On the Ground

The fundamental thing you have to understand about the actual experience of being in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 is how little we understood of what was happening. I’ve seen, of course, replays of the live coverage, with the shots from across Hudson, the Twin Towers boiling smoke before elegantly falling — the ultimate real-world example of the “something horrible being shown beautifully” format that filmmakers so love. The experience of being in the immediate area of that collapse after living for several years with the towers themselves and their site as a primary location in my life, was nothing like that.

The TV shots are controlled. That’s the only way to describe them. Even though no one knew who had done this, why it had happened, or had any information about what was going on in the buildings or around the site, the very fact that the disaster could be encompassed so neatly in a single camera angle gave it a comprehensibility that was utterly absent on the ground. Even though it was horrifying, it only stretched from Point A to Point B, and if any more planes came anywhere near, they’d be visible from miles away. Moreover, it seems to me, from having watched plenty of other breaking news stories in my life, having hung about a TV waiting and listening while tiny little individual facts eeked out, that the very act of letting someone else explain what’s happening gives us a sense of control or at least sanity. We don’t know what’s happening now, but we’re learning and we’ll know more later. Someone, somewhere is uncovering what’s happened; someone, somewhere is untangling this madness and will explain it to us, not to mention make some kind of response.

None of that was available to us on the ground. We heard snippets of radio reports – we heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth one had… crashed? Was still in the air? Might be heading for us at that very moment? Conflicting reports. Later, I think we heard that all flights had been grounded so that the eerily silent skies of the city at least had some explanation as we walked north, if not any comfort.

It wasn’t until relatively late that I understood the size of the planes that had hit the Towers. I’d heard, when my subway car stopped at West 4^th Street, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. That was all I heard, those words with a confused laugh from the conductor, clearly afraid of being ridiculed and unable to imagine it, herself. I imagined it was a private plane, and some sort of unskilled pilot. When I got up to grond level and saw the two Towers both smoking and weeping debris, I don’t remember what I thought. Two planes, obviously, but it still didn’t occur to me that they might have been big commercial ones. I did understand, I believe, that this was deliberate. We were under attack. That was one clear understanding from the very start.

And I had one clear thought. I had it sometime later when I stood on Duane Street in from the RealPilates, the studio I ran then. I looked up at the smoking Towers, the rain of glass and wallboard and furniture and flailing, screaming live people falling from it, and I thought, “We’ll never feel safe again.” I even thought about that thought, and marked how clear it was, how certain I felt about it, when the rest of my mind was all spinning and churning and trying to find anything solid to hang onto. That was my experience of being on the ground, deep within the TV shots.