9/11 Redux

My cousin Tim was in NYC on 9/11 and wrote a moving, thoughtful description of the day. He resent it today; I've pasted it below. (It's long, but worth it.)

This is an email message I sent close friends and family members across the country on the evening of September 11th. If you've already had enough of the 9/11palooza, feel free to skip. (A few of you got this the first time.)

You'll recall it was very hard to make long-distance calls that day, and email was often the best way to reach people. I'd sent an earlier mass email at 12:58 p.m. saying only that I was safe and in Brooklyn. I think this captures...the desire to draw boundaries around what had happened...the strangeness of being surrounded by trauma and disaster in a city where I'd only been living for three months...and how very much I missed my family.

My emphasis on giving blood in this letter seems a little bit weird five years later. Some context (from Richard Bernstein's book Out of the Blue): "In the hours and days that followed, people went to blood-donor centers, thinking that that would be the way to help, but they were turned away after spending hours in line, because there were too many volunteers and, in a grim paradox, there weren't very many injured who needed the blood. People had either died or they had gotten away."

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Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 20:05:15 -0400
From: Tim Stewart-Winter
Subject: Today

Dearest all,

I am sending you another mass email simply because the telephone and especially cellular circuits in New York City are overloaded and it's very difficult to make outgoing calls. It's been difficult to get through even to my mom and dad. How can today's events be rendered into words? Is it grotesque to narrate when so many people need information other than mine? But how else but in words can I share with the people I love what happened today, which I want so much to do? How else can I change abstract concern into detailed knowledge? Beyond giving blood, which I am ineligible to do, what else can I do?

As you may know, my office is on the 25th floor of a skyscraper on the northeast corner of Battery Park, about ten blocks from the World Trade Center. Just before 9 o'clock, someone in a corner office saw the first plane crash into the WTC from the north, and alerted everyone in the office. Most of the staff were already at work and rushed to the floor-to-ceiling window to see the fire and smoke pouring from WTC #1. A TV was on showing a very similar view, and it was unclear whether it was an accident or an attack. Then, after a few minutes of confusion and disbelief, the second plane swooped down from the harbor and hit the south tower.

I imagine I will not soon forget that moment, which changed everything. One plane crash could be a freak accident, a failure of air traffic control, or even the act of a lone crazed person. But two plane crashes, one after the other, knocking out the towers one by one as if in a movie (words that were said over and over) - that has a logic to it that is not simply twice the logic of one plane crash. Someone said, there's another plane, and I saw it crash into tower #2 through our floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window. People screamed and ran and tried to decide which side of the building was safest - surely not the side facing the Trade Center? But - the other side, where the second plane had come from?

People began saying they didn't feel safe being on the 25th floor of the building. Looking back now, this thought sounds obvious and naive, but at the time, when nothing was clear, it seemed worth turning over the possibilities. Was this an attack on a building? a city? a country? A couple of people left right away, but the rest of us were gathered into the board room and told that everyone could leave and everyone should consider leaving, though the building wasn't yet officially being evacuated. Ben Maulbeck called me on my cell phone, and when I called him back he told me he thought I should get out as fast as possible. (Thank you, Ben.) Most of the museum staff went down to the ground floor, where the streets were congested and filled with people and sirens.

Some people said the building had been evacuated, some people said it hadn't, the security staff were running around and didn't seem to have clear answers. In fact it was probably a full hour or more from the time of the first bombing before everyone was down on the ground floor. In retrospect — I say this again - I can't believe how long it took me to decide to leave the area. It would have been best to leave after the first crash, when it still might have been possible to get out of Manhattan on the subway, which was soon shut down. But leaving seemed dangerous. It wasn't clear (as it still isn't, but even less so) what the hell was going on. Action seemed less urgent than communication. And everyone was in shock and found it all unreal. The second plane had looked so Hollywood, so disruptive of and apart from the logic of daily life, that it couldn't easily be assimilated as a danger or a fact.

People couldn't make cell phone calls, however, because the circuits were jammed, and there were dozens of people in line for every pay phone. I got through to my parents' house and my mom's office. The streets were filled with people who work in the financial district, trying to figure out what was the safest place to be. Police and emergency workers were themselves very freaked out and had no particular instructions. The first tower to collapse did so (I'm not sure which), and there was a horrible sound. Someone said that it had toppled over, which is not the case, but there was immediately a lot of debris and wind and smoke. I found a co-worker in front of our building, and we decided to follow the crowd until we thought of something better to do.

We followed people onto the FDR drive and up the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. Then the soot began to settle; it quickly covered the street and our clothes, looking like snow. People began to cover their mouths with pieces of clothing to keep the dust out of their lungs, but it was inescapable, especially since everyone was breathing hard and running/trying not to run.

Every option seemed awful and scary. Everyone was trying to find a way out of lower Manhattan. I thought about just walking uptown as far as I could - I imagined arriving at Central Park and continuing up as far as Inwood - but passing all the landmarks along the way didn't seem safe. Staying on the ground level seemed dangerous, in case there were more planes coming or a bomb went off. It got hard to breathe, briefly, and my co-worker and I wondered out loud whether we were breathing in anthrax, and quickly decided not to talk about it since obviously there was nothing to be done.

The scariest thing was that it didn't seem clear whether the attack was over. After the first plane hit, and then after the second plane hit, and then after the towers collapsed - after each earth-shaking impact it seemed like the disaster was over and the rescue could begin, but each time there was more. No one knew what to do. Police and emergency staff were all trying to get to the World Financial Center area - especially after the towers collapsed and injured some of those gathered nearby.

My coworker and I were very nervous about getting on the bridge, because it seemed like whoever did this might want to attack the bridge once it was filled with frantic people. But we both wanted desperately to get out of Manhattan, and we walked across as quickly as we could. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for emergency workers whose job was to stay in the middle of the disaster; I have never been so scared before. My boss sometimes jokes about the importance of knowing the quickest way out of the city, and the joke became a gruesome fact.

I'd been meaning to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and now I have. Anyway, we kept thinking and talking about our apartments. A few emergency vehicles came across in the other direction while we walked, as well as a few brave firefighters walking into Manhattan, but otherwise the bridge (both the car and pedestrian areas) was closed to cars. It's a long bridge. People didn't run, amazingly enough. Several times while we were on the bridge we heard a plane or helicopter or loud noise, and we cowered and covered our faces and of course kept thinking/trying not to think about what we were breathing.

Has anyone ever been so happy to get to Brooklyn? By the time we reached the end of the bridge the dust and soot had started to settle and it was easier to breathe. When we got into downtown Brooklyn my co-worker and I decided to part ways and each go to our own apartments, so she went toward Cobble Hill and I went toward Prospect Heights.

A few people were wearing dust masks, and a man began selling them on the street, hygienically sealed in plastic bags, for two dollars. There were enough people around that it would have been impossible to give them out to everyone, and we were now far enough from the disaster (so far as we knew, and know) that it didn't seem inhumane for him to sell them. "Protect yourself," he called out to the hurried crowd (maybe he is used to hawking goods on the street), just like the vendors call out all along State Street when I get to work every morning. In retrospect it made no sense to buy a mask—I had no doubt inhaled lots of soot already - but my mouth was dry, my pulse pounding, and my lungs uncomfortable - but there was nothing "sensible" about the circumstance, and I sprang for one and put it on. I wondered where the hell he'd gotten them from, whether he just had a stash of dust masks or whether he bought them somewhere or was given them. The entrepreneurial spirit was alive even in the midst of destruction.

I went to my friend Ben's apartment, since Sam is in Michigan right now, and once I got there and drank some water and could shift out of shock mode, I was filled with the thought that I am lucky and a feeling of loss and devastation.

Two final thoughts:
1. I urge you, if you are eligible, to give blood. I wish I could do so.
2. Remember something Rudy Giuliani said this afternoon (and did you ever think I would be quoting him as a paragon of political and emotional calm? but with the current president of course anything is possible): that we have to avoid succumbing to fear and prejudice and hatred, which were the genesis of this crisis in the first place. It is hard to fathom the loss of life that has taken place. It is almost beyond belief. Please love each other.

I love you and I want to talk to you soon. Lower Manhattan is closed tomorrow, and I will be in Brooklyn. Julie Russo is here and we are about to make dinner.

Much, much love,

Tim