Ground Stop: 9/11/01

Posting about 9/11 on September 12 is fitting, I think. I was stranded in Chicago three years ago today. I realize now that there are few things I remember with certainty, but that the lessons of the attacks are clear.

I'd flown to Chicago to join a hiking trip with my grad-school friend Michael and another friend; we'd just spent several days tromping through the Porcupine Mountains in my home region, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We hurtled back to Chicago on 9/10, and in the years since I've thought about how that day, some of the 19 murderers were in transit, too, going here or there to stage the penultimate phases of their plot.

Anyhow, on September 11, I had a 9:03 a.m. flight from Chicago-Midway to Minneapolis, and so my friend Michael and his fiancee Julie took me to the airport. We were on Lake Shore Drive when, over NPR, the announcer said - very calmly and briefly - that a plane had apparently struck one of the World Trade Center towers. She then switched to a story about the assassination in Afghanistan of the mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, an event about which I was reading as I sat in the back seat of Michael's car. We expressed some surprise at the apparent accident in New York, but kept going to Midway. Just as we got there, an NPR announcer broke back in with more details about the situation in New York, but I remember thinking blithely that it didn't matter to me way over in Chicago - how could it? I waved good-bye to Michael and Julie and headed into the terminal.

Checking in was easy and fast. I was taking back to Minneapolis a tent I'd rented for the camping trip, and the bag included dozens of sharp tent stakes, but of course nobody balked at such prosaic luggage. It was in walking to gate that I realized something was amiss. There were big knots of people outside every restaurant or bar that had a television, and the images on the screens were of the towers, smoking furiously. I called my wife, Shannon, to say I was at the airport and she breathlessly said that both towers had been struck by airplanes. Horrible, but still: how could this affect my ability to get home? At the gate, though, a frantic Northwest Airlines ticketing agent had just announced that our flight would be delayed briefly due to a federally-declared "ground stop" on all airplane travel in the United States. I called Shannon back, and unbelievably she said one of the towers had collapsed. She was disappointed that I wouldn't be home soon. Little did I know that I might've still gotten to where I was going if my last name was bin Laden.

Now it was clear that something was very much wrong. I tried to watch the televisions in the airport bars, but I couldn't see them for all the other people around them. Many people were now drinking, and not just beers but heavy-duty stuff. Some sort of aggressive action had taken place, but by whom? Against whom? Why?

Finally, at what must have been about 10 a.m., Northwest said that our flight wouldn't be leaving today. I got reticketed for the same flight the next day, I think, and called Michael, who was working on his dissertation at the library at the University of Chicago. He'd already thrown in the towel on that endeavor, and now he was at Julie's office at the U of C, where everyone was listening to the radio or watching the news. Since it was clear I wouldn't be flying home that day, he invited me over to the U of C and then to stay with him and Julie for another night. He said that the news media were already speculating that the attacks were the work of Islamic terrorists. Michael and I hashed over that idea for a few minutes and I remember saying it was more likely to be the work of a domestic terrorist group, a la Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City. I was due to start teaching a US history course on 9/12 at the University of St. Thomas, so I also called the departmental secretary to say that I probably wouldn't be back in time. She assured me that it was fine if I had to cancel my first class, as everything had already been cancelled that day. Actually, I think that the school declared a day of prayer for 9/11.

Dragging all my stuff (including that stupid tent) with me, I made my way to the city bus terminal at Midway and caught the bus over to the U of C. About halfway through the trip, the bus crossed the Dan Ryan Expressway and offered a clear, beautiful view of the Chicago skyline. A vociferous black woman, who'd been talking to a friend during the whole ride, asserted in a classically Second-City kind of way that the terrorists would hit Chicago next, because the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building were tall, too, right? This was absurd, but in retrospect it was a million times smarter than what the neocons blathered about over the next few years.

At the U of C, I hung out with Michael and Julie for a while. I learned there that the Pentagon had been bombed as well, and that the president's location was unknown. We went to lunch and talked about how the event would solidify Bush's shaky standing as president. Sometime that afternoon, a bunch of us headed to a nearby bar to watch the televised coverage of the events. There, with most of a pitcher of Goose Island under my belt, I heard Jerry Falwell make his famous assertion that the attacks were God's punishment for America's liberal ways. Again, ludicrous but not as ludicrous as many assertions later.

From the bar, we headed back to Michael and Julie's place, where over the rest of the day and the evening we watched the incessant coverage and debated what would come next. I predicted that Bush would try to use the attacks to justify Star Wars; Michael scoffed but accurately described how the attacks would cow the Democrats for years. I called Shannon a number of times - though as I recall, I couldn't get through on several occasions - and to Northwest, where ticket agents were certain I'd be able to fly the next day. I was out of clean clothes, so I went to a nearby Sears to buy some polo shirts. By midday on the twelfth, it was clear that wouldn't be the case, and so I started calling car-rental agencies about one-way rentals to Minneapolis. Only Hertz would let me do this, so I reserved a car for 9/13.

That morning, I said my good-byes to Michael and Julie and bussed down to the Hertz office in the Loop. I had to walk quite a ways from the bus route to the office, and the Loop was frighteningly empty - except for cops, who were everywhere. Just outside the Hertz office, a man offered to sell me a car. Just inside, several people were being turned away because the company was out of vehicles. It turned out I had one of the last rental cars in Chicago. I loaded my stuff and headed out of town. I tuned in NPR right away, and all the way back to Minneapolis, I listened to one form of coverage or another. They were already calling the New York site "Ground Zero." I remember almost having to stop when Neal Conan starting taking calls from eyewitnesses and survivors: some people had calls so close as to be fantastic, others just called to say they'd lost a wife or a son or a brother. One especially gut-wrenching anecdote had to do with a firefighter who was going up the stairs in one of the towers, helping civilians make their way down. He was still inside when the tower collapsed, but he'd helped many people get out alive. He's somewhere on that list that Elise linked to.

More than anything, that's my dominant memory of 9/11: the men and women who willingly sacrificed themselves so that others could live, even amidst unimaginable chaos and death. How different from our president and vice-president and their callous, warmongering advisors, men who have never sacrificed or even risked anything, but who have nonetheless clothed themselves in others' heroism, who have used freedom as the pretext for inflicting horrors on innocents, and who have three years later still not killed bin Laden.