(click for larger view of pictures)
Five years ago this weekend I was in Montreal at, of all things, an airport convention. The company I worked for at the time, a transportation retailer, was displaying at the convention and I was in charge of the project. About a dozen of us had flown in a couple days before.
It was an International convention and there were aviation directors (they are the head executives that run their respective airports) from all over North American and the world.
The morning of the 11th started out as ordinary as possible. I was one of the first ones at our booth at the convention center and started to set things up. Other people were starting to show up and the convention opened up for the day. Just before 9:00 I called my assistant back in East Rutherford to say hello and she said that all the office employees were crammed into my office and the other offices on our floor that faced the World Trade Center. The offices were located in the Metromedia building off Route 3 on an upper floor.
She said something had hit one of the buildings. Some plane, she said. My first thought was that it had to be a landing error from LGA or TET. I looked around and few feet away from me was the VP in charge of the company stores in the lower floors of the WTC, next to the PATH. I flagged him down and said he had to call the WTC stores NOW. He called the stores and they were in the process of evacuating.
Within a few minutes dozens of cell phones around us starting to go off. These were the phones of all the aviation directors across North America getting calls from their assistant aviation directors back at home calling to say, ”Uh, boss, all of the planes are coming down to land NOW…”. It was then we grasped the situation and how grave it was. It was from them that we heard about the hijackings and some missing planes.
When I heard that I realized that it would be days until the planes would be able to get off the ground again. My cell phone wasn’t working very well at that point, so I called my husband back at home in HH from a land line and told him to call Hertz at the Montreal airport immediately, use my corporate card, and rent me three cars no matter what the cost. I tried calling the office again but the employees had started to leave the building.
We had no TV, cable feed or Wi-Fi in the Convention hall. We quickly went back to the hotel to get to CNN. When we and dozens of other convention people got there, the hotel had set up a large screen TV in the lobby with lots of coffee. We huddled together to watch and pray. Just a few minutes after we got there, the most surreal moment occured…the first WTC building collapsed. We watched in horror, screaming, crying for the people inside. We were shocked. Where were our friends and family that worked in the area? Did all the store employees get out (they did)? And then the second building went down. OMG! What was going on??? We watch the TV with our hands on our faces.
We need to get home!! We were then told, by the hotel management that they had heard that the border between Canada and the U.S. was closed. We wander the rest of the day like zombies. My family is all over the U.S. and they are calling my house, worried. They knew that my husband worked all over the city and I was in there frequently. They were relieved that we were safe. My husband was home with the kids that week because I was away.
Three of us go out to the airport to pick up the cars. We were lucky that we had them as there were hundreds of people, who had an unscheduled landing in Montreal, lined up at the car rental desks trying to get cars. We bring them back to the hotel and wait until the a.m. to see if we can get home.
We call the RCMP in the morning and are told that the borders are open and we divide all of us up by geography and start driving. There was no one on the roads and we get home to NNJ very quickly. There was no one at the border crossing. Very eerie. I was very suprised that at the border crossing they asked one question, had us pop the trunk and waved us through.
Do you know what I remember most back at home those first days? No planes. It was sooo quiet. The low hum of airplanes is such a part of the background noise of our lives that we don’t notice it until it is gone.
My husband’s union, as part of their job, helps run generators for the entertainment industry. The union asked for volunteers to go to Ground Zero to man the generators for the movie lights that were donated while they searched for survivors and bodies. He went down there. When he got home, all I kept thinking about was that he was muddy and helping with the “bucket brigade” where 3,000 people were missing. I made him take his clothes off in the driveway and throw them away. He and his fellow union buddies did it for a few days until the city started paying their own workers. He was depressed after being there. He had grown up in Jersey City and spent his childhood watching those buildings going up and his high school days going to school literally across the river, practically in the shadow of the WTC. And there he was now, helping to look for body parts, in the pile of the buidlings that were so much of the backdrop of his life.
I went to work and sat in my office for weeks and watched the smoke and dust clouds come off the rubble thinking about all of those families that were missing dads, moms, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and what their familes must be going through. Reading the obits in the NYT every morning of all those gone. And all they did was go to work. And now all that their familes wanted to do was to bring them home.
About a week after the attack, I stopped at Rite Aid to pick up a package of photos. My husband had given me a new Nikon 35mm camera a couple of weeks before and I had taken it to the office to show it off. I took a roll of film around the office. I opened up the package and there at the end of the roll, a misty picture of the Twin Towers from the window behind my desk. Also in the same order were some pictures that my husband took of Ground Zero with a disposable camera when he was working there. He wanted to remember.
Looking back five years, it seems like another lifetime. My 5th grader barely remembers when there were “Twin Towers”. The smaller kids kids know that we are in a war because of something that happened in downtown Manhattan and Washington D.C. But do they really understand? Do we?
