the tower, but continued to get ready for work. Like most, she figured the worst was over but the day had to go on. As she was walking out of our building, everyone started running and the doorman grabbed her hand. She heard the sound of the second plane screeching overhead and said it was a horrible sound she would never forget. She knew what it was but didn?t look. She heard a crescendo when the second plane struck. They ran into a drycleaners across the street. That?s where she was able to leave me her message. She said she looked up at a picture of Jesus on the wall of the drycleaners and that gave her comfort.

Afterwards, she had started walking away from the towers down towards the tip of Battery Park. All of the smoke was blowing that way, so the police started herding everyone north. She was at the yacht basin when the first tower collapsed. She had been staring at the water trying not to look at the devastation. She knew what was going on, but chose not to look at it. She had been talking to a few other people. One girl had invited her to come up to her apartment in Gateway Plaza to wait.

When the first tower collapsed, Lori was caught in the tidal wave of dust and debris that spread out from the implosion. She considered jumping in the river, and had even gotten on the other side of the railing at one point. As she was enveloped in dust, she said she had accepted that she was going to die and was at peace.

As the dust settled, all was quiet. Then someone started yelling for people to get up and run. Somebody noticed Lori laying face down, stunned and trying to breathe through her shirt. They grabbed her and tried to pick her up. She snapped out of it and told them she could run herself. She didn?t notice at that point but she had lost her planner, cell phone, laptop, and shoes. Her knees were bleeding from the granite plaza, and she was covered in dust.

She started running. Someone yelled for people to breathe through their underwear. She took off her underwear and was using that as a dust filter, I believe. Someone gave her a shirt. She got separated from several people she had joined only moments before. She saw someone on a bike and yelled for help.

The person, John, put her on his bicycle and started peddling. They took turns peddling, John running beside the bike when Lori peddled. At one point they stopped to rest and a few FBI cars rode up and set up beside them, so they kept moving. They got to his apartment near 80th Street. He let her take a bath and lent her some of his girlfriend?s clothes. That?s where she was finally able to call me and her dad.

She went outside and told a taxi she?d pay a thousand dollars to get out of Manhattan, but the city had closed all bridges and tunnels. She saw two men getting into a taxi and somehow it came up that they were going to try to catch a ferry. She jumped in with them and they were able to get on a ferry to Hoboken.

When she got off, the police asked who had been within ten blocks of the towers. Lori answered yes, and even though she was bathed and had on clean clothes they hosed her down with something.

They managed to catch a taxi who could get them to Metropark. The foreigner cabbie had said something strange, almost mocking the predicament of the people who went into the towers that day with their high paying jobs and had ended up dead. If I had been there I probably would have punched that guy, but I guess in the chaos no one had that thought.

So Lori made it to Metropark and I picked her up.

We drove straight to Bethany to her parents' motel and got in around midnight. We stopped in to see her parents. They had an oceanfront room for us and we went to bed.

The next morning we woke to the sunrise. It was a beautiful morning, with the waves crashing and clear skies. As we sat and watched the sun come up, I couldn?t believe the contrast to what had just gone on. Everything was so peaceful. We looked at each other and said, ?What happened?!?

It was odd not seeing jet trails in the sky and knowing it was due to the air traffic shutdown. That whole week was surreal. Slowly, worldly concerns crept back into our minds and we spent the next day filling prescriptions, buying toiletries and clothes. We were basically refugees at that point, leaving New York with the clothes we had on and nothing else. We were the fortunate ones who only lost a work apartment, but nonetheless we didn?t have anything we needed. Getting back to Atlanta wasn?t an option and we didn?t want to consider it anyway after all that had gone on.

I wrote e-mails to everyone and relayed our story and let them know we were okay. We started sounding like broken records rehashing the story to everyone we saw. We took the story-telling well, but once or twice we told it to someone and they told us they had lost someone close to them. That put our ordeal in perspective.

A day or two after the incident, there was a rally and memorial on the bandstand. It was packed, and I think everyone relearned at least the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner that week. I was calm most of the time, but a few times the emotions welled up on how I felt about thinking Lori might be lost and thinking of the grief that so many people were going through.

I think the terrorists underestimated our reaction to their attack. They sought to frighten us and probably thought as soft Americans we would be in hysterics and panic. Most people I spoke with wanted blood. Most wanted war and vengeance. Just as the Japanese awoke the sleeping giant with Pearl Harbor, I wonder if the terrorists realized how drastically they mobilized this country against them. All pacifist arguments went out the door with the attacks. All concerns that the U.S. needed to be mindful of every country?s culture and politics went out the door. We were going to react unilaterally if necessary and though we would ask the world to understand, we weren?t going to pussyfoot around with offending anyone?s sensibilities.

They also blew their load. I think anything short of a nuclear attack would be anticlimactic to the World Trade Center coming down. The subsequent anthrax mail attacks didn?t faze me at all, and I considered any further attacks as just a part of a war that we will eventually win.

At the end of the week, I went back to work in New Jersey. Lori stayed in Delaware and didn?t work a couple more weeks. I stayed in a hotel near Livingston. My NY client needed a little bit of work done, so after two weeks I went into Manhattan one night after work to their offices. It wasn?t easy getting there. I never used the subway much but that was the only way to lower Manhattan. I parked my car in Midtown and took the subway.

The whole area stunk like an electrical fire. It was smoky, and ash was raining down. I didn?t see much that trip, but had to come back again for a day the next week. I got a police escort to get into our apartment and walked all through the restricted area to get there. It was amazing. I walked through an alley and the fire escape the whole way up the building was packed with debris from the collapse. I walked by the heap of twisted metal and concrete at ground zero.

Our apartment wasn?t affected except for where we had one window facing West Street that had been open a crack. Everything in that hallway was dusted. I grabbed a suitcase of the most important things while the police waited for me. I got our candid wedding pictures, wedding video, and a few other sentimental things that could not be replaced.

A few weeks later I was done in New Jersey and started back full-time in New York. Our apartment was still in the red zone, so I stayed in a hotel for a couple weeks until I could get back into our apartment. We had been scheduled to move out at the end of September, but you couldn?t get a truck down there to move out. The apartments extended us a month for free.

For a while, lower Manhattan was a ghost town. There were no business travelers, most restaurants and shops were closed, and those that were open were deserted. That area gets a lot quieter in the winter anyway, but it was deserted. I?d walk around at night and be the only one on the street aside from national guardsmen and police.

The saddest things I saw were all of the posters and flyers for missing people. It quickly became apparent after the attacks that you either escaped the attack or were dead. There were very few injured and no one was found alive after the first couple days. People in our apartments were gone. Lori and I were amazed that we didn?t personally know or work with someone who died.

The faces on the fliers showed so many people in their twenties and thirties. These were people like I worked with or went to college with. We had walked by these people many times. We always used to pass a fire station right beside the towers on Liberty Street on the way from our apartment to Chase Plaza. We saw the guys hanging out waiting for a fire. Almost all of them perished that day.

It is sad when anyone dies, but when a person who has lived a long life dies I don?t consider it a tragedy. The people I saw on the fliers were women I would have tried to meet when I was single or guys I?d hang out with. They were people who I?d see in a restaurant and wonder where else I?d seen them before. They were people like me and Lori. That?s what struck me.

Lori started working again but from a client location in Wilmington. She refused to go back to New York. She never liked flying to begin with, so she only flew back to Atlanta a couple times over the next few months and it terrified her every time. I flew back to Atlanta every other week to check in on things and drove to Delaware on the weekends in-between.

Flying didn?t bother me. I figured no one will ever be able to repeat September 11th because no one will ever willingly give up a plane to a hijacker. It was protocol to work with the hijackers for a peaceful resolution prior to the attack. No one ever thought the hijackers would purposely fly a plane into a building. I think most flyers would fight any attempt to hijack their plane now, and I know I would. I looked at the bruised-up face of Richard Reid on the news with satisfaction that people defended themselves from the next attempted air attack.

At the end of October, my brother Tony drove a U-haul up and we moved out of our Manhattan apartment. My project wouldn?t pay for the apartment, so I started staying in a hotel every week until the project was done. Tony spent the night and we walked around the perimeter of ground zero. Some of the areas I hadn?t seen before. The impact of those towers falling was tremendous, and hunks of one building were gone as if Godzilla?s tail had bashed it on the way by.

That area was beautiful before the attacks, and I feel a loss from the destruction of the buildings. Those towers were monuments to human ingenuity, and I feel the same about them as I would feel if the pyramids of Egypt were bulldozed over or how I felt when the Taliban blew up the giant relief statues of Buddha. What a waist. I worked in a 64 story building near the ground zero, and pictures of the towers make all of the surrounding buildings look half their size.

The fires burned underground at the Trade Center for a couple months. Every building I went into had several air filters going full-tilt. There were good smoke days and bad smoke days, depending on the wind and the intensity of the fires.

In January, Lori had to come to New York with me for a day to travel back to Atlanta. I think it was good for her to see that New York isn?t a war zone and has pretty much gotten back to normal. Life is returning to lower Manhattan. Some things will take time to fix, such as the collapsed tunnels from the New Jersey PATH trains. They used to end below the Trade Center. I finished my project in January.

Lori finished her project in December and quit her consulting job as per our pre-9-11 decision. She will be helping her parents out with the motel. We have moved to Delaware which we had also planned to do prior to September 11th. I still fly to work every week, but it?s North Carolina for now.

It?s nice living in the middle of nowhere now and knowing virtually everyone we run into. I look at all of the happenings in the world; Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus hacking each other to bits in India, Africa, Indonesia and the Middle East. What a violent and disturbing time we live in. I wonder if this is the storm before things start to improve, or just a reflection of true human nature. At least I have my home by the bay to retreat to at the end of every week.