Eight years ago on the morning of 9/11/01, I was taking pictures of the Executive Leadership Development program Kim was leading at the Embassy Suites in the financial district of New York City, a stone’s throw to the World Trade Center. While the CFO for the company she worked for started the morning off with a keynote talk about the current global finances to the 150 employees in the room who had come from all over the world (as far as New Zealand, Australia and the Netherlands), the group was interrupted by a panicked sounding woman over the intercom informing us that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.
Mayhem hit soon after.
The room dispersed, people scattered. Most cell phones stopped working, so the bank of pay phones were crammed, people stood immobile, staring at the news on the large screen TV that hung in the lobby, racing outside, racing to their rooms, racing around not knowing what to do or where to go. I ran upstairs to our room (the elevators stopped working) to collect my belongings when a good friend called my cell. She was watching the news from Tampa and was adamant about our getting out of there now!
Kim, the CFO and I were the last three people out of the hotel. Kim had her laptop in a backpack and dragged her suitcase by the handle (for the next 75 blocks). I had my camera bag over my shoulder and my suitcase. I couldn’t carry my set of lights, so I left them in the ball room where the program was being held thinking I would come back later to pick them up (it was more than a year before I ever went back and everything left in the hotel was damaged and irretrievable).
The debris was falling like a blizzard of gray snowflakes blanketing the ground and clinging to the clothes and skin of all the people running. The SWAT team, in their full regalia (black masks, on piece suits and boots), guided us by waving a forceful arm swing pointing toward the Hudson River. There was no thinking at this point. We followed their direction and ran like hell across a grassy field (I think it was a soccer field), through a ripped open chain link fence, down a few stairs and on to the wide sidewalk that paralleled the river. We must have run for 15 minutes and then everyone just stopped and turned around. We followed suit and in a moment, we witnessed the second tower implode and collapse as we felt the energy of thousands of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters float upward in the morass of billowy black smoke.
Against my better judgment, in a moment of mass destruction, I reached for my camera and with tears in my eyes, snapped off a few, while silently blessing all the people who just lost their lives.
We spent the night at Kim’s boss’s home outside of Manhattan that night, where it was eerily peaceful and quiet, rented a card the next day and drove home. We heard the guy from New Zealand spent nine days getting home (to a wife and new baby) via Canada, Alaska, and so forth, and arrived to a hero’s welcome full of the press, family, friends, and the community at large!
To have the dubious distinction of having eye witnessed such a world tragedy is something I haven’t quite resolved for myself. However, what I have resolved is that I am more grateful than ever for my family and my life, and every 9/11 for the rest of my life, I will whisper a prayer to the families of those who lost their loved ones on that day.
Until next time,
Bob
By the way, the photo of the twin towers was taken on the evening of 9/10/2001 from a dinner cruise on the Hudson just as we passed the Statue of Liberty.
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