The Day America Changed
Tuesday morning, 10 a.m. CDT. I can’t believe it. It’s not happening, it’s not real. It’s a gruesome game, somebody’s idea of a joke. It’s Tom Clancy, at his worst. My husband Bill and I had planned to spend the morning at our computers, writing fiction, doing our day job. Now, these awful events overwhelm us, and we can’t move from our chairs. The living room fades around us, becomes insubstantial, unreal. What’s on the TV screen is the only reality, except that we can’t grasp it. My mother must have felt this horror in 1938, when she listened to Orson Wells’s radio show, War of the Worlds and believed it—as she told me once she did. She must have felt like this about Pearl Harbor. Did she wonder whether that was real, or another horrible fiction? I felt this way at Kennedy’s assassination, felt the same stunned, helpless disbelief, the same stomach-twisting anguish. Never again in my life until now. Until now.
Tuesday noon. My daughter has called, crying, disbelieving. My editor emails, says she is watching from her window, below 14th Street in Manhattan, and the air is filled with smoke. Friends telephone, email. Bill and I stand in the kitchen, holding each other, wordless. Everyone reaching for someone, all of us needing to be connected, to touch the ones we love. But what of the families whose loved ones are lost forever in the maelstrom that used to be Manhattan, used to be the Pentagon, who will never come home? They’ll never again be able to touch and hold them.
Wednesday morning, 9 a.m. We’re at war, the government is saying. I believe that much, at least. I can see the battlefields, in New York, Washington. No planes in the air, people stranded everywhere. No water, gas, electricity in Lower Manhattan. Rescuers digging with their hands through mountains of unstable rubble. Politicians in astonishing harmony, singing God Bless America on the steps of the Capital and voting double-digit billions to fight an as-yet-unnamed enemy. Peggy Moody and I decide we have to do something. We begin creating this website, as much for ourselves as for others, she in Austin, I here in the country, on one of the most beautiful and dreadful days of the year.
Wednesday evening, 6 p.m. The website is finished and posted, thanks to Peggy. Strange thing: as we worked, I began to feel less helpless, more determined. Whoever the enemy, he isn’t large enough or strong enough to defeat us. However imperfect this country, with its own bloody past, its own inhumanities, it is still a shining hope, and throughout the day I began to see images of that hope. The rescuers who gave their lives to save lives and property. The mayor of New York, with his grim confidence and strength. The people who wait on the sidewalks with pictures of loved ones who worked on the 101st floor, the 90th floor. The firemen and ironworkers and volunteers from up and down the East Coast, passing what remains of the tallest building in the world in buckets, hand to hand. The Statue of Liberty in the harbor, watching, sturdy and tall, her torch still held high. Images of hope, of will and determination, of strength.
Thursday morning, 9 a.m. The stories are already beginning to come in. As I read them, I weep, realizing that all Americans have shared the same experience, the same disbelief, the same anguish, the same fear. And the same hope, too. What an incredible 48 hours, a roller-coaster ride, a Force Five hurricane, an earthquake off the Richter scale. I’ll never be the same again. I don’t want any of us to ever be the same again. I want us to love more, appreciate more, cherish what we have. I want to put a copy of that picture—the 757 slicing into the World Trade Center—on the wall over my computer. I want to look at it each hour and remember exactly how I felt on the day America changed.
Last updated: 09/13/01