By Steven E. Brier
September 11, 2003

It’s a crisp fall morning here in the Northeast, a typical school morning. I’ve fixed the kids their breakfast, my daughter wants to read “just one more page” instead of getting ready, and my wife is preparing for her daily trip into lower Manhattan.

But this date will never again be a typical fall day, no matter the weather.

Two years ago, my wife left early for a quick doctor’s appointment, and was trying to make an early morning meeting in Manhattan. Like many husbands, I’ve learned to ask if anything special was on her schedule, nod and periodically mumble “uh-huh” at the response. If there was anything needing action from me, I’d know enough to ask her to repeat it (or just wait until later and call and ask again).

After my wife left for the doctor, I kicked into full daddy mode. My daughter was on her fifth day at middle school and still nervous enough to want to be early. She raced out the door with a hurried “bye-bye daddy” tossed over her shoulder as the screen door slammed, and she cut through the back yard to meet a friend one block over and walk to school.

My son had to be pried away from Power Rangers, dressed and forced to eat. I finally got him ready, rinsed off the breakfast dishes, tossed him in the car and off to school we went. The first graders at his school line up outside the front door, and he jumped right in line and started talking with all his new friends, ignoring me. First-graders, he’d been told by one, didn’t get all huggy or anything around their parents. But just as the class started going in, he stepped out of line, gave me a hug and said “bye-bye daddy.” I hugged him back and went off to breakfast.

It was quiet in the village that morning. By the week after Labor Day, people around here are in their “New York work” mode and had caught their early trains into the city. But the morning was glorious, and the rest of us were caught up in the beauty of the day, talking about it and wishing for more like it. As I headed back to my home office to negotiate some new contracts, a friend walking up the street said the radio had just announced that someone had flown a small plane into the World Trade Center.

By the time I got home and turned the TV on, it was apparent that it was no small plane. Worst of all, that half-remembered conversation with my wife was coming back.

If she had caught the train she wanted and then taken the PATH, she’d have been in the World Trade Center about the time the first plane hit.

If she had taken the ferry, the timing was about right for her to be walking through the plaza.

If she’d missed that train but made the next one, she’d be in a subway, on her way from Penn Station to Chambers Street/World Trade, which wasn’t any better.

And that meeting, where was it? Was it with the Customs Service? She’d been meeting with them as part of a long-running patent infringement suit, and they needed to be updated on what could not be brought into the country. If it was with them, was it in their offices at the WTC, or the building next door, or at her office several blocks east? And if it wasn’t them, with whom and where was it to be?

There was no answer at her desk, nor those of the people around her. But if I knew what time she left the doctor’s office, I’d have a better idea of her status. Unfortunately, the doctor’s office kept track of what time people arrived, not when they left. The receptionist and one of the nurses, quite proud of their ability to see a number of patients at the crack of dawn and get them quickly on their way, were now distraught that they hadn’t moved slower or fumbled things or otherwise screwed up and made people miss their trains.

I figured the kids were safe in their schools, and blissfully unaware of what had happened. I decided to leave them there while I tried to discover my wife’s whereabouts. (I was – to put it politely – livid to learn later that day that my daughter’s middle school decided to pipe a local TV station’s news feed throughout the school. Although the principal and the PTA president assured me that only a few minutes of the disaster was shown to the students, my daughter talked of watching both towers fall, again and again and again. It sounded like more than a few minutes to me.)

By noon, I’d had no contact with my wife or anyone at her office. Of the dozens of people in my neighborhood who work in lower Manhattan, only one had been heard from, a neighbor whose office faces the WTC. He’d watched the second plane hit, dodged debris and body parts, evacuated his staff and force-marched them to the ferry to Weehawken. He used a backup cell phone and two-way pager to get me and pass along instructions for his wife and employees’ families. But there was not a word about anyone else.

By 1 p.m., there was a sliver of hope. The outgoing message on my wife’s office phone had been changed to the cryptic “I’m OK, but trapped. I’ll call later.” The “OK” part sounded good, but the “trapped” part didn’t go down so well.

By 1:30, I could see that text messages sent to her cell phone had been accessed, though I couldn’t tell by whom or where.

At 2, I sent a text message that NJ Transit had announced it was going to try to get a train out of Penn Station headed west if the authorities gave them the OK. Not long after, the phone rang. It was my wife, saying she’d walked the length of Manhattan back to Penn Station and was going to try to get a train home.

The town where I live is a bedroom community, with many of the residents routinely commuting to Manhattan. Many families have two breadwinners, and around here, that means both parents often work in the city. Normally, no one thinks much of it, but when tens of thousands of people can’t be contacted, it creates dozens of other problems. For the schools, students would not be sent home alone, no matter what the emergency paperwork said. Students had to be picked up and signed for by a parent, a guardian or one of the emergency contacts. No one wanted a latchkey kid to find out that neither parent would be home that night.

All went well for me. I picked up the kids at their normal times, and tried to keep them to their normal routines of homework, reading and after school play dates. My wife managed to get on the first train out of Penn Station and was home well ahead of her normal schedule.

She had missed her train that morning, and then there’d been the usual subway problems. When she should have been leaving the subway at World Trade, she was waiting at the 14th Street station. As near as she could tell, they’d gone as far as Canal Street, where they waited underground for several hours, oblivious to everything going on. The subway returned to 14th where everybody got off, still with no clue that the world had changed.

Like many others on the train, my wife started walking south toward her office, periodically trying to use her cell phone. There are only a couple spots in that neighborhood where the towers would not have been obscured by other buildings, so nobody realized anything was wrong. Until, that is, they started meeting ash- and dust-covered people headed north, and the new reality caught up with them.

My wife, like many others, turned around and started heading back the way she came, hoping to find some way out of the city, with no idea what was going on. At least I, at home, had information. In Manhattan, the collapse of the towers knocked many TV and radio stations off the air and rumors ruled the day. 

That outgoing message on her office line? Well, she meant “trapped in Manhattan.” I guess “stranded” would have been a better word to use, but when you’re lined up with thousands of people covered in dust, trying to use the only working pay phone for blocks, you don’t go looking for a thesaurus.

My next-door neighbor got home OK, too. He’s a senior hardware engineer and department head for a company downtown, and had stepped outside for a few minutes that morning. After he saw the second plane hit, he grabbed his staff and started hiking them north, stopping at a bodega along the way to make them all get sandwiches, water and use the bathroom. He has cell phones on two different services as well as a two-way pager, as do most of the people on his staff, and they worked the phones as they hiked, using the walkie-talkie features on one set of phones to contact staffers outside the immediate area. They caught the last ferry from Midtown before the city was closed, figuring they would be better off outside the city.

After making sure his staff had places to stay and could get there, he worked his way back home and sat in the rocker on the front porch. He spent most of the next few days there, quietly rocking in his chair and staring blankly up at the sky. He went back to his office over the weekend, with a police escort, to pick up a set of backup tapes and drives for the disaster recovery site. All the office doors, he said, were marked with hieroglyphics from the search-and-rescue teams indicating when they’d been searched and noting whether bodies had – or had not – been found there. He was told not to dally, because there were nasty cracks in the walls and that there was an engine from a 757 in the office above his.

Over the next few days, the rest of the neighbors straggled home, some still dust- and debris-covered and occasionally bringing along out-of-towners they’d met along the way who needed a way back to California or Atlanta or Dallas or wherever. They would get  a drink or two, a meal or two, clean up a bit and try to get a rental car, or a train, or a bus to get home. 

For weeks afterward, the crisp fall air reeked, the odor of a burning landfill mixed in with the smells of electrical fires and overheated engines. Where once we would take visitors and show them the Manhattan skyline and the Twin Towers, impromptu memorials sprung up. People would come and stare at the plume of smoke rising, as if from a funeral pyre.

One of the running jokes around here is guessing where people work by where their cars are parked at the train station. The Wall Streeters have to be in to work early, and have the choice spots next to the station. The lawyers are next up, especially if they’re trial lawyers and have to go to court. Us media types start work at a civilized time of day, and park much, much farther away. For several weeks afterward, there were cars that never moved, parked nearby the station. It was odd, because the overnight parking rules usually are strictly enforced. Yet these cars sat there, in the same spots, day after day, getting a little dirtier, the autumn leaves collecting, but nary a ticket. Normally, people would grumble about choice spots being wasted, but not now. There were several here, ditto at the stations in the towns on either side of us. There seemed to be a couple dozen down the line in Summit and the other towns home to the big traders, but no one said much about it. One day, all the cars disappeared.

Much of life is back to normal. We still take people up to South Mountain Reservation to show them the view, though the kids are quiet when they look toward Manhattan. And we still comment on the change in the season and how nice it is.

It’s a beautiful day here in the northeast. My daughter wanted to read “just one more page” before going to her math class at the high school, and my son wanted to play with the toys he got for his birthday. But eventually they got moving, and they both yelled “bye-bye, daddy,” as they ran out the door. My wife blew me a kiss as she hopped in the car, and said that she’d see us all tonight. I stood on the porch and whispered a little prayer that they’d all take care.

It will never again be just another day.
© September 11, 2003