I grew up, if not in the shadow of the Twin Towers, at least within shouting distance. Looming over the Hudson, so blandly out-of-scale with the rest of downtown, they seemed less like buildings to me than abstractions of Corporate Power and Wealth (as they did to people in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan as well). It had none of the glamor or history of the Empire State Building, with its shining limestone eagles and zeppelin mooring mast. Instead, the Twin Towers served as landmarks for me, and I could always orient myself by gauging my location in relation to them. Only occasionally, as during the evening hours when light transformed the steel into thick columns of blazing sunlight in the heart of downtown, did the towers develop a personality of their own.
My morning busride took me past the towers. I am convinced that if I had not been sleeping, and had peeked outside my window on the way to school, I would have seen the first planes hit. As it was, I went to school without incident. By the second period, we were all called into the gymnasium for an important announcement. Our principal, usually in such a good mood, stated as sollemnly as he could muster "a plane has hit the world trade center". The reaction of most of us: "that sucks". Then someone called out "was it a Cessna?" "a jetliner". We weren't the same after that.
Classes continued as usual, but rumours seemed to filter through the doors in spite of our lack of tvs and radios. Two towers had been hit. The pentagon. Pennsylvania. War. Tens of thousands dead. FInally we couldn't take it, and we all gathered in the one room with a grainy television to watch history unfold. After five minutes I had to leave: I couldn't bear to see my landmarks so mutilated. I was afraid of returning home to see desecrated monuments, little knowing that the terrorists had not simply destroyed the towers, but had
erased them, leaving an absence far worse than a ruin.
In spite of my anguish, I was also strangely thrilled. I was a very patriotic lad at this point, and I had immersed myself in the patriotic annals of World War II, the CIvil War, etc. THis was Pearl Harbor, Fort Sumter, and the Gulf of Tonkin all rolled into one on my doorstep. The future was now uncertain, but big events lead to bigger responses, right? I actually looked forward to living through a period I could look back upon later and say "I was there". I should mention that I called both my parents immediately to see if they were all right. I never doubted their survival, but looking back now I should have been far more worried than I was.
Our superiors eventually decided to cancel school, and I found myself in a bus returning home. I refused to look outside my window. I was simply too afraid of seeing the smoke and ash looming over my city, poisoning it forever. Instead my eyes found refuge in an US History II text which I read with insane dedication, trying to replace my fears with the kind of faith in progress that only an American high-school textbook can provide. As time progressed I found that our bus had stopped. I finally looked out of my window- traffic all the way back to Giants Stadium. The feds had closed off the Lincoln and the Holland tunnels, but by doing so had blocked access to the city in-between them: Hoboken! My city was off-limits, courtesy of the United States goverment.
After quick planning, our bus drivers decided to pull into a police station to find another way of geting home. At one point we were seriously considering staying at the station for a night, an option I didn't mind much (they had cable and MAXIM). At the last minute, however, I got word that my mother was on the police line: she had actually called every place I could be around my school until she got a hold of me. Love you, Mom.
She told me that she was staying with her mother and Sister down in Essex County, and was going to pick me up. Gratitutude, thankfullness. When my mom came and picked me up I remember being strangely quiet. It was only after I begged my relatives not to make me watch the 24-hour news cycle that my emotions came out.
The days following 9-11 were, if anything, even more dramatic than the event itself: the smell of ash across the river, the makeshift memorials, vigils, and prayer meetings that brought our entire community together, the performance of "somewhere" that left all of us crying in our libraries basement, the sound of military jets overhead, a random hug given to a stranger, jungle-camoflauge troops patrolling downtown. MaybeI'll write about those one day. But for now, I can only look back seven years and try to preserve what the 21st century's beginning felt like to a 15 year old boy.
