Lucky me

I had just sat down at my computer that day, thinking how lucky I was to be working in a home office overlooking a tree-covered Virginia hillside. I was living in New York the year before in a studio near Central Park. It was exciting there, but tight and hectic. The sun was too elusive in winter. I was ready for something new, and there was a man in Virginia itching to marry me.

I'd been married to him three months and two days the morning I looked out over the trees. Marcus had just finished a stretch of active duty at the Pentagon and gone back to his private sector job. He called that morning and told me to turn on CNN. I typically had it on because of my work covering cable TV, but it was still a little early. Then he said an airplane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

“Oh, I get it,” I thought. “Another twisted military guy joke.” I sat there waiting for the punch line, but he said, “No,” and in his command voice, “turn on CNN. We're under terrorist attack.”

While I burn synapses trying to process that first crash, another airliner plunged into Tower Two while I and a few million other people watched on TV. This clearly was not a freak accident, but a terrorist attack? How was this somehow blacker than an act of war? Were the sailors who slowly suffocated in the capsized Arizona at Pearl Harbor 50 years before somehow less terrorized? The Japanese did indeed warn us they would attack if we didn't lift oil embargoes, but militant Moslems have been warning us for years they wish to eradicate Americans. Is it only an act of war if you can afford your own heavy artillery? The most radical among the desperate and fanatical always change the rules of war. On the day I was looking out my window, they overcame our multi-billion dollar missile capabilities with adrenaline and box cutters.

But this I didn't comprehend as human beings started throwing themselves off of the twin towers. I could only think to locate people I knew. Then the landscape shifted again. Literally. I heard the explosion first, then felt the ground beneath my building surge. Just two miles away, a third aircraft plowed into the Pentagon. The sky outside my window roared with low-flying jets; for a moment I thought they were going to fall like rain. I wondered if should I stay in front of my window or go outside and die. I realized in those few seconds that I wasn't quite so stoic about death when it seemed a little more present and out of my control.

I wanted to be calm, active, constructive, something. I wanted my Red Cross rescue training to kick in. But my job was to watch cable news and comment on it, which felt inane and flat. I wanted to see and touch everyone I knew to make sure they were whole. I called a friend in New York whose commute took him beneath the Trade Centers. We were on the phone when the first tower collapsed. I watched the conflagration at the Pentagon, where my husband, with whom I had not yet spent an entire month alone, had worked just days before. I'd heard his voice on the phone, but the view from that Virginia window had become so surreal I wasn't sure what to believe. It was only when I put my arms around him that night that I knew how lucky I really was.

Wednesday, September 4, 2002

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.