I seem to have a knack for choosing bad times to travel to New York City. I’ve flown to the Big Apple four times since Aug. 3, and twice something tragic has happened.
I went to New York for the first time my sophomore year of high school with my mom and my sister. I remember feeling like quite the little tourist, scared of the subway, scared of crime, generally intimidated by the enormity of Manhattan island. However, after my boyfriend, Peyton Horn, graduated from the University in June and moved to New York, I was forced to face the overwhelming city.
My first two visits this year, both in August, were wonderful. Eating fantastic food, drinking fantastic drinks — pure hedonism. We took a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, went dancing at “Windows on the World,” a bar at the top of the World Trade Center, and took an evening boat cruise around Manhattan. My eyes were opened to a New York I had not imagined.
I went for my last trip of the summer on Sept. 6.
We spent the weekend doing New York-y things: shopping, eating and sightseeing. Then came Tuesday, Sept. 11, and it was time for me to head back to Oregon. My flight was scheduled to depart at 8:15 a.m. It didn’t leave until about 8:40. As I’m sure most people recall, that was about eight minutes before the first plane hit the WTC.
We had been flying for about an hour when the pilot informed us we would land in Chicago (instead of Denver, where we were scheduled to land) and that every plane in America had been ordered to the ground. We were given no explanation.
We landed shortly afterward, and as soon as the plane hit the runway, I called my mom. She told me everything she knew about the attack, and I repeated the information to the other passengers sitting around me on the plane. People sat quietly, shocked and uncertain about what to say or how to react.
I spent the next two hours (sitting on the tarmac at Chicago O’Hare International Airport) calling Peyton, calling his family, and trying to keep myself distracted from the fear that was creeping into my mind. The building Peyton worked in was attached to the WTC by a footbridge, the same footbridge we had walked through just weeks before.
After two hours on the tarmac and another half hour taxiing, my nerves were shot. I went to stay with a friend of my mom’s in Chicago and finally spoke to Peyton about 2 p.m. He was fine. He had seen the towers burning on his way to the subway, and shortly after received a phone call from a colleague explaining what had happened and telling him not to go to work.
His life and the city were forever changed. The office building where he worked is now the tallest one standing at ground zero. In the weeks that followed, the company he works for, Lehman Brothers, temporarily relocated to hotel rooms in Times Square and purchased a new building at the north end of the square, which the investment bank will move into in 2002.
On Nov. 9, I went back for my first visit since Sept. 11. Peyton and I spent a wonderful weekend together and decided on (what should have been) my last day to go to ground zero. It was the two-month anniversary of the attack, and Veterans’ Day, so there were many people at the site, including President Bush.
People can’t get very close to the rubble of the buildings. There are police standing guard to make sure people don’t get through the barricades, but the destruction is visible.
Walking around ground zero is intense. Flowers, candles, pictures, hats and T-shirts hang on the chain link fences set up to keep people away from the debris. A bike, undoubtedly belonging to a victim of the attacks, is still chained to a post, dusty from Sept. 11. Its spokes are stuffed with flowers.
When we got back to Peyton’s apartment, I asked him how it felt to see ground zero.
“It felt like a part of the city was missing,” he said. “Like my part of the city was missing.”
Monday morning I woke up ready to pack and catch a cab to LaGuardia Airport. Not half an hour after rolling out of bed, Peyton’s roommate, another University alumnus, Stephen Tachouet, called and told us to watch the news: Another plane had crashed in New York. My stomach dropped, and I got all shaky. Not again, not terrorism, I prayed.
We watched the news for a bit. The crash had happened less than an hour before, and the news was mostly just anchors playing a guessing game. In an action frighteningly reminiscent of Sept. 11, the airports were shut down, although this time only for a few hours. My flight was canceled, so I stayed in New York another day and returned home Tuesday.
My travels to New York have been anything but uneventful. Just a couple weeks ago I received a letter from United Airlines, thanking me for my “patience, endurance and understanding” on Sept. 11. As if I could have felt anything else.