Into the day. Into the future. Into everything we cannot possibly know… We walked into the future.
The weather is one of the things I remember most.
It was perfect.
That feels almost inappropriate to say 25 years later, but the day was gorgeous. September in New York can give you a few days when the humidity disappears and the whole city seems to come into focus. September 11, 2001 was one of those days. The sky was an enormous, uninterrupted blue. The sunlight was brilliant. Everything had edges. Whenever I think about that morning, I see that blue sky first.
At the time, I was living outside Boston. My first wife and I had separated, and I was living alone in a small house. My life was already in one of those moments where you understand that something has ended but don’t really know what is beginning or where things were going.
I had gone to New York for completely ordinary reasons. I was attending a screening of a short film I had scored and having dinner with two old friends. I stayed at my parents’ apartment on 74th Street and York Avenue.
I had done trips like this many times before. I expected to do them again.
I got up early on Tuesday morning and grabbed a cab to the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia to take the Delta Shuttle back to Boston. The shuttle was part of the rhythm of my life then. You boarded, took off, landed, went home. New York and Boston were separated by only 35 minutes in the air. We only had rudimentary security at airports before 9/11. Remember?
So, we boarded and taxied toward the runway just as we were supposed to.
Then we stopped.
We sat there for several minutes… And then, more minutes.
The waiting on the runway was particularly strange because the entire point of the shuttle was efficiency and speed. You could feel people beginning to notice and stir. Heads came up. People looked around. A few passengers began receiving calls. This was 2001, when my phone in my pocket was my trusty Motorola Razr Flip Phone which was still just a phone, and getting information from the outside world wasn’t the continuous multi-platform experience it is now.
I looked out the window.
Far away, against that almost violently blue sky, was a thin column of smoke rising from lower Manhattan.
Just then, a woman on the plane said in a loud voice — not screaming, just loud enough for everybody around her to hear:
“A plane hit the World Trade Center…”
There was a moment when those words still described an accident.
A terrible accident, certainly. A plane had somehow hit one of the towers. My mind tried to arrange the information into something recognizable. Mechanical failure. Pilot error. Some unimaginable mistake. I recalled a random fact when a plane crashed into The Empire State Building in the 1940s during fog. What it like that? What happened?
Then the captain came over the intercom. His voice was grave and urgent instead of institutionally pleasant.
He said that the airport had been closed because of an “event” over the city. We would be returning to the terminal immediately. Our flight was canceled. All flights were being canceled. There would be further information at the terminal.
The energy inside the airplane changed.
People leaned toward the windows. Conversations became more urgent. More phones appeared. Everyone wanted information, and almost nobody had any.
We slowly taxied back as about 20 planes went back to their gates.
When we finally reached the Marine Air Terminal and got off the airplane, the place I remembered entering a short time earlier was completely different.
There were now heavily armed police throughout the terminal. For years I remembered them as National Guard; I am no longer certain that they were. They may have been Port Authority police or tactical officers. Memory preserves some things with photographic clarity and smudges others around the edges.
What I remember clearly is their equipment. The automatic rifles. Their urgency. Their faces.
Something was happening, and whatever it was had moved very quickly from somewhere far away in lower Manhattan to the terminal where I was standing.
A large group of us walked through the long sloping terminal, through the baggage claim and went outside. The taxis were gone. The buses were gone. There was no one around except police.
People were milling around trying to understand what they were supposed to do. Police were telling us to disperse. Disperse where?
For those who don’t know LaGuardia Airport, the Marine Air Terminal sits apart from the rest of the airport, on its western edge along Bowery Bay. The main terminals are roughly a mile or more away, physically separated from it. On an ordinary morning, that isolation is part of its charm and can be an advantage when trying to get into town. That morning, it meant something else entirely. Once the terminal began shutting down and the taxis disappeared, we weren’t simply stranded at an airport. We were stranded at the far edge of it, cut off from the rest of LaGuardia, with Manhattan somewhere in the distance and no obvious way to get there. In fact, to get to the rest of Queens meant crossing the service roads for the Grand Central Parkway through multiple intersections. Not good.
So, I asked an officer what was happening.
His face looked deeply troubled. But he responded without ever looking at me: “Something happened in the city, I dunno,” I remember him saying. “You better get moving. The whole facility is being shut down right now.”
Get moving. Moving? It seems almost funny now because I had no idea where I was supposed to move to.
I had a computer bag with a toothbrush, pair of underwear and a dirty shirt from the night before. I was supposed to be flying home to Boston. My parents were back in Manhattan. There were no taxis. No buses. No subways. The airport was closing.
I caught the eye of another passenger. I said: “hey, crazy right?” We shook hands. His name was Richard.
I asked him the most practical question I could think of.
“What should we do?”
He said, “Walk.”
I said, “OK.”
And so we walked.
I didn’t know Richard. I don’t remember discussing whether this was a sensible idea. There wasn’t a plan. We put our bags over our shoulders, walked away from LaGuardia Airport and started toward Manhattan.
I had no idea it was going to be roughly eight mile journey back to the city. We just walked.
I remember the sunlight coming off the cars.
That is one of those details that has stayed with me for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Cars were packed into the side streets of Queens, barely moving, sunlight flashing off windshields and chrome. Everything was bright. The sidewalks were bright. The sides of buildings were bright. The trees were green. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere.
It was beautiful.
And something terrible was happening.
Richard and I walked quickly through neighborhoods I didn’t know. Low brick buildings. Apartment houses. Storefronts. Residential streets. People standing in doorways. Police cars angled across intersections. Traffic backing up in every direction.
Our bags got heavier.
The morning got stranger.
We still didn’t really know what was happening.
There was no smartphone to pull from my pocket and stare at while walking. No live video feed. No YouTube. No social media. No constant stream of alerts.
Instead, there were car radios.
Almost every car seemed to have its windows open, and almost every radio seemed to be tuned to 1010 WINS. I didn’t know this 25 years ago, but WINS is the oldest continuously operating all-news radio station in the United States. As an easily accessible AM radio station, it became the essential voice of what was happening on that day for the whole city.
So Richard and I listened as we walked. Ten seconds from one car. Twenty seconds from another. A voice from a taxi. A bulletin from an open window.
Then we would walk out of range and lose the story until the next car.
It is difficult to describe how primitive that feels now. We were physically moving through information. The news existed in patches along the street, and we were assembling reality from fragments as we walked past. Seeing people’s reactions to the on-going news was as compelling as the news itself.
At first, the story was a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
Then, at 9:03am that morning, the second plane struck.
And suddenly everybody understood.
Not what was happening exactly.
But what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t an accident.
I remember feeling that realization outside of myself as much as inside. You could see it moving through the streets. People came out of their houses. They stood on sidewalks. They stared toward Manhattan. They looked up at that beautiful empty sky as though there might be something else in it.
People turned their radios louder.
Strangers began talking to one another.
Something had happened to the assumption underneath the day.
Until that morning, the sky was just the sky.
Now you looked at it differently.
Richard and I kept walking.
At 9:59, the South Tower fell.
Again, I remember the people.
There was a sound — not one sound from one person, but a collective reaction. A gasp seemed to move through the streets around us.
The World Trade Center was falling down.
Even writing those words twenty-five years later, part of me resists them. Buildings like that weren’t supposed to fall down. Cities weren’t supposed to change shape while you were walking through them.
We kept walking.
What else could we do?
That is another thing I remember about the day: the almost ridiculous persistence of ordinary physical life.
You still had to put one foot in front of the other. Your shoulder still hurt from carrying your bag. You still got thirsty. You still had to cross a street.
The incomprehensible was happening, and meanwhile your body continued being a body. My mind raced trying to make sense of it all.
By around 10:30, Richard and I had reached the Queensboro Bridge — the 59th Street Bridge.
The bridge was closed to normal traffic. Thousands of people were coming toward us, walking out of Manhattan. Some covered with dust. Weird.
I remember seeing them and realizing that Richard and I were moving in the wrong direction.
Everyone was coming out.
We were going in.
I was trying to get back to my parents. Richard was trying to get to his girlfriend. There wasn’t anything heroic about it. We simply had people on the other side of the bridge.
So we walked toward them.
Somewhere near the middle of the bridge, a woman screamed.
I looked downtown.
A tremendous cloud was rising where the towers had been.
The North Tower had fallen.
There are images of September 11 that everyone knows now because we have seen them hundreds or thousands of times.
This wasn’t like that.
I wasn’t watching television.
I was standing on a bridge with hundreds of strangers.
There was distance between us and lower Manhattan. Sunlight. Blue sky. Buildings. Water. The normal geometry of New York.
And then this enormous unnatural cloud occupying part of the city.
For a moment, nobody seemed to know what to say.
I remember fighter jets streaking across the sky.
And I remember the sound of sirens. So many sirens…
Once we reached Manhattan, the usual noise of the city seemed to have been hollowed out. With normal traffic gone, sounds traveled differently. An emergency vehicle would come racing down an avenue and you could hear the pitch of the siren change as it approached and then change again as it passed, bouncing between the buildings.
New York is almost never quiet. During COVID it got quiet. But not like this…
That day it was quiet enough to hear fear.
Richard and I reached the Manhattan side of the bridge and said goodbye.
It is strange to think about him now.
For several hours on one of the most consequential days of my life, this stranger was simply beside me. We walked together because neither of us knew what else to do. Then we reached Manhattan and our lives separated again.
He went south toward his girlfriend. I went north toward my parents. I never saw him again.
I started walking uptown.
The streets were almost empty except for police, ambulances and first responders. The buildings towered over streets that suddenly seemed far too wide without cars and buses and people filling them.
Again and again, police officers told me to get off the street.
“Get inside.”
“Keep moving.”
“Get off the street.”
A few made it sound like a threat.
Get off the street or else.
And I remember thinking: Or else what?
Not sarcastically.
I really wanted to know.
What else was happening?
Were more airplanes coming?
Was there another attack?
Were there bombs?
Was something going to happen uptown? Was Boston being attacked? Was Washington? I didn’t know…
That may be the feeling I remember most clearly now.
Not terror exactly.
Not even fear.
Not knowing. No information.
Yes, I had bits of information. Two planes. Two towers. Both towers gone. Something had happened at the Pentagon, although I’m no longer certain when I first heard that. There were rumors everywhere. Scraps with no larger context. What happened in Pennsylvania?
I was walking up an empty avenue toward my parents’ apartment without any idea what kind of world I was walking through.
And, of course, that is what all of us are doing all the time. Every day.
We just usually don’t feel it.
We walk into the next hour of our lives assuming it will resemble the hour before it. We schedule dinner. We make plane reservations. We separate from people. We reconcile with people. We worry about money. We fall in love. We make plans for next Thursday. We fall asleep with a dog in our laps.
We behave as though the road just ahead of us is somehow visible.
It isn’t.
September 11 didn’t create that truth.
It exposed it.
For a few hours that morning, the thin membrane between the life I thought I was living and the uncertainty that had always been underneath it disappeared.
I was simply a person walking north through Manhattan trying to reach his mother and father.
Nothing felt theoretical anymore.
When I finally reached their building on 74th Street, I went up the elevator.
CNN was blaring from multiple TVs in the apartment. After hours of experiencing the morning through smoke in the distance, car radios, strangers’ faces and glimpses of lower Manhattan from miles away, I suddenly saw the images everyone else had been watching.
The airplanes. The explosions. The fire. People running. People jumping from the towers.
The towers falling. Again. And again. And again…
My mother was shocked and enormously relieved to see me.
I remember that much more deeply now than I did then.
I was her son.
She had known I was at LaGuardia. She knew airplanes were involved. She knew something terrible was happening to the city. She called and called. The cell circuits were overwhelmed.
And then I walked through the door.
My father was watching the television intently. As a writer, he had a gift for compressing complicated things into very few words.
“A truly terrible day,” he called it.
Yup. That was enough.
Twenty-five years later, I am reluctant to tell you what September 11 “means.” I’ve lived too much since then to apply a neat meaning.
I could draw a line from that morning through wars and politics and surveillance and fear and technology and the changed relationship America has had with the rest of the world. There are people far more qualified than I am to do that.
What I know is smaller.
I know that before that morning, I had confused the enormous power of the country I lived in with some guarantee about the safety of the individual life I was living inside it.
September 11 ended that illusion for me.
Asymmetric warfare existed long before 2001. Human beings have always found ways for smaller forces to wound larger ones. David and Goliath. But September 11 was when I understood it physically. A small group of determined people had taken the ordinary machinery of modern civilian life and turned it against one of the most powerful nations in history.
I think about that now when I watch Ukraine fight for its survival against Russia. I see people using ingenuity, drones, inexpensive technologies and adaptability against a far larger military power. The circumstances are entirely different. I don’t want to flatten history by pretending otherwise.
What feels familiar is the reminder that size and power do not protect us from vulnerability. More guns do not equal more safety.
But even that is not what stays with me most.
What stays with me is how much I had taken for granted.
The plane takes off.
The bridge is open.
The taxi comes.
The meal is served.
Your parents are home.
The building will be there tomorrow.
A person you love will answer the phone.
You will get another chance.
I wish I could say that September 11 permanently changed the way I lived.
It didn’t. That may be the most honest thing I can say twenty-five years later. Not long afterwards, I went back to taking things for granted. I became consumed (again) with my own problems. I worried about stupid things. I was selfish. I became convinced of the importance of things that weren’t important. I made bad choices. I forgot to call people. I assumed there would be more time.
I have had to relearn gratitude over and over and over again.
Maybe that is simply part of being human.
As humans, we know we are vulnerable, and then we forget. We know everything is temporary, and then we make plans as though nothing will ever end. We know the future is unknowable, and every morning we walk straight into it anyway. We know we will die and then we take our lives for granted. We see the names of the 2,977 people who died that day and we can hardly fathom the loss. And then we forget, again…
That is what I see now when I remember September 11.
I see myself and a man named Richard walking out of LaGuardia because there was no airplane to take us to Boston.
I see sunlight flashing off the windshields of cars trapped in Queens. People standing outside the cars in disbelief listening to a crackling car radio.
I feel the weight of my bag on my shoulder.
I see hundreds of people walking toward us across the bridge while we walked toward them towards the city.
I hear a woman scream.
I hear fighter jets.
I hear sirens echoing between buildings.
I see my mother’s face when I finally walked through the door.
For years I thought September 11 was the day the world changed.
Twenty-five years later, I think that is only partly true.
The world changed, certainly. But for a few hours that morning, something else happened. I saw the world as it had always been.
Fragile.
Beautiful.
Terrifying.
Temporary.
None of us knows what is waiting at the other end of the bridge. We never did. That morning simply made it impossible not to know that.
And still, every morning, we pick up whatever we are carrying and walk toward it.
Into the day. Into the future. Into everything we cannot possibly know.
Maybe that is what being human has always been: moving forward without any promise about what comes next, carrying what we can, sometimes fortunate enough to have a stranger beside us for part of the way, and hoping that somehow, after all the distance and uncertainty, we get home.
Hopefully, to find people we love waiting for us…
