I woke up that morning around 6am west coast time, got ready for work. Went downstairs and got on the computer to check email. I also looked at a music web forum I frequented a lot back then. Someone had posted a thread about two planes crashing into the WTC.
I ran over to turn on the tv and saw the smoking towers. They replayed the planes crashing into them. I called Daniel down to see. I called the kids down. Then I left for work, like any other day. But not really.
I listened to the radio on my way to pick up my co-worker that I carpooled with. There were reports of a truck bomb going off outside some building, and another plane crashing into the Pentagon. I thought, “What’s next? The white house?”
When I parked in Cristy’s driveway she walked out the door. But I met her coming out. My first words to her were, “Do you have your tv on?” She hadn’t heard about it.
We went inside and sat on her couch, watching the towers burn. I realized my parents were probably asleep and hadn’t heard about it. My brother lived and worked in DC. So I called them to wake them up and told them to turn on their tv.
Then we watched the towers collapse, live, in front of our eyes.
We were in shock. But it’s funny how your normal routine calls to you. We headed into work. We drove across the I-90 bridge, which goes over Lake Washington into downtown Seattle. From the bridge you can usually see all the air traffic taking off and landing at Sea-Tac airport. That morning, the skies were empty. It was eerie.
I was telling my husband last night that it was sort of like when the power goes off. Suddenly everything is so quiet. You realize how loud everything is normally. Same with the planes not being in the sky. You don’t really notice them until they’re gone.
We listened to the news on the radio all the way into work. And once we were at work, we got nothing done—we just sat at our computers, listening to the news on the radio, and reading the news on the Internet all day. It seems weird now that we even bothered going in that day. There were precautions being taken at the biggest tower in Seattle—the Columbia Tower, aka the Bank of America Tower. It was evacuated. I’d been in that Tower once when there was a fire drill. We had to walk down many flights of steps. I’d forgotten that until just now.
What I remember most, other than seeing it all happen live on the news, was waking up the next morning. I didn’t immediately remember what had happened, but I had this feeling that something was wrong with the world. That everything had changed. By the time I’d gotten up out of bed, it had all come back to me. And I felt guilty for having slept in a nice big comfy bed, when probably thousands of people were still trapped under all that rubble, hoping to be saved. It was before we knew there was no one left alive to save. Or very few.
For a long time, years, I couldn’t look at a skyscraper without thinking about a plane flying into it.
The other thing I remember is when the local firemen paid tribute. I think it was a couple days later. I worked in Pioneer Square at the time, right near a firehouse. At noon all the trucks in the city went out driving through the streets with their sirens blaring. I went up to the roof of our building with another co-worker so we could see them drive by. I found myself looking up at the sky, empty save for one plane. I assume it was a military plane. It left a big trail of smoke in it’s wake. It flew directly overhead, and into the sun.
