It’s hard to relate to my story, because relating is hard to do without common experience. It seems that no one really knows what to say when I tell them I didn’t find out what really happened until after the fact long after the fact, and yet I was in Manhattan. I meet a lot of curiosity regarding what I experienced. I can see the gears turning behind the confused faces and awkward silences, but I think that most people simple find the premise simply inconceivable.
Can you imagine it?
Go back to what you experienced when you first heard about the attacks. Imagine hearing about it, but not seeing any of the media: no news reports, no video. Next, imagine that no one around you had seen or heard any news reports and video, either. What would people say to eachother? Now, imagine the location being lower manhatten, but when you look up, you don’t see smoke and ashes, you don’t see an attack zone. Imaging seeing beautiful blue skies when someone next to you says to another person, “I heard they said we’re under attack. They say there are more planes in the air, and they’re sealing off the city.”
Imagine if that was the only thing you’d heard about the attacks until 4:00 in the afternoon that day, if that was all anyone else knew, and all you knew was that, well, for all you know you’re in a war zone, and you should probably get the hell out of there.
Imagine looking out of your window right now, and being told that you’re in an attack zone, and that you have to evacuate.
Blue skies all around you. War zone. Under attack. Get out of the city. More planes in the air. Apocolypse…in blue? Go north. Go, go, GO!
My story will begin moments before the evacuation of Penn Station, at 1:00 pm on the afternoon of September 11th. I walked north, and took pictures of what may have been, for all I knew, the end of my world. For all I knew, as I walked north from 34th street, I might not see tomorrow, or even the end of the day, or even dinner. Can you imagine that? How freaking normal is it to merely sit at your computer, or in your car, or anywhere at any time during your day and causually think about what you’ll do when you get home tonight? Can you imagine not being able to think that far into your future, because you’re unsure whether your future will extend past the next few minutes? What I saw was not the surreal imagery that was broadcast that day from ground zero, but it was surreal in another way. My own private apocolypse.
September 11, 2001, Penn Station, sometime around 1:00 PM, I think. I called my mom to tell her I was taking the train to Amherst and would arrive at 6:00 that evening.
“Hi mom, it’s me. Soooo, my train ‘ll get in at 6:00-”
“OH THANK GOD YOU’RE OK!”
“Uh, yeah, wh-”
“Where are you?”
“Penn Station, why?”
“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON?!!!”
“No, what’s up?”
“Planes hit the World Trade Towers.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I heard something about that.”
—
I was sitting in a Starbucks in Bryant Park earlier that morning when I heard a call come over an officer’s walkie-talkie a few tables away.
“…a plane just hit one of the towers…”
That was all. The officer took another sip of his coffee, then casually got up and walked out of the shop. I didn’t think much of it. Be me for a moment: from where I sat, looking outside at the bright blue sky and seeing people going about their business with the casual steadiness which New Yorkers exhibit while doing just that, from the non-challance with which the officer responded to that call; you don’t imagine the kind of chaos and destruction that was being telecast all over the globe that very instant.
I finished my coffee, went to my PT appointment at Bryant Park Physical Therapy, and then headed to Penn Station.
—
“Yeah, I heard. Some plane hit the tower -”
“THERE ARE NO MORE WORLD TRADE TOWERS.”
“Huh?”
“Both towers were hit by planes and collapsed. We’re under -”
“Whaaaaat?!”
“DOES EVERYTIHNG LOOK NORMAL TO YOU????!!!”
“Ummmm, yeah,” I said, looking around. People were sitting, reading the paper, waiting for trains and buses.
“You mean to tell me that the trains are still running?”
“Looks like.”
“The Port Authority is closing off the city. There have been attacks on the towers, and the pentagon. They’re going to evacuate you any minute. Get to Lynn’s.” My “Auntie Lynn” is my mothers best friend, she lives on the upper west side. “Call Lynn, NOW. I’m going to call your father.”
“Ok,” I said. I put $0.50 in the phone. (You might recall that, back then, the average pedestrian didn’t have a cell phone permenantly plugged into their ear). As I dialed Lynn’s number, the call to “please exit the station” came over the PA.
{Above: Evacuating Penn Station}
This photo, like most of the photos you’ll see in this “galery” looks spectaculary ordinary – at first. You’ll have to take a second look at many of them, and allow to walk you through the process. As I’ve said, for all I knew, the world – as I knew it – could come crashing down at any moment. I had a disposable camara in my backpack. If this was the end of days for me, I’m going to take pictures of it, the “apocolypse” as I know it, so, in the event that I am not blown to smitherenes, there will be this time-capsule/record of what the end was like. The pictures are merely the scenes I saw: People, daytime street life in Manhattan. I took picutres of things that looked normal, thinking that even if this is the end, people are still doing people things, and not looking like a Hollywood action movie, but I also took pictures that look slightly amiss for the place and time.
These days, when it seems like every 12 year old has a cell phone, it’s hard to imagine a scene like this one above – not one person in sight with a cell. This photo is extraordinary in that just how often do you see a crowd of New Yorkers standing still on a street corner, looking and talking to eachother?
The crowd thickened as more and more people emptied out of Penn Station, and slowly began to buzz with people turning to one another to ask if they knew what was happening. Only a scant few had cell phones, but it quickly spread that none of those who had phones could get through because the signals were all tied up.
For the most part, standing on the corner, I heard nothing more than what I was able to understand from my mother over the phone: the towers were hit by planes and collapsed. Still, with no media, no video iPods, it was hard to comprehend. All you could do was ask the person next to you, and they would usually shake their head and say they didn’t know anything. I could pick up bits as pieces as the info was passed along. and most of it was no different from what I’d heard on the phone. But then I heard about the other planes, and the fear started to swell and grip.
Looking around, it didn’t look like a war zone, it didn’t sound like a war zone. But that was wrong. The environment, what I’m seeing, I thought, it’s wrong: it’s at a total discord with what the outsiders seem to know about what happened at the towers. The uneasiness in my stomach was the stuff of science fiction: the feeling that there could be alternate realities. You hear things that make you uneasy and afraid, and you expect the world around you to dissolve into chaos. You expect to go dizzy, you expect your eyes to cloud over. Time slows down, all things not immediate to the situation become a mush of grey matter, and the only coherent thought in my head was “go to Lynn’s.”
{Above: north and west bound traffic in gridlock along 7th avenue}
Look at that blue sky. Northeasterners might remember how nice the weather was that day, it was a perfect fall weather: warm sun, temperate, refreshing. So strange. Looks like just another day in New York City. Except for that it was a little after 1:00 PM, and the streets were all gridlocked with people trying to get out of the city.
The fear and discomfort flipped on some kind of physiological back-up generator that powered my feet to start walking, one foot in front of another. I can honestly say that I was afraid for my life as I walked north towards Times Square, having heard that more planes could hit. It felt as if the fates had taken my reality, or my future, like one can take on object from another person, and put it on hold, as if to say, “we’re going to take this – you’re future – away from you now and put it on hold. By the way, you might not get it back later.” The sense of what that felt like, I can only explain by saying that I couldn’t imagine, hard as I may try, what my dinner that evening would be like. Try to think about what you’re life will be like 30 years from now. It’s difficult to conceptualize because so much *could* happen between now and then, things that we don’t control. Now, imagine that being forced to apply that same reasoning in thinking about your dinner tonight. It is *hard* to throw everything up in the air, but that is essentially what happened to me and I assume happened to almost everyone else on that island.
For 20 blocks I walked like this, feeling like I didn’t control my feet or my reality. For 20 blocks, we streamed north, alongside gridlocked cars and buses with people pressed up against the doors and windows.
I counted the streets, one at a time at first. Then, as I made past times square, still breathing, still going, I started counting the streets in 10’s. Ok, you’ve made it 10 streets, now for the next 10. Then, everything seemed to come to grinding halt. The public transit shut down, and everyone begen to slow down and then stop, as if someone had hit a big cosmic pause button.
{Above: “Where you goin’? Nowhere.” Tuning in to the car radios.}
Look closely at the cars, and at the crowd surrounding them. People parked their cars along the street, turned their radios to the news broadcasts, opened all the doors and cranked the volume. Again, not an everyday sight in NYC. I stood and listened for a few minutes with some others. It was still hard to conceive of what was happening without any media, and none of it stuck in my head, it swirled around and sedimented into the mush. We all stood around any ways, just trying to figure out what was happening to us.
{Above: tuning in some more}
It took me a few minutes to figure out what was happening in this picture. Under the table with the books is a radio, and people were stopping to listen. It was pretty difficult to make out the broadcastings.
{Above: Pigeon under a scaffolding}
I took a few pictures of pigeons, because they seemed to be unuasually stoic, as if they, too, had stopped and were trying to figure out what was happening.
{Above: see, I told you. Not *everyone* had a cell phone.}
As the life-gripping fear subsided further, I stopped to attempt a phone call. The girl on the left, holding the cell, I believe couldn’t get a signal, and had also stopped to use the pay phone. It ended up being a fruitless endeavor; there was a dial tone, but all lines were busy, probably from people trying to call one another for info. So I walked on.
{Above: Stopping off for a pony-ride}
This is my favorite picture: a mother stopped to let her son ride the mechanical horsey. It reminded me that amidst the unseen chaos and uncertainty, children are still child-like, with innocent child-like desires, such as riding the horsey. I wondered if the mother was thinking, well, if we’re tumbling to our chaotic doom, I may as well let my kid ride the horsey.
As for me, I thought, well, if the world as I know it is going to end, I’m not going to die thirsty. …So I stopped in one of the corner groceries (amazingly, the grocery marts were open) and got myself some orange juice.
{Above: Self-portrait of me with my OJ. }
White Mike would be proud – hanging from my right shoulder is my “survival sack”, a green army-surplus medic bag, which I still carry with me as my “purse”. It holds everything.
{Above: Peace, defiled}
The above photo is the last photo I took on my long walk from Penn station. I reached my desination: W104th street around 4 pm, and bought myself a falafel-gyro at the New-Jerusalem Restaurant on the corner. As I turned onto 104th from broadway, I noticed that I had about 2 pictures left on the roll of film. This was the second to last: a leaf floating in the gutter, to symbolize defiled peace. I hadn’t seen anything, and still to this point knew very little about the attacks, but I could still intuit that any sense of peace would be gone for a long, long time. I went upstairs to meet Lynn, who directed me to the roof.
{Above: looking back}
From the roof, I could see the dark grey smoke rising from downtown. The air smelt of burnt metal, and organic fumes, which I could not smell from street level, probably because organics are quite vaporous and rise. It is very hard to make out in the photo because it was shot on a cheapass disposable camara and the horizon was very, very bright. If you look just a smidge to the right of dead center, you can faintly make out a few smudges near the sillouettes of the buildings.
I stayed in NYC for 4 more days. One because I couldn’t leave due to the Port Authority’s closure of the bridges, and the subsequent days because I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to figure out what happened, to be with the people, who like me, were also trying to asess just how much of our lives was still up in the air. I went to Washington Square and walked around the growing sidewalk memorials with my friend Scott. Later I met up with my cousin, Adam, and his fiancee.
I’ve been back to NYC many times. I refuse to go to “ground zero”, or refer to “ground zero” in conversation. Another large part of my avoidance of 9/11 conversations has to do with what I saw, compared to what was broadcast, and what 99.9999% of the rest of the world saw that day. To me, it looked like a scene from a Hollywood action movie: unreal. Contrast that to what I saw, which looks, to me, surreal. I still feel as though my memory is caught between two realities: what *really* happened, and what I saw in person. To this day, when I see footage or images of the attacks, this other reality, I feel my blood pressure rise and my breath becomes short.
