I was visiting my mom in Phoenix for her birthday when the towers fell. I was scheduled to come home that day and was in the shower getting ready to leave to go to Sky Harbor airport when mom frantically called me in to watch the news. I ran into the living room just in time to see the second plane hit the tower. My mom and I just stood there, me dripping water all over the carpet, as the news replayed the attack over and over.
We stayed glued to the news for quite a while as news of the attack on the Pentagon came in and then flight 93 crashing in Pennsyvania. It must have been an hour or two at least. When they announced that all of the airports were closed, including Sky Harbor, I remember jumping up as if out of a fog and ran in to get dressed and figure out what I was going to do to get home. Greyhound was an immediate choice, but within an hour after Sky Harbor closed, all of the bus lines were closed too. I tried renting a car, but all of those were snapped up pretty quickly as every other stranded person realized the same thing I did at the same time.
I remember a constant stream of phone calls to and from Sally in between calls to car rental agencies. I remember being frustrated by how long it would take me to get home by bus. It was late morning as I looked at getting a bus ticket and I wouldn’t get home until almost 8 PM that night. I remember being glad I didn’t bother to try to get a ticket after the bus stations were closed.
In the end, Sally, my mom, and I agreed to meet halfway. My mom and I would drive to the California border and I would get a hotel room in Blythe, wait for Sally and then drive home the next day.
I remember being angry, so fucking angry that someone had the temerity to do such a heinous thing. What sort of sub-human animal could so callously sacrifice human lives like that. As the news began to report who had done it, who this Osama bin Laden guy was, I remember thinking it would a very good thing for our military to reign fire down on his ass, or better yet, how it would be very nice for him to be captured and presented to the families of the victims and how that meeting could be televised for the world to see what righteous, justified anger looks like.
In the weeks that followed and as details of the plot, the hijackers, and Al-Qaeda came to light, I remember trying to come to grips with such hatred that defied all logic and reason. Even if you grant that whatever grievances they felt towards the West and U.S. are valid, what they did on 9/11 went so far beyond what a rational human would do that it boggled my mind. It still does. It was an act of war, this generation’s Pearl Harbor and what makes it worse, what fucks up the equation is how it was an extra-national organization which pulled it off. How do you declare war against a group with no single defined home country?
The drive from Phoenix along the 10 is some of the loneliest stretches of road anywhere. There is literally nothing but rocks, dust and heat between Phoenix and the Colorado river. On a timescale that we live by, nothing changes, everything is the same. I remember that drive vividly because as I looked out at a landscape that never changes, everything else had. The drive out was pretty quiet. My mom and I were pretty muted in our conversation, the occasional dirty joke, which normally would lift our spirits, did nothing.
Once we got to Blythe, and I was alone in my room waiting for Sally to show up later that day, I remember feeling empty. Something vital has been ripped from my soul, something I didn’t know was there until it was gone. A part deep down that connects each of us to each other without us consciously knowing. It was ripped out violently in a ball of ignited airplane fuel and what bothered me the most was that I didn’t know what to do to get it back. I felt helpless. When Sally finally showed up later that night with my son Ian, I remember hugging them with enough force to actually go through their bodies.
It’s been eight years now and a lot of what I felt then has been absorbed into the background radiation of my day to day life, but I have a superstitious fear that if I ever go visit my mom again, something like 9/11 will happen again.
I know. For a person who puts a lot of stock in logic and reason as a means to get through life, being afraid of somehow causing another 9/11, like some sort of cosmic joke butterfly effect, is pretty damned stupid. I’ll go visit my mom at some point in the next year and nothing will happen. That doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about it.