9/11 Where I Was Not

 On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York intending to be total tourists, before moving on to visit friends Stan and Jen in Medford Lakes, NJ.

If our original itinerary had worked out, we'd have been in New York and would probably have done the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building on the 9th September. Once actually there, the more enigmatic Empire State came first, but might not have done if it hadn't been closer to our hotel. This budget hotel had roaches in the shower and smelled mouldy, but that was ok, it was exciting, we were in the Big Apple!

Luckily, because of various minor complications like Stan and Jen being on holiday in the West Indies and because BA's discounted airmiles tickets weren't available when we'd originally planned to go, we'd reversed the order of our trip and went to Medford Lakes after New York. We never made it to the World Trades Centre and I am eternally grateful for those minor complications.

Watching the events on live TV, while in the safe living room of Stan and Jen's charming log-cabin home, on the shore of the lake, was terrifying. None of us could believe what we were seeing. 

We spent half the day frantically trying to phone home, to reassure our family in England that we were safe. All the mobile lines were completely overloaded and landlines weren't much better. Eventually Rob managed to get an email through to his father in Leeds and asked him to please phone my mother in Hastings to tell her we were safe. We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports while Stan managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe too. 

Just as alarming was seeing that there was nobody on top of this. Politicians were panicking and TV channels had no known pattern, no appropriate template to follow, on how to report an event of this magnitude which was actually happening to their fellow American citizens, not people in far off lands of whom they knew little and cared less.

The pristine, primped and botoxed newsreaders unemotionally reported on whatever garbled messages emerged from the authorities, (with jollifying adverts) between distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. The reporters were without a hair or tear out of place and the requisite toothy grins were still plastered on their shiny faces, their body language mocking the horrors they were failing to report in any meaningful way.

There was no information.

Later in the day I went alone for a swim in the lake, it was peaceful and temporarily soothing.

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I don’t deliberately try to mark 9/11. The stress (mine), the horror (everyone's) and the fear (the victims), is something I'd like to forget, although I won't. The only events which have come close to affecting me that much since are the horrific Grenfell Tower fire and most recently the impossibly hopeless evacuation of desperate people from Kabul. The only earlier event to have the same effect was, as a child, watching reports from Aberfan. I felt I was one of those children, experiencing that horror.