Many people have a moment in their lives where they could reflect and say specifically where they were and what they were doing at a given moment. For me, I never experienced anything quite like it until September 11th. But when it happened, we all knew, my friends, colleagues...even before the full impact of the day was felt that this was the event of our lifetime.
I lived through it twice is a strange sort of way. First was the actual event. I was living in Wisconsin, right outside Milwaukee and several friends had come to visit from California. They were heading home and I had just dropped off one at the Milwaukee General Mitchell Airport. I left him at the curb and was heading to work and ironically was listening to AM news rather than a the usual local FM music station.
News soon came in saying that a plane had struck one of the twin World Trade Center towers. Naturally I was thinking small prop plane and naturally so was the news announcer. A little news continued to trickle in during the drive until the moment I heard that one tower was beginning to list. At that point I and I assume the rest of the listeners realized that this was not a small isolated accident. When I got to work I received a message from my friend from the airport, naturally he could not get out but had the foresight to rent a car almost immediately and started driving back to California with one of my other friends.
The CNN website was down and so were most other major news sites, we received some news from the Milwaukee Journal and some fuzzy images from a TV with no cable connection. Later that day, we heard that our employer GE Healthcare had preemptively loaded several tractor trailers with imaging and other medical supplies and sent them to stage around Manhattan to assist hospitals cope with the influx of patients. I'll admit that I felt helpless in the face of the tragedy but it helped knowing that in some way we were helping.
Several months later we were relocated outside Manhattan in Connecticut. I got to see first hand much of the destruction but more significant were the images. Images of missing people posted around the city with personal details and contact information should they be found. People like you or I, all ethnic and age groups. From the young kid from the mid-west trying to hit it big in New York, others supporting local families to foreign nationals working on a variety of endeavors.
When my wife graduated from grad school she interviewed with Merrill Lynch which had offices in a neighboring building. She would have been on-site that day had she taken the job. Just another way that we could have been touched even more significantly. The Marriott Hotel we stayed in was destroyed completely.
As we explored the wonders of NYC, one couldn't ignore the tell tale signs of the tragedy. Nealy all fire stations had lost significant portions of their staff, their pictures posted prominently. When a fire truck would drive by it would carry an American flag streaming from it. Over the next several years we visited New York frequently and were fortunate to experience much of the physical and emotional healing.
Those who know me, know that I am almost compulsive about always having a camera with me to capture life as it happens. It's safe to assume that much of my compulsion was born on September, 11 2001. Perhaps it is just my way of making sure that life's most significant events are never forgotten.
