Plum Crazy

Written on 9/11/01

I'm still in shock. Nothing I ever saw compares to the sight of the two buildings on fire with gaping holes in them. I am just grateful to be alive. I just pray that many of my colleagues are also alive. I'm also glad I was not downtown when the towers collapsed. I'm not sure I could have handled seeing that. Hearing it on the radio was bad enough. People were crying on the buses. I was crying on the bus and while walking on the street trying to get home. It took me two hours to get home, but at least I made it.

Written on 9/13/01

I was on a bus on the FDR Drive approaching the Brooklyn Bridge exit, on my way to work at the World Trade Center Tower 1. Suddenly, people on the near side of the bus start looking out the window, shocked. Someone said "A plane just hit the World Trade Center." I couldn't even believe it, it really didn't register. The bus driver pulled off at the Brooklyn Bridge exit, stopped the bus, and told us we had to get off and "Good luck getting home." I got off the bus and looked up. Only now did this start to sink in, as there was a gaping black hole in the building, flames rising, and chunks of the building falling off. I couldn't figure out which tower it was, though, as I was in too much shock to remember which had the radio antenna. I tried to get on my cellphone, but it was not working. I walked about a quarter of a block, found a payphone to call my parents to let them know I was not in the building when it happened and to ask them to tell me which tower it was. I suppose at this time I still had some stupid idea that I would try to get to work if Tower 1 was not the one that was hit. Of course, at this point, we all thought it was an accident. Anyway, after I called my father, who hadn't even heard yet, I walked back down to look at the building. By that time, the second tower was on fire, with an even worse gaping hole. I started to cry even harder at that point, because I realized that this could not possibly have been an accident. People all around me were just staring up at the building in shock, some in tears, some unable to do more than stare.

Eventually, I started to walk uptown again, with some vague idea of getting on a subway home. I had a portable MP3 player with an FM radio with me, so I decided to listen to the news while I was walking. Unsurprisingly, and if I had been thinking clearly I would have realized this, the subways were not running. I did see that local bus service was still running, so I walked a ways to a bus stop and got on the First Avenue bus. I was sitting on the bus listening to the radio. Since no one else on the bus had a radio, I was telling the other passengers what I was hearing. I told them that the Pentagon had been hit also, and everybody's faces went even whiter at that. Somewhere around 34th Street, the news came on that Tower 2 had collapsed. At that news, the bus got very quiet. Around 50th Street, traffic was so bad that most of us got out to walk. I walked up a bit, still listening to the news, when I heard that Tower 1 had also collapsed. At that, I started crying again. Some very nice man stopped to reassure me, and then I went to find another payphone to call my parents again. Took me a while to find one, but eventually I did and called them. Then I walked a little ways further until traffic had cleared up and got back on a bus the rest of the way home. All told, it took me two hours to get home that morning.

The rest of the day was spent trying to let people know I was okay. I couldn't make outgoing calls for hours, but I was able to get some ingoing calls and so got some news about some of my coworkers who had not been upstairs at the time of the plane crash. I sent an e-mail to a guy who used to work for me who had moved to Chicago a couple of months earlier to let him know I was okay and to find out if he had heard from anyone else. He had not, at the time, but that got me on an e-mail list wherein we would all report when we contacted someone, so we had a list of people who were okay. I basically spent the rest of the day in shock on the Internet and phone, waiting for news of my coworkers, combing the survivors lists, crying off and on. I have not, to this time, seen actual footage of the towers collapsing, and I'm not sure when I will be able to watch that. It's enough for me to know that my office is completely obliterated and that hundreds of people I know are dead. I don't think I can bear to see it on tape.