Story Frame 43 – Black Smoke on the Horizon

September 2001 [from a letter to a friend in Denmark] … Dear Jørgen, It is a horrific time here. The Pentagon is only 12 miles away from me and with my work projects these days, I could easily have been in New York that day. We Americans have so little experience with something of this sort and it made me think of how many people around the world have to live with this sort of hell on a daily basis. We have been very lucky until now, and certainly I feel we have been naïve. I would hope that one outcome of all this tragedy would be to create more of a team spirit towards world matters….

I was still looking for the security of an actual job, one with regular paychecks, steady hours, hopefully health care insurance and, if I was really dreaming, paid vacation days. I’d had so little of this since I left my earlier, pre-marriage career working in design. But in the wake of the success of The Face, freelance projects began coming my way, starting me on a road to self-employment.

Charles Oppman, a good friend and the chef/owner of Café Marianna, my favorite eatery in Alexandria suggested I should protect myself by incorporating. He also suggested using his lawyer, Gregory Wade. It seemed like a good idea, so I booked a meeting with him for September 11, 2001.

The morning of our appointment, I was in my bathroom, listening to NPR as I put on my makeup. Staring into the mirror, mascara wand in hand, I paused.

Did I just hear someone say a plane flew into a building? In New York City?

I finished getting dressed listening to NPR’s erratic and jangled news reports, trying to piece together what was going on. I thought I heard someone say people were jumping out of a building.

Confused, but needing to pull focus on my meeting with Greg, I made a mental note to call my friends and family in NYC later to get their take on what had happened.

As I drove north along the Potomac River on the George Washington Parkway towards Old Town, I saw an enormous cloud of dark smoke on the horizon. It appeared to be on the Virginia side of the river, the same side of the river I was on. Must be a bad fire, I thought, as I eased my car into a parking space on King Street just outside Greg’s offices. I walked up the path through the small garden and into the historic house that Greg used as his law offices.

“It’ll be a minute!” I heard someone call out by way of greeting. “Why don’t you grab a coffee across the street? From some reason, our coffee machine’s not working this morning.”

I walked back across the street to Starbucks and placed my order. I was waiting to pay when things suddenly got crazy.

A phone on the other side of the counter rang and one of the baristas answered. The buzz and hiss of the coffee machines suddenly stopped, as if someone had pulled the plug. Then the lights went off. The barista put down the phone and turned to face us, a panicked look on her face.

“Get out!” she shouted at those of us waiting for coffee. “EVERYONE! GET! OUT! We’re closing IMMEDIATELY!”

I was confused. This was all very unfriendly. Was she yelling at us because the power had failed?

“But I haven’t paid for my coffee yet,” I said, as the others headed for the door. “Should I just put the money on the counter?”

“No! GET OUT NOW!” she yelled, flinging things around behind the counter.

Feeling a little ruffled and confused by her behavior, I did as I was told and followed the other customers out the door. Happy with the free coffee, I walked back across the street to Greg’s office to tell him the strange thing that had just happened over at Starbucks.

Weirdly, all hell had broken loose inside his offices, too. Everyone was scrambling to find phones, purses, keys, papers, belongings, stressed looks on their faces. Once again, I felt like a character without a script on the set of the wrong film – with a cup of coffee as my only prop.

A moment later, the lights went out here, too, and Greg’s computer shut down. As his staff began making their way out the door, he apologized, then began hastily gathering up his own papers, saying it would be better if we met another time.

“One of the Twin Towers in New York was hit with a plane this morning,” he explained, as he ushered me out the door. “And now also the Pentagon, apparently!”

The Pentagon was only a few miles north of where we were. That was the smoke I’d seen driving into town.

Not wanting to be by myself, confused and wondering where to go, I started the engine of my car and nudged my way out into the traffic. Impulsively or instinctively, instead of going home, I turned down a side street and headed over to the river and Charles’ restaurant. The lights were on.

Inside, in the middle of what should have been a busy morning prep, Charles and his kitchen staff were huddled together in a small cluster, staring silently up at a television screen mounted on the wall. When he heard me come in, Charles came over and put his arms around me. We watched in silence as the newscast showed footage of a plane flying into the second tower and bursting into flames. I heard someone crying. No one spoke. No one understood what was happening.

And then came the news announced a fourth plane was headed to Washington DC. Café Marianna was also close to the Pentagon and not far from Capitol Hill. Charles decided to close the restaurant. He began almost pushing everyone out the door, including me, promising to call me later.

The phone was ringing as I walked into my house. It was a robotic call from the elementary school telling me to pick up my child immediately. Moments later, it rang again. It was the father of one of Leif’s friends, asking if I could pick up his son, Sandy, and keep him at my house until he could get home. Of course, I said.

I walked the 4-5 blocks over to the elementary school, trying to guess how much the boys had been told, and what I should, and should not, say to someone else’s son.

Neither seemed to comprehend the shocking horror of the situation; they were just ten years old. But they did at least have an awareness this was a national emergency. At one point, Sandy stopped walking and looked at us.

“Hey,” he said. “This happened on September 11^th! That’s 9/11 – just like the number you call for emergencies!”          

He was right. I hadn’t put the two together. How weird and strange the coincidence, if it was, in fact, a coincidence.

As the days and weeks passed and more news unfolded, I couldn’t shake off the terrifying awareness that there were angry people in the world ready to kill themselves in order to kill us. I was constantly worried Leif and I were sitting ducks, too close to Washington DC.

Fortunately, Zoë was not there. At least I’d gotten one of them out of harm’s way. After our trip to New York, she’d applied for and been accepted to do a semester away in Denmark that fall. When she first mentioned the idea, I told her it was too expensive and that I couldn’t afford it. But this was something she really wanted to do, so I told her if she could raise half the money, I would give her the other half from the small amount of money Karen had left to be used for the kids’ education and travel.

Zoë got to work immediately, baby-sitting, pet-sitting and plant watering for friends and neighbors over a six-month period, raising about $500. That wasn’t enough, so she came up with the clever idea to auction off her Beenie Babies by selling chances to win the collection – more than forty of them. This was still the height of the craze, but Zoë figured it was worth the sacrifice for the experience of going to school in Denmark for half a year. The manager of a local supermarket gave her permission to set up her basket each Saturday for a month, selling chances to win the entire collection. Surprisingly, most of her ‘customers’ were mothers, not kids! Even more surprisingly, she sold more than $500 worth of tickets and met her quota.

She’d kept all the money she’d earned, more than $1000, in cash. I was so proud of her, as well as excited for this next adventure. I asked her to pose with her money so we could document her amazing accomplishment, which she was only too happy to do. She fanned out the bills in patterns on the hardwood floor in the living room then posed with them with our little dog, Zydeco, clutched in her arms. After I’d taken a few shots, she gathered it all up in her hands and threw all the dollar bills up in the air. I photographed that, too. It makes me smile each time I see it.

Zoë left for Denmark in August, a month before 9/11 happened. Although we have friends and family there, she was living with a family she’d never met and going to high school in a language she couldn’t speak. I was so excited for her.

Because of my work on the documentary, The Face: Jesus in Art, both Zoë and Leif had experienced New York City themselves for the first time just months before September 2001 and I felt part of the WNET/THIRTEEN family.

The New Yorker Hotel, where Zoë and I had stayed for the premiere of The Face: Jesus in Art just six months earlier, donated 10,000 free nights to volunteers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

On July 11, 2001, WNET celebrated the installation of its first state-of-the-art digital transmitter on Tower One of the World Trade Center with a party at the famous Windows on the World restaurant. Exactly two months later, Rod Coppola, the WNET engineer whose responsibility it was to maintain the transmitter, was working the day the plane hit the building. He was among the nearly 3,000 people killed when the towers collapsed.

As General Manager, Bill Baker responded immediately. The day after the attack, WNET donated its dozens of phones and available space, including the corridors, to the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the Red Cross.

“Hotlines were set up for families trying to locate their loved ones. For weeks, volunteers took up residence in the hallways and the Boardroom of our former offices at 450 West 33^rd Street,” Baker said, “And two volunteers, whose wedding had to be postponed, got married at WNET a few days later.”

As a result of my work on The Face, all three of us now had a more personal comprehension of the impact and losses of 9/11 than we would otherwise have had. Eerie as that was, I appreciated the fresh personal connections it had given each of us to the city, as if something had been calling us to come and experience New York City – before the world changed.

What to read next … Story Frame 44 – Hey Mikey!

[photograph by me, taken at The Newseum, Washington DC 2012]

Kristin Fellows is a published artisan writer, a world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. This tale comes to you from a small farming village in Portugal, where she is still surprised to find herself living.

When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com