On September 11, 2001, I was nearing the end of my planning period at Jeffersonville High School and had gone to the office to check my mailbox. Barb Trouy, our receptionist, was on the phone with a worried look on her face. I heard her saying comments like, “Oh, no. Do they know why?” She hung up and asked me if I happened to have my television on in my classroom upstairs. When I said no, she told me to go turn it on because her sister had just called and said someone had blown up the World Trade Center again.
I hurried to my room and turned on the TV. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I just sat staring at all the images and listening to newscasters trying to make sense of it. There was so much confusion because no one seemed to be sure what was going on. Was this just a horrible airline accident? Was it done deliberately? I remember thinking that all of the news reporters seemed overwhelmed by the uncertainty, and as a trained journalist, I kept trying to process the information in my head the way they had to be doing, too.
The bell rang for second block and my IRT (instructional resource time) students filtered in. They were juniors who were not in the midst of state-wide ISTEP standardized tests, as all our freshmen and sophomores were that day, so many had already started to hear or see the news. This was right at 9 a.m. It was strange to see everyone enter the room and then become transfixed, staring at the television. A normally chatty bunch of kids just fell completely silent and gathered on chairs, on the floor, and sat on top of tables, circling near the TV. It seemed I could barely even hear anyone breathing. Expressions ranged from horror to shock to stoic to tears. As we watched—live—the second plane flew into the second tower, prompting gasps and shouts that broke the silence. “Are we going to be attacked all over the country?” a boy asked. I couldn’t even find my voice to answer, and once we found out that the Pentagon had also been hit, his question seemed to be a real possibility. I saw a few kids shoot nervous glances out the classroom windows, searching that sunny, bright blue September sky for planes.
The rest of I.R.T. passed in a blur. Kids were so frightened and confused. One of the girls collapsed in tears because her older sister was living in Manhattan. She fell to the floor crying, “I have to talk to my sister. I hope she didn’t try to go to work today.” I finally let her go back in my newspaper office, shut the door, and get out her cell phone. I told her to keep dialing until she finally got through to her sister, which she eventually luckily did, considering how most communications into and out of Manhattan had completely jammed. Students’ emotions were swinging from sadness to anger to total disbelief, and I felt powerless to comfort them because I didn’t understand it either. They wanted to know if we were at war, and I couldn’t answer them. It was probably my hardest day ever as a teacher.
When the bell rang for the end of IRT, most of the students were reluctant to leave. All sense of normalcy in the school day had been abandoned. As my next class came in, freshmen and sophomores were just getting their first glimpse of the day’s situation since they had been in testing all morning. Many grew angry at the realization that the situation had been kept from them by the school administration so they could complete their testing that morning. The kids could tell how visibly upset I was, and I tried to get them up to speed on what was going on, as much as we knew. When I explained, with tears in my eyes, that my I.R.T. and I had watched the second plane fly into the second tower, one perpetually troublesome student said, “Cool! Are they gonna replay it?” I think my head spun around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I shouted at him how that was most certainly NOT cool—that these were real people dying, and it wasn’t a video game you could just hit “reset” on and start over. I almost started to cry as I wondered just what we had done to this generation by exposing them to so much violence in their entertainment and media that one of them could think this was “cool.”
After the school day was over, I went straight home and stared at the television for the rest of the afternoon and night and kept my computer on my lap, searching all the news Web sites. I’m not sure I ever even got up to get food. I felt like I needed to do something to help, but I didn’t know what that would be. I didn’t really sleep much that night. I just sat praying for all the people in the buildings and on the planes, and the newspaper adviser in me started taking notes on ways my staff could localize the story for that week’s issue of The Hyphen, our school paper. It was obvious our planned front page would have to be scrapped in favor of this story. I e-mailed my student editors and told them to come to school with ideas and plan to put in extra time after school to redo the issue on deadline. I think I finally dozed off from sheer emotional exhaustion sometime around 2 a.m.
For me, 9/11 was the beginning of a long period of not feeling safe. My mom had just been diagnosed with breast cancer a month earlier and had endured her first surgery and treatment, so I had already started the school year filled with anxiety. As a volunteer with the Miss Indiana Scholarship Pageant, I was scheduled to fly to Atlantic City, New Jersey, the week after September 11 to attend the Miss America Pageant, but there was no certainty my flight would go. Airports were cancelling numerous daily flights because the American public was refusing to get on planes in the wake of this tragedy. My parents had planned to drive to Atlantic City for the pageant anyway, so they just waited until later in the week for me to ride with them. On the way to Atlantic City, we stopped overnight in Pennsylvania, and we didn’t realize we had stopped very near where United Flight 93 crashed in a field. There were FBI and ATF agents eating breakfast in the lobby of our hotel the next morning, and I once again felt extreme sadness for all the people who had perished making sure that the terrorists didn’t make it to Washington, DC with that particular plane.
When we arrived in New Jersey, I made my dad request a room on a lower floor of Caesars hotel. I didn’t want to be up high; I wanted to make sure we were close to the exit and could get out of the building quickly in an emergency. The Miss America Pageant itself was surreal because of the security presence we hadn’t had in prior years. For both the preliminary nights and the televised finals, the area around Boardwalk Convention Hall was designated a “no-fly” zone by air traffic control. Ambulances and fire trucks were parked on the boardwalk outside. Agents with bomb-sniffing dogs roamed the aisles, and a camera crew filmed every single person entering the hall on the night of finals. My mom and I and our friends, Sarah and Debbie Wiley, sat together, and the first thing we all did was count the number of stairs to the closest exit, in case we would need to find it in the dark. It’s a habit I still have to this day whenever I enter a big sporting event or a nationally-televised event. It’s a habit borne of fears planted on 9/11.
Before 9/11, I didn’t think twice about going to the top of a high-rise building in any place at home or abroad. I didn’t survey my fellow passengers waiting to board a plane with me, wondering if any of them could be terrorists or have intent to do me harm in some way. I didn’t worry at all when I was traveling carefree in a big city, riding subways, waiting in train stations, or visiting monuments. And I certainly didn’t count stairs to the nearest exit of a stadium every time I attended a concert or sporting event.
Perhaps that wariness is the price we pay for freedom—for living in a country where the idea of terrorism is abhorred. Perhaps the damage to our national psyche only serves to remind us how lucky we are to live here and not someplace like Afghanistan or the Sudan, where living with violence and terrorism is an everyday occurrence. Perhaps one day, September 11, 2001, will be just a distant reminder of a time when we rose up and came together as a nation, something our children will read about in their history books much as we read about Pearl Harbor, rather than a time that still brings a rise of panic and sadness to my chest when I watch tonight’s remembrances on television.
Author’s Note: I wrote this on September 11, 2008, as I was watching a 9/11 memorial documentary on The History Channel.