I had just returned to my office, on Capitol Hill, after a
week’s vacation at the beach. It was a beautiful September morning, clear and
cool, bright blue skies. We had the morning news running on the office
television, they were reporting an “accident,” an airplane had hit one of the
New York skyscrapers – I called my boss, something didn’t feel right, I wanted
to find out what he knew. As we watched the news report, as I was on the phone
with my boss, we saw the second plane hit the other tower. This was deliberate.
We evacuated. On the street we heard sirens, and a large
explosion. We knew we were under attack. Street rumors were that the explosion
was a plane hitting the Old Executive Office Building, later I found out it was
the Pentagon. We could see the smoke in the sky.
One of my staff, Scott, went to get his wife; she worked for (then) Congressman
Gutknecht of Minnesota. My other staffer, Cari, and I got in my car to drive out of
Washington. We had heard the 14th Street Bridge into Virginia was
closed, so we headed for Maryland. The streets were gridlocked, police were
trying to direct traffic. The faces of the people on the sidewalks were
stunned, some in tears. I managed to get one phone call out to my boyfriend – I
told him I was okay and trying to get home, I asked him to call my family. The
cell phone lines were jammed.
Cari was able to get Scott on his
phone – he and his wife were at Congressman Gutknecht’s apartment on the Senate
side of Capitol Hill. We were invited to join them since we couldn’t get out of
the city. We entered the apartment – it was barely furnished, and there were
about twenty people already there – mostly young staffers – sitting on the
floor around a radio. The Congressman didn’t have a television. We listened to
the news reports. The Congressman was gracious and calming. He sent some of us
out to the local sandwich shop to get food for everyone. He wrote an speech to
his constituents in Minnesota, comparing 9-11 to Pearl Harbor, he dictated it over his landline to his office in Minnesota. Then he collected the
names and phone numbers of all of our families and had his Minnesota office
call our families to tell them we were all right. The cell phone lines were
still jammed.
By early evening Cari and I thought we’d try again to get
out of the city. It was eerily quiet; all the airplanes had been grounded. Most
of the traffic was gone and the sidewalks were empty. We drove into Virginia,
we could see black smoke and the wreckage of the Pentagon, and I could smell
the charring. I dropped Cari at the train station and headed home. I went to
the basement, unpacked my American flag, and hung it on the front door.
The next morning, our office was open, the point was to show
the terrorists that work would continue, and they could not, would not shut
down Congress, shut down America.
The sky was crystal blue, but DC was quiet, hushed. It seemed that even the birds were silent. Airplanes were still grounded. The
Pentagon gaped with a huge black hole. There were tanks parked at the bridges
into DC.
On the Hill, we all greeted each other in the hallways, on the
elevators. We knew we’d been a target, we knew we were survivors.
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| September 2001 |
