My 9/11 Story

In September 2001 I was working for a publisher in Gaithersburg, Maryland, just outside DC and living in an apartment nearby with my wife and 7-month-old son. September 10, I was taking loads up to our new apartment in Frederick, Maryland, about 40 miles away. I had noticed earlier in the week that the unit below us, which had recently been vacated, was now occupied. The people there had essentially no furniture, and didn’t make much use of their venetian blinds, as I was able to see a Middle Eastern woman lying on a bare mattress in the bedroom with nothing else in the room. On the night of the 10th as I approached our building, I saw a group of Middle Eastern men talking in the parking lot. When I got within earshot they stopped talking, looked at me, and waited for me to pass. It was late, between 10 and 11 o’clock, so all of this was odd, but I was busy. I loaded up my car, locked up, and drove up to Frederick.

The next morning, September 11, I was just getting out of the shower when the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, telling my wife to turn on the TV, a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. We turned on the TV, and there was the live footage. No one knew what to make of it. Was it an accident, a suicidal pilot, or what? Then the second one hit and the world knew.

We were still moving that day. It was the last push to clear out our old place, and I had reserved a moving van for the day. I went to go get it so we could finish what needed to be done and move on to understanding whatever was happening in the country. At the time the thought was this could be an attack on New York, or one of many on the whole country, no one knew.

At the car rental place, I waited in line and literally just signed for my truck and got the keys when a call came through that no other vehicles were to be rented until further notice. When Ramzi Yousef and other terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, they tried to blow it up with a rental truck full of fertilizer turned into a chemical bomb. As a precaution, there would be no vehicles released.

I loaded the truck, noting that the blinds in the unit below us were fully open and even the mattress was now gone. The apartment was completely empty with the tenants apparently gone, though our complex didn’t offer month-to-month leases and the people had been there barely a week.

I ran our stuff up to Frederick, and ran the truck back in about 3 hours, by which time the Pentagon was hit. Local reports questioned whether there was poison gas, chemical weapons, or bio weapons on the plane. There was talk of martial law, and all flights were grounded, though some planes were unaccounted for. Frederick is where Fort Dietrich is, which among other things has the lab where they research bioweapons. Not wanting to be near any targets, or subject to martial law, we decided to pack up the baby, our dog, and our two cats, and get the hell out. Thankfully I knew of an obscure place relatively nearby where we could hole up that was a highly unlikely target – Breezewood, Pennsylvania.

Known as the “city of motels” Breezewood is at the junction of the major East/West and North/South interstate highways. Nestled near the Pennsylvania border, it really is just a stopping point for people going elsewhere. We checked in, got settled, and put on the news. Just like when the space shuttle Challenger exploded years before, the news was essentially showing us the planes hitting the tower over and over again with breaks for speculation and interviews.

When got to the hotel, we took inventory of everything we had and noted we had almost all we needed – clothes, diapers, formula, pet food. But no litter box. That was a problem. Second problem – where do you buy a litter box in a town that’s essentially motels and restaurants? Also, what do you do with it when the crisis is over, given we had two at home? The gas station nearby had litter, and the hotel restaurant where we got our takeout dinner gave us cardboard takeout boxes with lids. Two torn-off lids became two litter boxes, which after some initial apprehension, the cats decided to use. Problem solved.

On my way back from the hotel restaurant I took a look around. As I said, Breezewood is at the beginning of the mountains, so looking south you can see straight down the interstate, toward Maryland and DC. For as far as I can see there was a solid line of cars and trucks heading into Breezewood. We weren’t the only people who were evacuating, it seemed, we just did it faster. Within a couple of hours, the hotel was full. All the hotels were full.

After dinner, we called our relatives to tell them we were okay. Most were relieved. My parents back in Milwaukee wondered why we left. They thought the safest place we could be was in the vicinity of an Army base. We explained that there was speculation that there was toxic gas or bioweapons on the Pentagon plane, and we didn’t want any part of either of those things. My dad scoffed at the idea. However, my grandparents were more sensible.

“You did the right thing. Protect your family and that baby at any cost. Don’t listen to your dad. Do whatever you have to do and be safe,” my grandpa said.

While my wife talked to her parents and kept her eyes on the news, I went to go get more ice to keep the baby bottles cold. Out in the hallway, I was stopped by a man who was staying in the room across the hall from us. He was talking to anyone who came out of their room, and they were all talking to each other, in pairs and small groups.

For the most part, we all went over what we had gone through, what we’d heard, and what we thought. Universally, we all asked the same question, “Are you going back? If so, when?”

I don’t remember anyone else’s story. But that man from across the hall, his story I’ll never forget. He was maybe in his late 30s, balding, frantic. He said he didn’t know if he’d be able to sleep or if he’d ever go back. He told the same story to each hotel guest he pulled aside:

“They were going to let us die. We mean nothing to them. I was at my desk and we heard the boom. I don’t know if it was an explosion or the jet hitting or what. And none of us knew. But clearly something had happened. But we were told that nothing was wrong, just keep on working. That’s ridiculous. The building could be on fire. There could be gas. They could have had smallpox or anthrax on that plane, nerve gas. They don’t know. But they wouldn’t let us go. Fuck that. I got up and left. I was told it would be an unexcused absence. Fine. But I wasn’t going to stay there and die. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. How can you go back to work at a place that will just let you die like that? Animals are treated better. Animals.”

I pulled away when I could and let him tell his story to someone else, then got my ice. Back in our room I told the story to my wife. No one was claiming responsibility for the attacks yet. No one knew anything, it was all guesswork. But now the FBI was looking for any information anyone had that could be related. Anything suspicious, especially if you were in the New York or DC area. Any tip would be appreciated and could be helpful.

My wife and I talked about it for a while and we decided I should call about the disappearing tenants from our complex. I called the number and was soon speaking to a guy who sounded like he was in his 20s, and who didn’t seem to know why I was giving him this information or why it would be interesting.

“These people showed up a week ago, had no furniture, and apparently left this morning. I thought that was rather odd. And they stopped talking when I was around.”

“Okay,” he said. “Do you know their names?”

“No. But I gave you the name of our complex, the phone number, and the name of the manager. They would know. You could call them.”

“Okay,” he said, showing still no interest. How could this obvious step be so unachievable for him? “Do you know where they are now?”

My mind reeled. Clearly, I was not talking to Elliot Ness or Clarice Starling here. If I didn’t know the tenants’ names, and they had only been there a week, how would I know where they had gone? And again, this is a question that he could answer himself by calling or sending a field agent to our apartment manager. “No I don’t,” I answered. “You know, there’s a Department of Defense office located on the same block as the apartment complex. It may be of interest.”

“Good to know. Do you have anything else?” His tone indicated that clearly this was not a hot tip and would not be going anywhere,

“No,”

“All right. Thank you and have a good night.”

And that was it. Not even a hint of a commitment that this would be looked into in any way. Thank you for calling and God Bless America.

We decided to go home the next day, since there were no further attacks. I went to work, showing up late. We were all late. No one really accomplished anything that day. The office was quiet except for the whispers of us asking each other the same thing everyone at the hotel asked. “Where were you, what happened, what do you think?”

Then there were the e-mails. My inbox was teeming with emails from colleagues, friends, contacts, from around the country. All of them knew I worked around DC; they just couldn’t remember how close to DC I was. Some of them remembered that on occasion I covered press conferences and things down in the District or at the Capitol. Was I there at the time, was I okay?

I assured everyone I was fine, and felt relief when I heard from a lifelong friend of mine who worked for Tor Publishing in New York. He was okay. He knew people who were very much not okay.

My wife talked to a friend of hers, Mary, whose wedding we had gone to the year before. She and her husband, Steve had their apartment in Pentagon City, a neighborhood so named for its proximity to the Pentagon. On the day of the attack Steve was home while Mary was at work. Steve heard the explosion and saw the smoke, though he didn’t know what it was from. Mary immediately left work to go home after she heard what happened, and along with most of the city, ended up snarled in traffic for hours due to road blocks and traffic jams. She tried calling Steve on her cel to see if he was okay but she couldn’t get through. The phone lines were all jammed. It took 3 hours for Mary to get home to find out if her husband was okay. At the same time, he assumed she was okay, but he didn’t really know, nor did he know how far she was from home. It was a very isolating feeling. And of course, just as with me and my family, they had no idea what was fully going on there in the District, just blocks from their home. Gas? More attacks? Who knew? All they knew was they had to get to each other.

A year later I ended up working in New Jersey, for a company based in Secaucus, which is across the river from New York. My boss’s office window actually gave her a view of the city, so she saw the planes hit. When I went up to the office the first time and saw the skyline, from essentially the same angle and on the same drive made famous on “The Sopranos,” I thought something was wrong. Then I realized the middle chunk of the skyline was missing. The part where the Twin Towers were. It made me feel sick and mad each time I saw it.

At the office where I worked, in South Jersey, we occasionally had planes fly over low, on their way to land at the airport in Philadelphia. Each time, people in my office would flinch, or cringe, or look up, not knowing if that day there would be a new attack. Everyone knew someone who had died in or been in New York that day, and the idea was still fresh in all our minds.

My friend at Tor, who was living in Cranbury, New Jersey, near Princeton, told me that things were eerie at his church. As is typical in that part of the state, a lot of the people in Cranbury worked in New York. 30 people from his church died in the World Trade Center, enough that services at the church were noticeably less crowded.

One weekend in the Spring of 2002, my cousin, who was also my son’s godfather, flew in from Chicago because he had business in New York. He called me and asked if I wanted to come up for dinner. I said sure, and so I packed up the baby and headed up to see him. I wasn’t familiar with the hotel, so I downloaded directions and drove up, no problem. When my cousin opened the door to his hotel room I said, “Nice hotel. How’s the view?”

He said, “It’s pretty interesting. Let me show you.”

We walked through the sitting area of his room and went to the bedroom, where he had a very large picture window. He opened the curtains and the room was filled with light. We looked down and saw The Hole where the World Trade Center once was, lit up every night with artificial lights as emergency workers sifted through the rubble, looking for remains of the victims. Even worse than seeing the fractured skyline, the sight made my stomach lurch. It was something else I’ll never forget.