911

A flower bloomed in my garden today. A magenta rose, one of my favorites, and one of the last for the late summer season. As I stood looking at its resilient blossom, I couldn’t help but think back on another September 11^th, one with a far more dire outcome.

In 2001, I had been living in Brooklyn for a few years and had recently bought a house in South Park Slope, then a still-sleepy, if quickly hippifying enclave a few stops from my job in Manhattan. I was working at a music company where I was tasked with putting our music into film projects, hence my attendance at the Toronto International Film Festival that day.

I remember turning on the hotel room news that morning, as I often did as I got ready for my day, where I saw a report from a witness who insisted that she had watched a big airliner hit one of the Twin Towers. The newscaster doubted her story. “Really, a jetliner? Are you sure it wasn’t a small plane, maybe a pilot who had run off course?” She insisted that it had been a large aircraft. Of course, we all know what happened next.

In horror, I watched as the news unfolded. The second plane hit. I screamed out loud and opened the hotel door to see if people were talking or evacuating or gathering – nothing. They were all probably glued to the news like me.

I had been scheduled to meet some fellow New Yorkers to attend a film screening, but everyone was transfixed by watching the unfolding news. It quickly became apparent that business as usual had ground to a halt.

I tried to reach my then-husband, who worked in emergency remediation, i.e., disaster clean-up, but was unsuccessful. Desperate for some human connection amidst the unwinding chaos, I called a few friends on each coast, just to touch base. Everyone was watching the news, no matter where they were.

My phone rang. It was the friend I had been scheduled to meet up with. “Come over to my hotel room, there are a few people here…” Unsure what else to do, I started out for her hotel a few blocks away. For some reason, I stopped to buy snacks and a bottle of wine, presuming that everyone would be freaking out. I was not wrong.

Inside my friend’s room, a half dozen people were glued to the news. One by one, each person tried again and again to reach their spouse or boyfriend or family. And one by one, they each burst out crying when they heard their loved one’s voice.

We cried a lot, both together and alone. Slowly, each person went their separate ways, mostly to try to figure out how they could find their way home, many to New York City. I had tried calling the airport, the line being constantly busy, and eventually the news said that all flights had been grounded.

I went back to my hotel. People were crying in the lobby and at the front desk, people were hugging on the stairwell. Eventually, my NY friend called and said she was trying to get a flight back to New York, which I found astounding. “How can you possibly contemplate getting on a plane today?!”

I headed to the train station. They told me that the trains weren’t running, and certainly not towards New York City, which was only beginning to discover just how vast and longlasting the day’s tragedy would prove to be.

I tried to call my office in New York, but no one answered. Eventually, I got an email from my boss wishing me good luck getting home and telling me that the office was closed until further notice.

Finally, on day two or three, I lucked out and got a seat on an otherwise sold-out, New York bound train. They warned us that it would take longer than usual, given the heightened security and all that. That was an understatement.

We departed the next morning. The loading and boarding areas were jam-packed. “The train is sold out, please – if you do not already have a ticket, you will have to wait,” a uniformed man yelled to the crowd. People ignored him and tried to jam onto the train anyway, making boarding slow and laborious.

Once on board, virtually every seat and space was taken. Luggage, suitcases, bags of who knows what – there was not an inch to spare. I don’t know whether it was the stress that we all felt or whether it was due to us being packed in on a slow-moving vehicle, but people were famished. It didn’t take long until the announcer came on and told us that the bar and all snacks had been depleted. There was some grumbling amongst passengers, but most of us were simply grateful to be alive, to be hopefully out of danger, and to be headed towards home.

The next announcement came. “Sorry folks, we are now out of all beverages…” A groan rose from the crowd. But, despite the anguish that we all felt, something magical happened; strangers wept on one another’s shoulders. People lent their dying cell phones to others in hopes of reaching family members. Others offered their last sip of water or bite of a long stashed, stale Fig Newton to their seatmates.

Knowing that we were among the lucky ones on those terrible days, we stuck together like a bunch of castaways on a life raft, clinging to each other as proof that humanity still existed.

To say that our journey was slow is an understatement; every few hours, we stopped so  security personnel could check the tracks for any explosives. As we neared Niagara Falls and the US border, we worried as armed guards with bomb-sniffing dogs boarded and walked slowly up and down the train.  We were not allowed to disembark.

I imagine that everyone was wondering the same thing as me – would anything ever feel safe again, or had the world irrevocably changed and this was to forever be our new reality?

The hours and then days dragged on. I doubt if anyone slept – I know I didn’t – as the miles slowly passed by outside the windows. By day two, someone suggested we sing a song to pass the time, and amidst the groans and shrieks of “Oh, please no!”, someone started softly.

“We shall overcome…” ‘ One by one, we all joined in, until our whole train car was crying and hugging and singing off-key, most with trembling voices. It was as if all the tension we had been carrying, both individually and collectively, momentarily dissipated.

My seatmate muttered “Ouch!” when I realized that I had been clutching her arm tightly enough to leave a mark.

When we finished the song, the car was silent, with only the slow and steady clack-clacking of the wheels on the track. I was suddenly exhausted. I looked around and saw my fellow passengers hugging one another, their faces drawn and haggard. I imagined that we were all thinking the question that no one dared to utter – what will the world we return to look like, and will it ever feel the same?

Slow miles and a day or so later, the announcer told us that we were an hour outside of New York City. What would normally be a 13-hour trip had taken us a few days, but we were nearly safely home.

We pulled into Penn Station around 3am, and stepped into a very different New York City than the one we had left a few days before.

Usually bustling and busy 24-hours a day, Penn Station was virtually empty. I walked down the long, echoing corridors, vacant except for our trainload of people. We waved to each other before I ventured outside with my rolling suitcase, my state of bewilderment setting in. The streets outside were deserted - no line of cabs, no honking horns, no pedestrians rushing to make a train. Just eerie silence, like a sci-fi movie where everyone suddenly vanishes off the face of the earth.  

Eventually, a lone cab rolled by and I grabbed it. “Park Slope,” I said to the driver, who did not respond or smile, the news constant on his radio.

Even in the 3am darkness, I could see the beginning of the signs that would soon be plastered on every stop sign and lamppost all over the city. “Missing!” with a xeroxed photo of a loved one. Most of these people would never come home.

The cab deposited me back at home, which looked the same except for the film of haze and smoke that hung over everything like a fog. My then-husband was helping clean up Ground Zero (luckily, his team wore full protective hazmat gear as many who did not died slowly from various diseases due to the toxic substances in which they were working).

The next morning the scale of the destruction was beginning to become clear; our local neighborhood firehouse, who had rushed to the scene, lost every single member. Every - one. My neighbor’s mother worked in the towers and was never heard from again.

I went to a march with some of my fellow Brooklynites, with most people remaining silent and carrying prayers for peace. Everyone looked stunned - every single home in our area had suffered a huge loss.  In the coming weeks, we walked around like bereaved zombies who, on a good day, could manage to put one foot in front of the other.

That horrible day and many that followed were unimaginable tragedies. Yet the memory lingers of the camaraderie that a bunch of strangers shared on the train ride home, ever so slowly making our way from Toronto to NYC.  

These days, with divided politics and increasing violence the sad norm, even that experience seems naively hopeful. Still, I cannot help but smile when I recall our thrill at sharing stale crackers or of our singing together in that overcrowded train car, of our mutual willingness to tell each other hopeful lies.   

My hope is that, despite the challenges we continue to face as a nation, we can evoke that sense of hope that I shared with my fellow passengers on that train 24 years ago. A sense of camaraderie, of shared purpose, like souls clinging to a lifeboat. Maybe it was having a shared destination. Maybe that is what we humans need – a shared destination - whether we all get off on the same stop or not.