Nine-One-One

I have been in Italy for a week now.  I was, once again, full-tilt-boogey from the moment I landed.  Hiking miles every day, visiting with old and new friends, meeting in the piazzas for drinks and meals.  There happened to be the annual Scottish Festival here in Barga this weekend and I love me some bagpipes and kilts.

Yesterday crept in with lighting, clouds and rain all day and night.  Barbara and I have a standing saying about travel in European villages; we spend more time looking at our feet at our age than at the towns.  As I ventured down the many, many steps from my flat to the Conad (grocery), I discovered a new treachery.  It is humid here, a lot more in this part of Tuscany.  Moss grows well here.  Moss on cobblestones is a not-so-clear but present danger.  Even with my hiking tennies on, I managed a butt plant on the way down the hill.  No harm done and no witnesses to have to face around town.  This is a small town, you cannot traverse across it without someone stopping you for a coffee or a chat.  I did not want to be the “tragico Americano” to be pitied for my clumsiness (or my age!)

But yesterday, instead of braving the elements myself, the Scots serenaded me from my street below and in the piazza with bagpipe concerts all day and I officially called a halt to my semi-obsessive need to hike daily.  I officially have walked 10,500,000 steps in 3 years, over 5,000 miles. I am proud.  And done.  I am actually taking the app off my phone, so my age-related OCD does not allow me to restart that particular obsession.

I came here, in large part, to write

That, I am pleased to say, I am doing.  I have managed 6,000 words so far on stories I have been dreaming about for decades.  But yesterday, exhaustion setting in and, with the rain falling, I grabbed a book, curled up on the couch, and just now, 24 hours later, I have finished it. 

I was an odd choice

For the past year in preparation for this trip I have been concentrating on Italian art and history books.  For some reason I picked up what I thought would be a rainy-day escapist book at random.  Far from that, it is called “The Only Plane in the Sky” by Garrett M. Graff.  It is a compilation of interview snippets from survivors, witnesses, and those affected by the 9/11 horrors; some famous, most just everyday Americans who lived through, and still live with the national trauma inflicted on all of us that day.

Strange choice for a holiday read

Or it was, until I realized that tomorrow is actually September 11^th.  It was a somber grey read for a somber grey day that I could not put down.  It was not until I finished the entire book (not a short one, either) that I realized the date alignment and I also realized that, as I was reading, I was continually reflecting on where I was that day and the immediate days after. So, there is the reason I picked it up

And here is my account of that day

Like the Kennedy assassination, we all know where were at that moment. Dave and I were on an East Coast trip to visit both our families, driving back and forth between North Carolina and Maryland.  We were ending up our trip at my childhood home with my mother about 25 miles north of Washington, D.C..  We were set to fly back to California on the morning of September 12^th.

Taking the TV hostage, away from my mother’s continual Fox-Trap News loop, I turned on the Today show.  I apparently flicked it on just after the first tower had been hit. We all (above a certain age) know those horrific images.  I called out to Dave to come quickly and look.  As we watched, the second tower was hit.  Unbelievable images.  An unreal quality of something major and impactful though, in America, events hundred of miles away somehow lose a small degree of impact if we are simply consumers of the news and images though the media.

And then it became local

The chatter started about more hijackings and more planes unaccounted for and suddenly planes out of control and off their destination paths. The coverage jerked and jolted along with Katie and Matt, who were winging it a lot, as the country and the armed forces were, trying to get a grip as well.

And then it got real

Reports started to emerge that one of the wayward flights was radar tracking towards Washington, D.C. I grew up in the shadow of the Capital.  I grew up there during the specter of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War.  I grew up in the Duck and Cover generation where we practiced hiding under our desks if the “Flash” came.

This was triggering fifty-year old memories

The live coverage was sporadic at best, intense to the max.  It rapidly became clear that Washington, D.C., the Capital Dome in specific, would be the next logical target.  They had literally struck and taken down the core symbols of American financial power so, thinking like a terrorist now, the heart of our government seemed not much of a stretch.

The images were free flowing now, our entire government evacuated out of their workplaces, traumatized and frightened workers wandering aimlessly about not knowing where to go, their eyes to the skies.  

Probably most shocking was seeing the White House staff running, sprinting, out of the enduring symbol of our country. Literally thousands of people in the streets with no idea where, if anywhere, might be safe from a repeat of what was happening in New York at that very moment.

And then it happened

The next plane flew directly into the Pentagon.  These messianically perverted idealists knew exactly the message they were intending to send.  They struck the very heart of our military capabilities.  Their message was now crystalline; they intended to decapitate our entire government and bring America to its knees.

The timeline of events is only now, after reading “Last Plane in the Sky”, clearly deciphered in my own mind. We, as a country, were woefully unprepared for a truly war-inducing strike on our own turf.  Wars were horrors we only watched on the evening news.  Horrific events taking place “over there”.  Over there being some foreign land so far from us that they had an unreal aspect to their own reality.  Tragic wastes of human life, history, and above all resources.  We as a country struggle all the time to feed, house, and cloth our own people. How much were we willing and able to spend “over there”?

There never seems to be enough money for the greatest nation in the world to eradicate the poverty within our own land, and those of us raised during Vietnam have always had a predisposition to rail at our government for getting us involved in foreign wars that kill our soldiers, decimate other counties, and inflict torturous evil on innocent people.

But shit just got real

It was fascinating to see and feel how patriotism, a concept drummed out of my soul thirty years back, was suddenly something I could feel. Granted it was tinged with a scrim of haze; a “what did we do to warrant this” guilt, but we were all, suddenly, patriots regardless.  As disingenuous a country as we have been and still are, it was heartening to see the rest of the world America Proud in those moments.

But shit got even more real

We were caught flat-footed and unaware.  Our fighter jets were only deployed after the Pentagon was struck.  I still wonder why; after watching the Twin Towers slowly disintegrate for at least an hour and a half, jets weren’t already patrolling Washington?  But suddenly there they were.  Overhead. Over our house.  Screaming low on the horizon, looping back around and around the capital. This was real.  This was a war.  This was now on our doorsteps.

And suddenly, The Last Plane in the Sky was down

It slowly dawned on us that we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  Our flight in the morning, gone.  Our life in California, on hold.  Thankfully we had our friend Chris who was on duty at our house minding the animals and keeping our lives going without us.  He could work from our house and was so helpful in assuring us that he was on duty and in control out there.  “Take your time, everything’s fine here.”  We, at least, had that comfort and assurance.

Technology was rudimentary then compared to today.  We had cell phones, yes, but really, they were still in their infancy.  The concept of going online to change flights was non-existent.  Getting a phone call to an agent? Fuggedaboutit.  And honestly, no one knew squat about what was happening anyway, and they may not for some time.  There were other things on the country’s agenda that morning, like saving our democracy.

Now keep in mind, we were still literally reeling from the Supreme Court’s selection of Bush over Gore just months before.  The sound of Bush’s twang brought bile to all our Democratic throats. It was not to be matched until decades later when an even great threat to our country would emerge, ironically, from that golden escalator in, of all places, New York City.

But now, we had to go with the horse we rode in on

Dave had a job back in San Jose that he really did have to get back to in the more immediate future.  We already had a rental car, and they were waiving drop fees within in hours of the attacks.  The same would be true for airline changes and all travel related fiascos spiraling out of control all over the country, and the world for the matter.

After a couple days we decided a road trip was in order.  We packed up, struck out, and headed west.

We did not have navigation on our phones in those days, we actually still had maps.  As we hit the highway, we began to notice many other cars headed our same way. As Americans, we were beginning to pick our jaws up off the floor, dust off our brains, and do what we had to do.

It became apparent that these fellow travelers were cars filled with disparate groups of business folks, like us, trying to get back to their lives, many clear across the country.  In every car, One person had a map unfurled in front of them, others were glued to their phones; calling their offices, families, airlines, anyone who needed to know where they were and how they were going to get back to where they were going.

We were doing the same

We began changing our destination airport with the hope that the planes would be flying by the time we got there.  We booked a room in Cincinnati figuring that was a semi-large airport but not a major hub. We assumed that Chicago and the like would be and were overwhelmed.

We checked into the hotel in Cincinnati and if I recall correctly, went to the airport to talk to the Delta desk in person.  Still a full ground stop, no estimate on when that would change.  

Interestingly all of humanity seemed, after the initial shock, to be in this together.  There were unimaginable lines at every counter.  As we waited, we began to talk with others, many of whom had been in the airport for days.  People were subdued, gentle with each other, kind to the overwhelmed agents.  There was no shouting, demanding, or outrage, we were all just, at our core, humans in an unheard-of situation waiting for guidance and help.

We did have the foresight to realize that if the airport did not reopen in the morning, we would need to drive further.  We re-rented a car for the next morning just in case.  At that juncture, every mode of transportation not in the air was in critical demand.

The next morning, we were back at the terminal, planes were starting to fly but crews were stranded in disparate places and even countries.  We met two guys from NYC that had been on the way home from Florida.  They lived in lower Manhattan.  They were frantic.  No phone communication, no way of knowing if their home, their pets, their friends, anything was impacted and if so, how horribly.  Yet here they sat, quietly waiting with the rest of us.

As the planes slowly began to land, we met others who had been coming back into the country and were diverted to Canada, Newfoundland, Gander. They had been on their planes for days.  They could not disembark because there were no customs agents capable of working through the nightmare of uninvited and unexpected guests in huge numbers in a foreign country. The paperwork was immense and unfixable, so they waited.  There was so much uncertainty and disinformation floating about that led to a doomsday sense of what could be next.

We finally got boarding passes!

But there was no crew.  We had captains but no cabin crew, they were on their way in from somewhere.  I volunteered to seat people and serve drinks.  It got a laugh, the first in days, and then others jumped in and said yeah!  We can do this. Finally, we see the flight attendants striding down the concourse like a scene out of the 2002 movie “Catch Me if You Can”. When we realized they were OUR crew, they got a standing ovation.  

We were almost on our way.

We had explored all options for flights.  We realized that getting to our original airport may be futile at that moment.  We told the agent get us anywhere on the West Coast and we’ll drive back to San Jose. They got us to San Francisco!  Perfect.  A shuttle to San Jose and we were within reach of home.

The final hurdle was getting our truck out of long-term parking.  Dave collected the luggage and tried to wait at the curb while I retrieved the truck.  When I pulled up to the curb it was lined with guards in full armed display.  They made Dave walk away from the airport proper and I had to find him on the side of the road, fully away from the terminal and off the facilities. 

9/11 had turned into nine-one-one

From that moment, it was a new world