9/11/2001

I was in Atlanta. Only a few weeks earlier I had made some aquaintances there and had returned for a weekend of fun. I was scheduled to fly home on 9/12. We had been out late the night before 9/11 and so I was asleep when the attacks occurred and did not engage in the news until after both towers had collapsed. My assistant, who thought I was in New York, called relentlessly until she was able to get through. "The United States in under attack!", she kept repeating, wanting to know if I was OK.

It was hard to know what to do next except stay glued to the TV, try to reach friends in New York, wait for another attack of another building. As an emergency medical provider, my natural thought was to figure out if I was needed in any capacity but being so far away from the tragedy and so far from home, all I could feel was helpless. At some point, we decided to head out to get some lunch. Because Atlanta has some potentially important offices like the CDC and because of the bombing at Olympic village, security was extremely tight and many highways were closed to traffic. At lunch, everyone in the diner was silent talking quietly to each other about what just happened, wondering what all of it meant for the future.

Back at my hotel later that evening, I started to make preparations for my own travel home. All flights had been grounded but there was news that air travel was going to resume. How strange would it be to get on a plane after all of this? In communications with my travel agent, I discovered that no flights from Hartsfield airport would be leaving any time soon. My travel agent was able to arrange a rental car for me but when I tried to go to the agency, I was turned away by US marshalls with automatic weapons. At another agency, I waited in line for hours with no guarantee of getting a car. I felt a bit selfish but really I just wanted to get home where things were familiar and presumably safe.

Fortunately, I secured a rental and began my 14 hour trek back to the Midwest, back to home. Maintaining cell phone contact with my friend Jen, she said "just get home, drive safely." From highway to highway through the south, the bluegrass states, and central US, radio stations played patriotic songs. Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American" was in heavy rotation. At each gas station, I talked to people. Everyone had their own theories, their own stories, their own prediction of what the future would hold for our country. Every piece of gas station type Americana like flags, shot glasses, window decals were flying off the shelves. When I reached the tollbooths of Chicago and I realized that I was in the homestretch, my anxiety began to subside. At home, there was nothing to do but watch the news and wait, unable to deny how vulnerable we all felt.

Two months later, I would visit New York for a friend's birthday. I was able to walk down to a position near the cleanup effort at Ground Zero. At some point, no cars were allowed on the streets. Never have I walked down a street in Manhattan during the middle of the day when I wasn't surrounded by the hustle and bustle of traffic and everyday life. But as I approached closer to Ground Zero, the streets still dirty with dust, people just milled around in disbelief, sorrow, complete silence, and quiet respect. Days later, I would be sitting at LaGuardia waiting for my flight home when a jumbo jet would crash in New Jersey. While eventually deemed not to be a terrorist plot, at the time I again felt helpless trapped in the airport unable to leave since all the highways and tunnels and subways back to the city were shut down. Again there were marshalls with automatic weapons. Again everyone looked ahead toward an unknown future.

Five years later, our sense of safety and security is still always tied to that sense of the unknown. We try to forge ahead. But our men and women fight an elusive enemy overseas, buses explode in London, hurricanes ravage entire cities, and the human condition continues to test our own sense of human decency. Just as the New Yorkers still look at a familiar skyline with the knowledge that something is missing, we all look at our lives and our futures differently since 9/11, a day that nobody could forget.