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.

9/11 Tenth Anniversary: Why I'm Going

Shortly before I moved away from NYC, I called a 9/11 help line and described some symptoms I’d been having. I couldn’t sleep without worrying about the five upper floors of my apartment building crashing down and crushing me. I thought about explosions or random violence every time I entered the subway. I’d grown afraid of heights, and I sometimes had anxiety attacks on airplanes.

“I’m not a physician,” she said, kind but careful not to commit herself or her non-profit organization to anything, “but what you’re describing sounds like post-traumatic stress syndrome. Many people who experienced the attacks, especially eye witnesses, have these problems. I have a couple groups I can recommend to you, or, if you’d prefer, a private counselor.”

I took the names of the groups. I didn’t go. For that moment, it was enough to hear that what I was experiencing was reasonable, normal, shared by others. I really couldn’t fall asleep without thinking about buildings falling on me in the dark. Not ever. Not one single time in any of the nights between 9/11 and May 2006, when I left New York City once and for all. In those years, I knew that my life was, if not falling apart, then not progressing. I was hauling around a weight of terror and sadness that was making real happiness or progress impossible. Many days, I dragged myself from home to job to grocery store and back home, and I was always exhausted.

Having a life that had, over nearly a decade in the city, finally come together, didn’t help. I had an amazing apartment, a job I adored, great friends, but those happy things only coexisted with the great darknesss. Even falling in love didn’t overcome it. The fear and anxiety monster always lurked just out of site, and came out with a vengeance every night when I turned the lights off, or in the subway, or at other times without warning, and often swamped me completely.

I knew, in the end, that leaving New York City was the only thing that was going to save me. And it did. I’ve never had one of those visions – airless, terrifying, crushing – of the building falling down on me in another city. I even get through plane flights much more easily now. And in the past few years, when I’ve gone back to visit New York, I’ve barely thought about my old relationship with it – the darkness, the feelings of asphyxiation.

I have to go back for the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Recording this milestone anywhere else in the world would be completely inadequate. I’m going to retrace my steps from that morning, going with my husband toward the site and, I imagine, telling him stories about what I saw then and how that day went. We’ll walk past my old workplace, where, of course, I stopped on that day, and continue the last five blocks to the site itself, and no doubt join crowds of others who feel called there. I know there are dozens of events and rituals scheduled. I don’t know if I’ll want to have anything to do with any of them. But I want to be there, and I believe – we’ll see if I’m right, but I believe – that this will mark a new era in moving on. Putting the demons down.