filed in What Gets Me Through the Day
We Remember
At a hotel in Toronto for the film Festival, I was zipping up my suitcase watching the Today Show, getting ready to return home to San Francisco. 5 terrifying days later, I was finally able to find a flight back, and for the first time, we were handed plastic cutlery to eat with our in-flight meal.
Tell us your 9/11 story.
Photo of Sam Pulia, mourning over the name of his cousin who was killed in the South Tower. Andrew Burton/Getty Images
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I love the 9/11 memorial and visit it every time I’m in NYC. Thank you for your interesting blog. Great art work!
I haven’t been there yet, but I can’t wait. Camla, what do you love most about it?
I had just left my parents’ house in VA to drive back to NJ. I heard on the car radio reports of a ‘small plane’ hitting the world trade center .. then a second plane … and then it was clear they weren’t small planes. Then the pentagon. I was headed directly for DC and didn’t know what to do, where to go. I stuck to my route and thankfully made it thru the beltway traffic though it was a snarled mess. When I got north of Baltimore on I-95 all the overhead signs were flashing “all roads to NYC are CLOSED” – it was as close to an apocalyptic moment as I ever want to be.
So scary.
Left Washington DC to drive to my new job in Denver. Final leg of journey was from some place in Kansas to arrive in Denver on September 11th. I left the motel at 5am (7am NY time). Only listen to CDs on long drives, not radio.
When I arrived, didn’t understand why everyone was driving around honking their horns and waving the American flag.
Had no idea what happened until about 1 pm Denver time when I called a DC friend to say that I had arrived safely!
A day engraved in my memory forever.
May they all be at peace.
In Toronto on 9/11, I was with a very international group of people. And it was fascinating to get their perspective in the immediate aftermath. But I remember having deep feelings of patriotism during that time.
I had just started my senior year of college and was driving to class and heard everything unfolding on the radio. By the time I got to class it was clear what was happening and they dismissed all classes. I drove back home and sat in disbelief alone watching the news all day. That was the day I lost my niavety about the world we live in. #neverforget
It was when CNN first started using crawls with more news info on the bottom of the screen. I couldn’t pull myself away from the TV.
I was a junior at college. Most classes were cancelled and most people were huddled in the student centre, watching things unfold. My Latin prof, however, sent an email inviting all his students to an extra seminar, on the grounds that when horrible things happen and we can do nothing about them, it is useful to get some emotional space. An hour of declensions and Virgil and we emerged calmer, more grounded, and better able to cope with the day’s events, all of which came in very handy when a friend called a short time later to ask me to collect her small children from school because she had been on a conference call with someone in the twin towers when the first plane hit and she didn’t think she was calm enough to drive.
What a wonderfully wise professor!
It was the second day of my new job. I had just moved to Virginia and was living in a military town. The moment that it happened, I was at a local visitors attraction and while one of my bosses attended a meeting, I was to get a tour of this place that’s populated by tourists. While going through the building, the events were unfolding. Cellphones were ringing all over the place and people were running off into side rooms. Everybody was turning on radios. Alot of whispering. I had heard something about a place crash at the twin towers but didn’t know anymore. At one point me, the tour guide and a German travel writer on assignment were taken backstage of this place were all the actors are and we huddled around a small black and white TV to watch the coverage.
The TV hadn’t been used in some time so you how it does that self programming thing where it rolls through each channel for a few seconds before going to the next one? That’s how I found out what was going on and that’s how we saw the second plane hit. In real time as the channels were flipping from station to station. We couldn’t go back to any of the stations until it had finished this process.
When the second plane hit, we all gasped. Then the first tower came down, there was just silence. I remember asking “Could some people have made it out in time?” and one of the actors at the attraction said “I’m from New York. I don’t think anybody made it out.”
I was new in town and didn’t know a soul. I used to be a newspaper reporter just two weeks prior to this and I would have probably been working like all my friends were. I remember being in my apartment that night and looking out through the blinds and seeing nothing but the flickering light of TV screens all across the complex. It was like that for weeks, well into the night.
That’s so vivid, Latarsha. I can really picture it.
I was living in Ventura County (just outside of L.A.), and at 6am PT, I had just left for work and was sitting at a red light when I turned on KNX1070 to get a traffic report for my almost 2-hour commute to work. They were broadcasting live from NYC – the first plane had already hit. They kept the feed live as they reported the crash of the second plane, then the crash at the Pentagon, then the collapse of the first tower, then the reports that another plane was flying “erratically” and they suspected that it had been hijacked (it was Flight 93), then the collapse of the second tower, then the reports that the erratically-flying plane “may” have crashed…it just went on and on and on and on. I was in tears by the time I got to La Canada-Flintridge, and I still had a ways to go to get to work (my job was in Rosemead). Thank goodness for the box of Kleenex I always keep in my car.
I remember thinking that the first one must have been just a horrible accident, but as soon as the second plane hit, I knew that it was intentional, even though they made a point on the radio to say that nothing had been confirmed.
I do remember that the other drivers on the freeway seemed to be more polite on the 210 in Pasadena than they usually were.
A huge part of my job at the time was drawing up legal documents and sending them overnight to various parts of the country. Once we got word that all flights were grounded until further notice (which obviously included Federal Express and UPS), it was pointless to try to work, since the documents were date-sensitive and at the time, we didn’t have a way of sending our documents via the internet. My employer did not shut down for the day, as people in many other departments didn’t have jobs that were so directly affected as mine, so I was at the office all day, not working. In my department, we had nothing but time on our hands to troll the news websites, as well as other websites where we pulled up maps of the affected areas (for those of us who weren’t familiar with NYC).
My father was a veteran of the U.S. Army, and he tried so hard to instill a sense of patriotism in me, but as a rebellious kid in the 1970’s who’d heard about all the problems of the Vietnam War, and who related more to the flower children than the military community, I thought his ideas were quaint and old-fashioned. I saw myself as more of a citizen of the world than of just a single nation. It was surprising to me to learn on that day that he had actually succeeded without my noticing it – I found myself so incredibly offended that anyone would DARE to attack us, and it was so shocking to me that I’d had such a visceral reaction to the events of that day.
On 9/11, it was weird to be trapped in another country with other “citizens of the world,” when all I wanted to do was get home.