The Towers (standard:non fiction, 1881 words)
Author: Michael Gates	Added: Jan 19 2002	Views/Reads: 3518/2202	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
This is an essay about my experience on September 11th, 2001, and my "relationship" with the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

so permanent a part of the landscape, that I couldn’t imagine anything 
short of a nuclear warhead bringing them down. If that. 

As if in mockery, September 11th was a preternaturally beautiful day. A
cerulean bowl of fresh air was suspended over the city, and the 
temperature was somewhere in the Mediterranean 80s. That morning, my 
wife, Beth, left for work as usual, and I made sure my son got on his 
school bus, as I do every weekday. I puttered around for a while, then 
sat down at the computer in my home office with a cup of coffee. The 
phone had rung twice earlier, but I hadn’t bothered to answer it. I 
played back the first voice-mail message. It was my sister, who _never_ 
calls me (since I see her several times a year at family gatherings), 
which gave me my first inkling that this would not be a routine day. "I 
saw on the news what happened at the World Trade Center," she said. "I 
just wanted to know if Beth is OK. Please call me." For some reason, I 
wrote down "Sept. 11" and "WTC" on the notepad I use for phone 
messages. (I look at that note now, and at the mundane phone messages I 
had scribbled on the page above it the day before, with a real sense of 
nostalgia.) I played back the second message, which was from my wife: 
"I’m OK...." 

With a slight sinking feeling, I went into the living room and snapped
on the TV, tuning it to CNN. 

The next thing I remember is being in the park next to my house,
Riverview Park, which has a Cinemascope view of the New York skyline. I 
had grabbed my digital camera and I was snapping pictures of the 
towers, which, for the moment, looked like huge smokestacks. Immense 
plumes were billowing from both of them. The park was filling up with 
spectators, many of whom were also taking pictures. Someone had a 
radio, and I heard that the Pentagon in Washington had also been hit. 
"Am I awake or asleep?" I asked myself. I decided I was, indeed, awake. 
Then I thought: "I am a witness to history." The cliché seemed 
perfectly apt. 

Then the first tower collapsed, accompanied by gasps and a chorus of
"oh-my-gawds" from the crowd. 

I began to have a peculiar feeling that I’ve only experienced a few
other times in my life: a contradictory sensation of time standing 
still while events rush forward at terrible speed. I’d felt it before, 
for example, in a car wreck, as the vehicle I was in was rolling over 
on a highway. 

Involuntarily, it seemed, I climbed up on the iron fence at the edge of
the park that faces Manhattan. So did several other people of the sort 
who normally don’t climb fences. I watched a huge cloud of smoke rise 
from lower Manhattan, as if an atomic bomb had just exploded. "What 
about Beth?" I thought. "She was 'OK' before, but what about now?" 

I ran back into the house and dialed her number at work. "All circuits
are busy. Please try your call again later." The recorded voice was 
maddeningly calm and businesslike. I turned CNN back on, just in time 
to see the second tower collapse. I tried calling several more times, 
but only got odd-sounding busy signals or recorded messages about 
"technical difficulties." Then the phone rang, but it was Trish, a 
friend of ours, wanting to know if Beth was OK. "I honestly don’t 
know," I said. "The second tower just came down." 

I ran back to the park. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I took
some more pictures of the smoke/dust cloud, which now appeared to 
extend about a mile up into the atmosphere. I don’t remember how long I 
stayed there, gawking. 

Eventually I went back inside to try the phone again and to see what I
could learn from TV. The phone situation was no better, and what I saw 
on TV was far more horrific than what I’d seen from the park. I was 
sitting there, mesmerized, watching footage of people jumping from 100 
stories up, of roiling dust clouds chasing people through Manhattan’s 
canyons, when Beth suddenly walked through the front door. She had 
caught one of the last trains out of the city, she said, just before 
the entire transit system shut down. 

For several days after that I went to the park every few hours to
observe the ghostlike cloud still rising from where the towers had once 
stood, trying to convince myself that I had really seen what I thought 
I had seen. After dark, the cloud glowed eerily, reflecting the stadium 
lights that had been installed at "ground zero" so that search and 
rescue operations could continue all night. In the days that followed, 
the cloud occasionally drifted across the river, giving off a faint 
smell of burning plastic. F-15 fighter jets roared overhead, but 
otherwise the skies were quiet, all the airports having closed. 

On Saturday, I went down to the Jersey City waterfront to help load
trucks with relief supplies. There was a huge crowd of volunteers 
there, of all ages and "types," though the majority seemed to be of 
college age. There were even some uniformed cops there who had driven 
overnight from Chicago to help load supplies. The atmosphere was 
surprisingly jovial as people formed "bucket brigades" to pass along an 
endless amount of bottled water and packaged food for loading onto 
trucks. Every so often, a boatload of exhausted firemen would arrive 
from the other side of the Hudson, to cheers from the volunteers. All 
of this bonhomie felt a bit forced, however, against the background of 
the smoking, gap-toothed skyline. 

I look now at the new breach in Manhattan’s jagged profile with a
painful sense of loss. I didn’t know anyone personally who died in the 
attacks, so I’m not sure if I can call if grief. Can you grieve for 
lost buildings? They were more to me than buildings, though, just as 
they were more than that to the people who destroyed them. Symbols of 
"capitalism" or "imperialism" to some, to me they were symbols of all 
that is "over the top" about New York: not just one awesome skyscraper 
but two, side by side, in relationship, "trading partners" if you will, 
and tall enough to rattle the gods. To me, their "two-ness" stood for 
something else, as well: it was a constant, iconic reminder that, 
though it’s possible to be lonely in New York, it’s never necessary to 
be alone. When the towers fell, the citizens of the New York metro area 
came together, as they always do when disaster arrives. There’s a hole 
in the sky that may never be filled, but, for now, we’ve filled the gap 
between ourselves. 

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