9/11 From the Left Coast

9/11
From the Left Coast

-------By the time my clock radio startles me awake, the twin tragedies are already an hour old. Two planes have impacted; four are rumored to be unaccounted for. Many, too many, are already dead. I turn on the television to watch the spectacle, completely unprepared for the pictures that assault my eyes. My child wants to know what has happened and why. How do you explain what a terrorist is to a 10-year-old without making him afraid to walk out the door? I somehow manage to explain, in terms that don’t frighten him to death, the little bit I do know about what has happened in New York. I stress how unlikely it is that anything is going to happen here in our town. Judi is at a convention in Las Vegas and I am left to choose whether to send him to school or not on my own. He is fed, showered and dressed and I long to hold him near me all day long. I stand on the porch, just as I do every morning, as he walks to the bus stop across the street, trying vainly to let him think that all is normal, the world hasn’t changed.

Judi is finally able to call from Vegas. They are locked down in the convention center, no one is permitted to enter or exit until… Until what? Until when? The lines at the pay phones are 50 deep and cell phones are passed around like candy so that all may call to see if their loved ones have been spared. We argue about sending the boy to school on such a day. She wanting to see him safe at home, me feeling that school is as safe as home. I’m convinced that he is better off going about his normal business rather than watching the horror on television or the tears streaming down my face and listening to my profanities as I curse the people responsible for this. It is settled when I agree to pick him up at the first hint of any trouble in our area. Someone at the convention center finally realizes that 1.5 million people in one place is an appealing target on a day like today so all the conventioneers are released to return to their hotels where they are still unable to check out, fly off/drive away. They’ve come from all over the world and now they are separated from home & families, helplessly watching events unfold. She goes to comfort and care for her staff; I chain smoke on the patio, watching CNN through the screen door. We promise to keep in touch.

All the news agencies scramble to impart any scrap of information they can, no matter how gruesome or improbable it may be in a race to keep me informed ahead of their competitors. I cannot imagine what it must be like to feel your situation is so hopeless that the only escape is to jump out of a window, knowing you have no chance of surviving the fall. I hope I never find out. Now a plane has hit the Pentagon and I wonder how many other planes are out there on their way to targets unknown. I live in the flight path of 3 major airports and as I sit on the patio, I hear no air traffic, not even helicopters. The city of Victorville is unnaturally quiet. We all huddle indoors, unable to detach ourselves from the images that are being broadcast. Like a car wreck we are horrified, unable to not look, unable to look away.

The principal at my child’s school agrees with me and they have had a full session today. The teachers and counselors have been available and reassuring. He returns home to talk about bad people who wage war on us, wanting to know what our President will do about it. I don’t have an answer to that, but maybe when the President speaks tonight he will. I tell him the things that have happened during the time he was at school. He quickly tires of nothing but newscasts on all the channels and goes outside to play. We have a ‘normal’ dinner—something quick. For the first time ever that I can recall, the television stays on during dinner so that we can keep apprised of any developments. We talk about the reasons this has happened here. We play Racko to try and take our minds off the horror that keeps replaying itself on the television. I tuck him in, rubbing his head the way he likes so much. I chain smoke some more on the patio and then spend a sleepless night on the couch in front of the television, praying for someone to be pulled alive from what the rescue workers are calling ’the pile.’

September 12^th dawns and again school is in session so off he goes. After a morning of viewing the endless loop that is the wounding and ultimately the destruction of the World Trade Center, I have seen enough of death and long to move among the living. I shower; dress and head out to the market, more for interaction with people than a need for supplies. I see the American flag flying everywhere. I can’t recall how many flags flew last June 14^th, but I do recall it being rare in the land of taken-for-granted freedoms. Doubly uncommon for a town that hosts a recently closed Air Force base. Are these flag wavers the same people that cursed our failing economy and talked of a cheaper life south of the border just a day or two ago? I pass a used-car lot and see the owner, a man of middle-eastern descent, putting American flags on the windows of his cars. I inquire where I might get one for my car and he eagerly presses one into my hands, "From one American to another." The mood is somber, but everyone speaks to one another, passing fact and rumor alike—people I am sure that days before would have crossed the street rather than make eye contact with a stranger.

September 7, 2001 is a day I will never forget. After years of putting our careers, our wants, our needs second to stability and continuity for children, we are moving on. With the return of Brian to his mother’s house, Judi has finally accepted a promotion, one that requires we relocate to Kansas. With all the gang and drug activity; the declining school system; with local home prices finally creeping up again, we decide that now is the time to stake out a better life for ourselves and our remaining child in a smaller town, away from all the problems that come when you concentrate far too many people in far too little space. September 7^th we have signed a contract to sell our home. We have already placed an offer on a home in the new town so we price ours below market and offer bonuses to both selling and buying brokers in hopes of a quick sale. It is this selfish desire to sell my home that I awaken with on the morning of the 13^th. My thinking is that the magnitude of the events of 9/11 is so great that there is no chance for us to escape Los Angeles anytime soon. The last thing on anyone’s mind—anyone but me, that is—is buying a new home. We want answers; we want revenge; we want to curl up in a ball and have it all go away. We don’t know how this is going to affect the economy, but it can’t possibly be good. Better stock up at the grocers, fill up at the gas station. Put any plans on hold until we see how the dust settles. And the dust still has not settled in New York. Fires smolder in the pile and the rescuers despair of finding anyone alive. The hospitals stand down their calls for extra staff, blood, supplies. There is no need for them. Amidst all that destruction, the surety that some will be saved evaporates like the steam from the water as they douse the embers of September.

In the days, weeks, months immediately following the disaster, we pull together. People are kinder, gentler, and more patient. Merging into traffic is a little like the days back when we had the sniper shootings on the LA freeways. Back then people let you in because they were afraid they’d get shot if they didn’t. Now they do it out of a newfound respect for one another. We email inspirational messages and pictures to each other, to our president. We hold candlelight vigils. We panic when we think of the dead leaving behind apartments full of untended animals and spring into action to rescue them. We weep for the walking wounded with their placards of hope as they search for news of the lost. Patriotism is rampant. In the weeks before the attack I remember reading about a company that makes flags. The owners were quoted as saying, "If we don’t diversify our product line; the company will fold, placing many people out of work. No one buys flags anymore." I think this company will be very busy, at least for while. A year later I can find any style and size of the red, white and blue that I can imagine for sale in the most unlikely of places, but in those first few weeks, you couldn’t buy a flag to save your life.

We supported our government doing anything and everything to prevent this from happening again. Nuke the mid-east? Get to it! Drilling in the Arctic refuge? Hell yes! New restrictions on luggage and contents? Bring them on! National identity papers—well, some still have a problem with that. I don’t, but the word ‘Homeland’ conjures up pictures in my mind of Germany under the Nazis, slightly reminiscent of ‘Fatherland.’ I would have picked something more industrial, less emotional sounding, but maybe that is the intent, to keep emotions running high.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you know how the past year has gone. Very few survived beyond the collapse of the towers, yet we are grateful the toll was only 3,000 lives. Some say it could have been worse, but I say it could have been better. I think it could have not happened at all. What might my country have done differently to avoid the attack altogether? Perhaps my country intrudes much on the politics of others when it really has no business doing so. Would we have been a less appealing target, if we were more insular and less vocal about the righteousness of our way of life? Are the intelligence agencies of my country, the ones that absorb countless of my tax dollars, truly so inept as to have not detected any hint of this plot? A year later I see the questions and the apathy resurface around me. I see it in myself. I thought that I would never again see an election with small voter turnout. Wrong. A year ago I would have supported my government in just about anything it chose to do. Today, I do not support actions it wishes to take against Saddam Hussein or the country of Iraq, yet I feel powerless to stop it and so know that the cycle of violence will continue because people like you and me feel we are unable to effect true, meaningful, and lasting change.

My life has changed drastically since 9/11, but not because of 9/11. Our home in Los Angeles did sell, and contrary to my dire predictions, it sold in exactly 30 days. There were none of the escrow horror stories that sometimes accompany such a sale and it was done relatively quickly. We were in our new home the day after Thanksgiving. Small town life agrees with us. People wave, smile, say hello when they pass on the gravel road that leads to our home in the woods, just as they did before 9/11. Everyone really does know everyone (and their business) in a small town. I feel safer here in a place that has more in common with the land of my parent’s childhood than my own. A feeling I hadn’t had in Los Angeles since I was a small child. I don’t know what tomorrow brings, but I don’t fear tomorrow and I hope that somehow, someway we can leave a better world for our children. I just don’t know where to start.