At the time I was working as a campus minister at a university in North Carolina while finishing up my Divinity degree in Johnson City, Tennessee (a place I hope to retire to some day). September 11 was a day I needed to commute to school, which involved a lengthy drive down a winding road from Boone, which was up in them thar' hills down to Johnson in the Tennessee hollers. It would take about an hour, and since it was impossible to pick up a radio signal and the cell phone hadn't quite yet become the extension of the human arm that it now is, I was essentially cut off from the world. It could have ended during that hour for all I knew of it, and in a sense it did. I filled the time by listening to Dolly Parton's recently released bluegrass masterpiece, Little Sparrow, on my CD deck and revel in the lush green of the hills while praying not to have the car break down. Otherwise, not a care in the world. You can listen to bluegrass on anything, but the hills of Appalachia breathe it.
When I made it into Johnson, I stopped, as was custom, at a kind of mini-mart along the way to pick up my donut and coffee on the way to class. On the way in, I noticed something a bit unusual, a group of customers gathered near the check-out, watching the little TV the clerk had on a shelf behind him. I thought, "That's weird but whatever." and got my repast. While checking out I saw that the screen was on a news station with a picture of a smoking wreckage. I asked, "Um...did something happen?" "Yeah, someone is plane bombing New York City, son." WTF?
Without further ado I took off to class, where I found everyone seated in solemnity around the discussion table, talking about what had happened, which at that moment was still only vaguely understood. I did come to glean that an American Airline jet was involved. It took me a moment to process, but then it clicked with a dull horror that my sister was a flight attendant on the Boston-New York route. And it was just about impossible to call anyone because the lines were all jammed. (As it turned out, she had missed pulling that flight by just a couple of days, and in fact - being the intrepid trouper she was and still is - was on the next flight when they resumed service. She said there were about fifteen people on the flight, and basically everyone sat up in first class with the flight attendants and talked about what had happened.She knew most of the crew on that fated pane.)
Well, there was a lot of shock, people crying, people getting enraged. A lot of young southern lads driving VERY fast and hard in their jeeps and pick-ups looking like they would love to kill someone right about then. Someone of swarthy middle eastern caste, that is. And in fact, people in that demographic began withdrawing quickly from public life. I remember a couple of charming Persian sisters who worked at a local cafe I would frequent who suddenly just weren't there anymore. And I won't deny that some political dread filled my mind, because I knew Bush would eventually parley the attack into an excuse to do some stupid neocon aggression that would only worses the problem. W. didn't let me down.
I didn't make it back to New York for a while, so whatever went on their had to be related second-hand by friends. Most is not worth going into, since copious New York stories after the attack are available. I remember the sicking horror I would feel when as a kid I looked over the viewing balcony on the newly minted tower (or even contemplated what that crazy Frenchman Phillipe Petit did with his tightrope). The idea of anyone plunging from such a height still gives me shudders and questions the benevolence of any deity.
I understand that for about three days the city was, probably for the first time since the invention of the motor vehicle, deadly silent. When traffic started again on the third day my friend Ed quipped, "It was the only time in my life that I said 'Thank God for the sound of New York traffic.'"
It remains, for me anyway, an indelible reminder of how thin a line it is we all walk, and how stupid any country is to be less than fully mindful of what is going on within, or coming over, its borders.