What Happened That Day
I woke up around 6 a.m. It was just like any other morning. I didn’t have any bad dreams or premonitions. Mostly, from the moment my eyes opened, I was pre-occupied about the day and rest of the week ahead. I had three major video shoots that would each take several hours.
"It’s going to be a looong week," I said to Dan with a sigh as I got ready. Hurriedly, I pulled on my long brown skirt and then a brown jacket. A button inexplicably bounced off and landed on the floor. Irritated, I tossed the jacket on my bed and put on a cream colored one instead.
Outside the sun was shining and the air was warm; another beautiful day in a string of beautiful late summer days. My mind racing, I thought of everything I wanted to get done in the next 15 minutes before arriving at work: take money out of the ATM, check out a house someone had mentioned was for sale, and get a coffee. I had a book on my lap on how to be smart with money. I was going to try to read it at lunch to get strategies for our finances.
Turning onto an unfamiliar side street, I scanned for this house someone had suggested Dan and I might want to buy. I couldn’t find it. Annoyed, I shoved the car in reverse and headed back to the main road. I’d have to look another time.
At Dunkin’ Donuts, the drive-thru line was long, as always. I decided to put it in park and read my book. Once I got my coffee, I proceeded to pull out of the parking lot and spill it on my hand. Frustration began to bubble again.
I arrived at work at around 7:45 a.m. and started answering e-mails and editing a few projects I was working on. One was about the new artificial nails policy for health care workers. The day was off to an utterly and absolutely boring and inconsequential start.
Then I got up to go to the bathroom.
When I left the bathroom and walked towards Conference Room 504, which is just outside my cubicle, I heard the television on and could see people hanging around the doorway and inside.
"What’s going on?" I asked Mark McCandlish, who works across the hall in Human Resources.
"Two planes hit the World Trade Center," he told me.
I didn’t completely absorb his words at first. My mind reached back and remembered that years ago a plane had hit the Empire State Building. Nothing too disastrous had happened. As I stood there watching the "Today" show, slowly it dawned on me that there were two holes, one in each tower, smoke and flames billowing out of both. One plane could be an accident. Two? How could that be?
Then they showed the replay of the second plane hitting the tower. There were several different camera angles, and each one was terrifying. This absolute horror fluttered within me and gradually grew. My heart began palpitating.
Sue went to call her sister who works in New York City. The rest of us stood there, unable to pull our eyes from the television. Sue came back, saying she couldn’t get through – a message kept repeating that all the circuits were busy.
At the bottom of the screen they had started running this ticker. "Reports of an explosion at the Pentagon," it read, and "One of the planes that hit World Trade Center identified as an American Airlines flight from Boston." Boston. Now we were really getting close to home. Jodi went to call her friend, an American Airlines flight attendant who flies out of Logan.
The words on the ticker were becoming more frightening every time I looked. "The Pentagon is on fire" -- "Reports of an explosion at the State Department" -- "Capitol Building and White House evacuated." I wasn’t even listening to Katie Couric. I just watched.
They cut to the President, at an elementary school in Florida, where he had been reading with children. Now, he seemed strangely out of place, standing there with children and teachers, while he made his first comments about the attack on America.
NBC and the other stations had quickly decided that the morning’s events needed a name. At the bottom of the screen, above the ticker, we were suddenly "America Under Attack" or "America Under Siege."
Everything seemed real but unreal. I was shaking uncontrollably yet also felt almost displaced from what was happening, as if I was watching myself react rather than truly reacting. I went back in the bathroom and just sat in a stall, shaking. "Please God please God please God," I kept praying. My thoughts couldn’t form any other prayer. I seemed to be frozen and stiff, and almost moving in slow motion.
I went back to my desk for a moment and typed an e-mail to Dan. The television was still blaring. I couldn’t leave it for more than a moment. Now they were announcing that the Pentagon had been hit by a plane. The ticker said: "United Airlines says it is ‘deeply concerned’ about Flight 175 en route from Boston to LA." They announced the President had gotten on Air Force One and was flying – somewhere. Marie headed to the phones to try to find news of her nephew, who works in the Pentagon. Sue finally got in touch with her sister in Manhattan, who said she could see the smoke from her office building. They had been told to leave the building and walk home.
If I stood up, from my cubicle I could see the television in Conference Room 504. As I stood and stared with Elzbieta doing the same in the cubicle in front of me, we both witnessed the first tower collapse. There was no warning. It just crumbled like one of those buildings on a documentary about demolition. At that point, I really just felt like I was watching a movie. "Oh my God, think of all the rescuers in there," Elz said, but my mind didn’t grasp it quite yet. I still couldn’t believe it had just crumbled. There was smoke everywhere, but you could still see the other building. I remember thinking irrationally that if the other one would just stay up, this wouldn’t be so bad; we would have at least salvaged something, and hey, one tower was better than none. But in a matter of minutes the second building fell to the ground too.
"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." That’s all we could say, our hands over our mouths. At that point, I felt as if nothing was impossible. Maybe these people, whoever they were, were going to blow up everything. Maybe the White House would be gone, and the Statue of Liberty, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe this was the end of America.
We switched the TV to CNN. The FAA had just suspended, for the first time ever, all air travel in the United States. There were still, however, 1,000 flights in the air that hadn’t been stopped in time. Were there terrorists on any flights? No one knew except the air traffic controllers, who were trying frantically to contact each plane.
There was this feeling of grim expectancy just hanging in the air. Yet in the middle of it, several people said they were headed down to the cafeteria to get some food. I shook my head at the offer to come with them. Food was the farthest thing from my mind. I could barely swallow.
More news from the ticker: "Disney World evacuated;" "Sears Tower in Chicago evacuated;" "Hijacked plane may be headed for White House;" "Air Force One arrives at undisclosed location."
Everything was happening too fast. I felt as if my mind couldn’t keep up and was just limping along, processing what it could. Everyone brought up their food and sat in another conference room watching CNN on the big projector screen. No one really talked. The anchor announced that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. They still weren’t sure about the plane headed for the White House. So we just sit here and wait for it to happen, my mind screamed.
About then Michael, my boss, came up and asked me to go over to the hospital. They were in Disaster Plan standby and he wanted me over there to get the latest news. Getting off the elevator, I saw the security guard sat not watching who came in the door but the news on a little black and white TV on his desk. As I walked through the doors I heard a big crash and jumped. It was just a truck down below near the building’s basement, unloading something.
Outside the sun seemed unnaturally bright. The day suddenly hit me as too blue, too ordinary. Again I felt the sense of surreal. I looked up at the sky and somehow heard this immense and haunting silence at there being no planes anywhere. On the radio in the car, there was no music. Every single FM and AM station had switched to news, either the local DJs reporting or tying into a national feed.
When I reached the hospital, I felt this strange sense of everyone trying to go about their business while something was very, very wrong. I passed empty conference rooms with TVs blaring the news. In one, a Food Services worker stood there, just staring at the screen.
I headed up to the conference room just off the cafeteria where our "Command Center" was set up. There were three TVs on, turned to three different stations, a laptop computer, and scores of phones, most of which were silent.
The hope was this: if there were thousands upon thousands of seriously injured people in New York, Baystate would be called to help. We could accept transfers by helicopter, or of patients from Connecticut hospitals to free their beds for New York patients. Many clinical employees were calling to volunteer their services. We took their names but learned slowly and painfully through the afternoon that our help was not needed. People in New York either got out safely, or just didn’t make it.
There was other information to glean. We were in touch with the City of Springfield to find out about school closings and other canceled activities, as well as the state’s response to all of this. I kept calling back to the office, where they were quickly crafting e-mails to send out to employees.
"Schools are not closing in Springfield, but extra curricular activities are canceled."
"A prayer service will be held at 3 p.m."
"The Blood Donor Center will stay open until 8 o’clock."
Every once in a while, I’d look back at the television. There was smoke billowing out of New York City. Thousands of people, many covered in dust, were headed across a bridge, trying to get out. Some ran and some walked as if in a dream.
I got a call to meet Mark Tolosky, the CEO, in the Emergency Department so he could do a TV interview. Both Channel 22 and 40 were already at the hospital. Back in the halls, I rushed around, still not really thinking about anything I was doing. Almost hysterically, I remembered that sometime in the afternoon, Jane Clark from the Red Cross was supposed to come over to review a video we had worked on. It was all about disaster relief. Somehow I had the feeling she wouldn’t be making it.
Back in the Command Center someone was passing out cookies and soda. I took some and realized it was the first I’d eaten all day. My head was pounding. The chocolate chip cookie was burnt. For some reason, I became furious with this security guard who was in the room with us, watching the TV.
"Whoever did this, we’re gonna kick their ass," he said, almost laughing. Why did some men have to respond like that? I thought. Why is there this need to act macho when really this is just awful, horrible, no matter whose "ass" we kick?
Finally, the call came from my boss. I could go back to the office. Sometime around then, I seemed to zone out. I felt exhausted and drained. I don’t remember riding back in the car or going back to my desk. I think I watched more TV and sent more e-mails to Dan. I counted the minutes until I could leave.
At 4:30 I got in my car and drove like a zombie the seven minutes to home. I noticed a letter in the mailbox. It was from Southwest Airlines, confirming my reservation for a flight to St. Louis on October 4. In the bedroom, staring at that envelope, I crumbled for the first time. My knees felt weak as I sank to the floor, weeping. "It’s awful, it’s just awful," I could only say over and over. After a few moments I turned on the TV. Just as with the radio, every station had abandoned regular programming. Even the Home Shopping Network had gone blank, with nothing but a message on the screen about the day’s events. VH-1 and MTV played national news. I think only Nickelodeon stayed with cartoons, for all the unsuspecting little ones out there.
Watching made me start crying again. I picked up the phone and called my mom. "How can we fly on a plane now?" I burst out. "I can’t do it. I just can’t do it." She was crying too. We stayed there on the phone together, talking and crying and watching TV. Then I hung up and just lay there on the couch, watching. They showed video again and again of the plane hitting the building, then the buildings disintegrating. I don’t even know what I watched; I just lay there, staring.
At 6 p.m. Dan came home. I still didn’t move. He came and sat next to me and both of us just watched as the sun went down. The President was back in Washington after flying to several secret locations across the U.S. For the only time that day, I felt overwhelming relief. All of these Democrats and Republicans were gathered for a press conference on the steps of the Capitol building, talking about how they were forgetting their differences to fight terrorism. At the conclusion someone started shakily singing "God Bless America," and then the rest joined in. I wanted to cry and laugh, it was all so bizarre.
I got up finally and made a few sandwiches. It was dark now. Still we watched, but then suddenly the TV started acting squirrely and then the cable went out. There was nothing but snow, on the biggest news day ever.
We decided to turn on the radio. I don’t even know what station. Late into the night, we sat, me on a chair and Dan on the couch, hanging on to every word. A reporter announced a truck-full of men had been arrested and were suspected of trying to bomb the George Washington Bridge. I curled into a ball, shivering. The night stretched on toward midnight. I was afraid to go to bed. I was afraid to leave the radio. At any moment, something might happen. I had to know.
Finally, we could no longer keep our eyes open. We dragged ourselves into the bedroom and crawled under the covers. My mind kept working, seeing fire and planes, hearing the news anchors. I didn’t want to sleep but wanted desperately to sleep. I clutched Dan tightly, not wanting to feel alone. I don’t know if I prayed. I know I wanted to. But I have never felt so paralyzed.
Outside the night was still summer. There were crickets but the skies were silent. There were people in houses who were going through all of this with me, but I didn’t think of them. It was just me and Dan and everyone at work and the Towers and the Pentagon and those planes. Over and over and over, in dreams that were barely dreams because I barely slept.
That was my September 11, 2001.
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