Even though I am not able this weekend to do all the grapic postings I had planned to do, while I have power and consistent dial-up connectivity, I can at least put up one of my musings the last several weeks since I returned from holiday in the UK.
The most auspicious passing was the third anniversary of September 11, 2001. I spent a couple of hours one afternoon reflecting upon my experience of that terrible day in what for me was a horrendous year:
It was an awful year. It was a most awful day . . .
It began like so many of that dreadful year. I awoke somewhat stiff and cramped on the futon out in the office. I was still quite tired, emotionally hung-over as usual, having been up until the wee hours of the morning online. For most of the past year I had been sleeping out in the office. Since Sara’s and my desperate estrangement. Our house was mostly empty. She had moved out several weeks before, taking most of our stuff. The remainder I had given away or sold at a tag sale the weekend before. The detritus of our fully separated life was scattered throughout the empty rooms. I only went inside for showers and occasionally to cook meals in the kitchen, when I didn’t eat out. It pained me to even be in the patio with our sunflowers and Montauk daisies, or to use the pool we had put up in the late 80s. Our 22-year, mostly wonderful relationship had crashed on the shallow shoals of my unrelenting anger and rage, a pernicious holdover from the war trauma I experienced in Vietnam. The lovely faux-Victorian house that we had placed so many of our dreams -- and all of our capital investment in -- had been sold. I was waiting to close the transaction, so I could take my half of the proceeds, pay cash for the Rialta RV I had ordered, and hit the road to reinvent myself, or at least find a way to survive a radically different way of life.
No doubt Chutney, our English standard poodle that I had custody of, was out doing his morning constitutional in the fenced backyard. I probably had my first cup of latte, either in hand or brewing, when the phone rang. I picked it up with a flurry of hope it might be Sara. Nope, it was one of my clients, who worked for the now defunct TWA,. He was yelling excitedly into the phone for me to turn on the TV, that a plane had just crashed in to one of the World Trade Center towers. I turned the TV on, and MSNBC came up on the screen. It wasn’t the normal Don Imus. Instead, an excited correspondent breathlessly described the chaos as a handheld camera jerkily panned horrified faces, necks craned back, looking upwards. A thick, black smudge of smoke was coming from one of the towers, out of which flicked yellow-orange flames. In the background was a hubbub of noise and confusion, and the hallmark sound of that awful day, the wailing of incessant sirens. I switched to CNN. Different commentators, same scenes. Back to MSNBC. No change. A quick scan of CBS, CNBC, ABC, the local New York Stations. No difference. Every channel depicted a Hollywood special effects nightmare -- except it wasn’t fake, it was way too real. Could I pinch myself hard enough to make it go away? No way, damn it.
Suddenly a huge, horrifying, psyche-tearing roar muted the screams of people beginning to run in panic. A second plane had hit the second Tower. Mesmerized in terror, in a trance, I mutely switched from channel to channel for the next couple of hours, as the gathering terror piled up one after the other: the strike at the Pentagon, the downing of Flight 93, the President flying in Air Force One all around the country, the collapse of one, than the other huge tower, confusion, dismay, babbling conjecture from the plethora of talking heads and quickly rounded up experts on everything -- but the truth.
By late morning, I was resoundingly driving myself crazy, flipping from one speculative, self-important suit to another, each carefully groomed for primetime to cover the biggest story of the new, now no longer idealistically hopeful, Millennium. The world was inexorably changed; history would never be the same.
I had to do something. I called the Suffolk County Red Cross to volunteer; they suggested I contact nearby Nassau County Red Cross, who was mobilizing Mental Health Volunteers. Since I had spent much of my professional life dealing with trauma, both Acute and Post, as well as having been trained in Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, I thought I might be of some service. I found copies of my NY State Social Worker license, as well as a copy of my Vitae, and started to drive to the Nassau county Red Cross office in Mineola.
On the 45 minute drive, I switched between 1010 WIN News and the Bloomberg Channel, no real new news, just lots more speculation, uncertainty, various conflicting rationales. The Southern State Parkway at noontime had little traffic going in towards the City, but already a near rush-hour stream of traffic heading East. Driving north on Meadowbrook Parkway, I got quite emotional near where Sara and I had lived in Garden City, when we first moved back to Long Island from Albany during the early, good years of our relationship. That was in ‘83, three years after our son was born, a time of unbearable innocence and a multitude of dreams, now long gone . Soon I was pulling up in front of the Nassau County Red Cross building.
By late afternoon, I was registered with the Red Cross, had been given a couple of Red Cross Orientation sessions, and was issued a Red Cross ID badge. I had just missed the last Red Cross Mass Disaster Vehicle that had been dispatched to what was now designated as Ground Zero, a term burned into the lexicon of a whole brand new, most unsettling and radically unstable era. Someone was needed to go to LaGuardia Airport to offer counseling and support to American Airlines staff and passengers stranded in the terminal. I volunteered to go. I was given instructions, the name of an EAP colleague to contact, and a special Red Cross pass that would let me on the Parkways and Expressways going into the City. They had been closed to the general public at the Queens border since that early afternoon.
By the time I left the Red Cross Office, dusk was gathering. I stopped at a Seven Eleven on Hempstead Turnpike to get a large cup of coffee and a sandwich to eat on the drive in to LaGuardia. Everything had a specter of unreality – it was like being in an endless fog while at the same time everything sharply glowed. I remember what a beautiful early Fall day that Tuesday had been, a gorgeous day, a radiant day with bright, cloudless blue skies, and a hint of Fall crispness in the air.
The Red Cross ID easily got me on the Northern State Parkway. The nervous middle-aged Nassau County Policeman didn’t take his hand off his service revolver, while he examined the ID and my driver’s license. It was most eerie driving on the empty road at that time. During normal, rush-hour traffic, all lanes in both directions would be stop-and-creep-forward full of homecoming traffic. Just after I left the Cross Island near Whitestone Bridge, I noticed the huge, dark plume of dark brownish black smoke, leaning East over Brooklyn from far downtown.
As I merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, I became aware of the screaming wail of sirens from emergency vehicles by the dozens -- fire trucks, ambulances, military vehicles, ugly, squat bomb squad trucks -- speeding along in both directions. I carefully stayed in the slow lane, hugging the shoulder as much as I could. It was almost dark when I turned off the exit into LaGuardia Airport at 97th Street. I could still make out the darker splotch of smoke pouring out from where the Twin Towers had been. The dark cloud now glowed ominously deep-orange red, casting an uncanny sheen all along the skyline from Lower Manhattan up into Midtown. There were no stars.
Two regular City road patrol cops carefully scrutinized my ID and radioed to their headquarters for instructions. After a static-filled conversation, I was brusquely motioned onto the LaGuardia Airport premises. Again I was struck with how strange and like a Twilight Zone episode it was, like I was driving through jello in an alien time warp. There was not a plane in the sky or on the runways. One of the busiest of our nation’s airports with planes landing or taking off every 10 seconds or so, LaGuardia was completely shut down. All commercial airline traffic everywhere had been grounded indefinitely. No planes were flying anywhere, since four had been hijacked that morning, which now seemed another lifetime away. Occasionally, I would hear in the distance the distinctive whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, or the screeching roar of covering F-16s overhead.
I shortly ran into a roadblock manned by National Guard troops in full battle gear, who would not let me further into the main airport artery. A Captain directed me to try going around a back way. Within a quarter of a mile, I was stopped by a Mutt and Jeff SWAT Team, both wearing flak jackets over khakis and dark blue NYPD baseball caps in combat boots. The large, burly, silent one kept his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun trained at my head during our entire encounter. The other was a diminutive, high-strung, nervous fellow, like the Dustin Hoffman Ratso character in Midnight Cowboy, with an M-16, hopefully locked, and fully loaded. He couldn’t understand what I was doing at LaGuardia, being not at all impressed by my Red Cross ID. He was obsessed with my car, which was an old, gray ’88 Pontiac 6000 SE, which had my mountain bike on the trunk bike rack. I guess, looking back, it makes sense that he was concerned by my driving around in a 13 year-old, rattle-trap of a car with a bike on the back. I mean, what better, though perhaps too obvious a strategy, than to pack a clunker up with dynamite or other explosives, park it somewhere, then ride off to safety and detonate by remote control or with a timer. He carefully searched me and the car, finding nothing by trash, but in a squeaky shout he informed me that no, I could not go into the parking garage, and no I could not go into the terminal because everyone had gone home. I asked him if I could call Nassau Red Cross for instructions. After he carefully examined my cell phone, he allowed as I could, muttering all the while what a cluster-fuck this was.
I called the office and was told that yes, American Airlines had moved everyone into a nearby hotel, but no, there was no need now for me to provide any counseling services, for me to go home and come back in the morning. Disappointed, thoroughly thwarted, I thanked the officers, carefully turning around, and headed for the East entrance to the Grand Central Parkway. As I entered the Parkway, the steady stream of emergency vehicle sirens continued, swirling red lights blinking and streaking, in both directions. This was soon punctuated by another, louder sound, however, the roar of the engines from a large aircraft. I looked up and saw over Shea Stadium, making it’s final approach, a large four-engine aircraft heading straight towards me. I could only hope it was a military aircraft.
Apparently it was, because I made the long, lonely trip back to the empty shell of a home in Islip unscathed with no further incident. Bone-aching tired, I collapsed on the futon where I had begun that awful day, an eon or so previously. Little did I suspect just how much my life and existence had been changed. Chutney cuddled up beside me on the futon, burrowing in, offering me some whimpering comfort, as I sobbed myself to sleep to finally end a perfectly awful day.
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