Though I have spoken of it often throughout my life, I realized I have never written down my memories of 9/11 and the following days. Here’s how I remember it.
In the fall of 2001 I was ten years old. A Tuesday near the beginning of the school year should have been like any other. Our homeschool routine was to have “together time” first thing, though not early. A family of night owls, our school day began around 9 with readalouds, vocabulary words, history, and memory work (scripture and poems) then we would all go to our individual work for the rest of the morning.
This Tuesday was slightly unusual in that my parents were both out of town in Denver, 1600 miles away. My sister-in-law—my oldest brother’s wife—and my nine-month-old nephew were staying with us. There were four kids living at home at the time. My sister almost seventeen, my next older brother thirteen, me, and my younger brother about to turn seven. Another brother was off at college, and the oldest married with his first child living in town (and in our house that week).
We were in the living room reading when the house phone rang. House phones, of course, were still the primary means of communicating with anyone outside the home and were always answered when they rang. That was the last normal thing that would happen for a long time.
Whoever answered it came back quickly, “Turn on the TV, there was a plane crash!” We were not in the habit of turning on the television during the day, I couldn’t imagine why this was worthy of interrupting school. “A plane crash” did nothing to prepare us for the image that greeted us on the screen, one that everyone in the world was watching at that moment.
In Denver, my father had just been heading downstairs for his first meeting of the day. A lady in the elevator asked where he was going like it was shocking anyone was going anywhere. “To my meeting,” he offered. “It’ll be cancelled, go back to your room and watch the news.” She must have been convincing, he went back and found my mom glued to the tv having just heard herself.
A few years ago reminiscing about this day someone said, “Can you imagine if there had been twitter on that day?” This thought chilled me. How different would the national experience have been if everyone were getting their news piecemeal, unverified, conspiracy-laden from the start? The days and weeks of potent unity we remember so vividly may not have happened.
My parents soon called the house, “We’re coming home. It will take a few days, we think we’ll have to drive.” They were certainly not going to wait around to see how long air travel would be grounded—they knew they had to get home. Even driving turned out to be difficult. Every rental car in Denver was claimed immediately. Even the U-Haul store was cleaned out. Eventually they sat in the waiting room of a rental agency waiting for a car to be returned before starting the 24-hour drive home. Once on the road they didn’t stop, taking turns driving and napping, talking with complete strangers at every gas stop along Interstate 70. Everyone was on their way home.
My main memory of the day itself is visceral. A knot my stomach had never made before. Of all the ages I could have been, ten was a very tender one. Old enough to understand something world-changing had happened, not old enough to understand what that might mean. My teenage siblings were theorizing about terrorists and retaliatory actions, my little brother not quite old enough to really get it. I was filled with dread and my parents weren’t home.
Pretty quickly I dismissed myself and went upstairs to do anything else away from the TV. I was up there when the second plane hit. “Come back downstairs, we’re watching history!” I much preferred reading about the Fertile Crescent in Story of the World than watching it unfold 150 miles away.
Though not as significant a part of our cultural memory, the other two crashes, into the Pentagon and the plane heroically brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania, gave the day a sense of unending disaster. We were all watching the news as it broke, one plane after the next. After four crashes why not more? When would it end?
Then the first tower fell.
At some point we realized lunchtime had come and gone. My sister made a package of ramen noodles, giving me a bowl of mostly broth saying, “We’ll have to get used to having less food now.” She meant it as a joke but at the time I thought she was serious. The idea of a land war in North America seemed completely possible to me. “We are under attack” was a phrase used all day long on the news. My sister and I laughed about this years later, she had no memory of it at all.
My parents made it back by Wednesday night, but nothing was normal for a while. In fact, nothing ever returned to how it was before. There is a lot of nostalgia right now about the 90’s. Everyone wants their kids to have a “90s summer” or “90s childhood.” They are mostly taking about technology and screens when they say this, but a world without a 9/11 is a different world. One less frightening, where danger is farther off and home a safer place.