September 11, 2001 -- Ten Years Later

I was working in New York on September 11, 2001. Here are some thoughts about that day and its echoes:

Around noon ten years ago, I was trying to get out of New York and get home. Both World Trade Center towers had collapsed, bridges and tunnels to the mainland were closed, the sense of "there's more" was in the air. Thankfully, I was able to communicate with my wife using e-mail and, then, private messages via an Applchat chat room. She suggested immediately going to an ATM and withdrawing funds. That was sage advice; I might have needed the cash to bribe my way out of town, obtain food and/or water, find shelter.

I thought my one chance to get across the Hudson River was by ferry. The mainland ferries were not well known at that time, although I was familiar with them, as I always made it a point to know every possible transportation angle in and out of the City. I walked over to the ferry slips on the West Side. They were crowded, but there was a chance to make it across. I took that chance, and in the late afternoon boarded what turned out to be the last ferry to Hoboken.

The boat's route ventured within a mile of the smoldering Trade Center site. No intervening buildings blocked the view. Everyone onboard became quiet. We were close, very close, to the heart of darkness.

Once the ferry docked, passengers were separated by those who had been south of Canal Street and those who had not. Those who had been south of Canal were washed down from head to toe; their clothes were not replaced. They went on their journey wet.

Amazingly, I got on a train and went home. (Hoboken was a mainland railroad terminal and was consequently not shut down during the 9/11 incident.) The ride went by in a kind of daze. I did observe four office workers helping one of their colleagues, who was in shock, get home.

Given her condition, the afflicted woman could never have gotten home on her own.

My wife met me at a railroad station near our home and I finally felt a sense of relief. Before we drove away, I bought a six-pack of beer and a large bag of potato chips. I consumed four bottles that evening and did not feel buzzed or anything.

In the days and months following the 9/11 incident, I continued to work in the City. I kept enough cash in my pocket to allow for "contingencies." I completely avoided any underground subway or railway, except to briefly cross the Hudson River. (I take them now.) I took the bus from the West Village to the Columbus Circle area where my office was located. I walked whenever possible. Sometimes, I would go a little out of my way to the now-closed St. Vincent's Hospital, which was Ground Zero's front-line hospital, and look at the pictures on "Missing" flyers affixed to the outside walls and nearby streetlight posts. I avoided the Morgan postal annex, the West Side site of the post-9/11 anthrax episode that was so disturbingly mishandled by federal security and health agencies.

The 9/11 incident was not my first time living in cities where politically motivated murder had taken place. I was in Rome when Italian prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and ultimately killed. (For an Italian perspective on the Moro case, read the excellent writer Leonardo Sciascia's book The Moro Affair.) A year later in Rome, an extreme right-wing group blew up a nightclub for ostensibly political reasons. Earlier in my life, I was a student at the University of Wisconsin in the aftermath of a left-wing group's bombing of a building housing armed forces research projects; a researcher was killed in the incident. My student newspaper, of which I was a staff member, was a highly interested party in the articulation of the group's point of view and later, in legal defense for one of its members.

The 9/11 incident was nothing like the Rome or Madison situations. 9/11's purpose combined nihilism with fanaticism in ways the Roman or Wisconsin participants never imagined. Whatever one feels about 9/11's perpetrators, their common denominator was a willingness to use mass murder to achieve their aims. For the perps, if the achievement of their goals included the end of the world, their attitude was "so be it."

Recently, I was talking with someone who had fled a war zone created by religious animosity. As it turned out, his once peaceful backwater had erupted into hateful violence. He noted that there was no reasoning once the conflict had started, and, at the time, no obvious path toward ending the conflagration existed between religiously-charged communities. Once war began, he said, you never knew where or how it would end, or what would change. The one thing you could count on was nothing would be the same.

He could have made the same observation about New York, and the United States, in the post-9/11 era.

The photo shows "Missing" flyers posted outside St. Vincent's Hospital in the days immediately following the September 11, 2001 incident.