A younger me in Washington, D.C.
Like too many things in my life, I’ve told myself that one day
I should write down my memories of 9/11 and never did. And here we are, an
impossible ten years later, a day to the anniversary. I tell myself I can still
make it, I can still remember.
The impossibility of that day was amplified by my life at that time. I was a little more than a month away
from my 22nd birthday. I had arrived in Washington, DC only six days
earlier – 9/11 was one of my first days as an intern at a legislative affairs
consulting agency. The prestige of the job was in sharp contrast to the mess I
had left behind in the other Washington, my home of Washington State. I would
not be going back to school for my senior year – I was on indefinite break from
college, after my best friend’s death and the dicey year of being depressed that followed. By the time I came home from college for summer break,
I had beat the heavy shroud that paralyzed me, but my parents, rightfully concerned, demanded I stay home and heal. But home was laced with memories and the
past. I knew that to move on emotionally, I had to escape physically. And so, I
ran.
At 21-years-old, I was far to old to be considered a
runaway, but my escape to DC had that feel about it. I announced to my parents
on Friday that I would be leaving on Monday – they forbade it, I went anyway.
One friend drove me to Portland, OR to catch the train (a plane ticket being
way to expensive) and another lent me $600 – the only money I would have for
the indefinite future.
So I got on the train, with a friend hastily arranged
for me to stay with some college alumnae upon my arrival. The train ride took 3
days. I don’t remember a lot of it. I do remember waking up to dawn and
crossing the continental divide, seeing buffalo and getting off to buy a coke
in a small town in North Dakota, imagining not getting back on and what my new life
would be like. I remember seeing Chicago and Philadelphia for the first time,
rolling in and rolling out without exploring. To this day, stepping on that
train against all common sense was the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
And suddenly I was a resident of Washington, DC. I rented an stuffy attic room in a group house ran by a Chinese woman in Georgetown. The
house always smelled like Chinese food and I was the only non-foreign,
non-graduate student there. Rather than get lost on public transportation, I
would walk several miles across Georgetown to my new job in Dupont Circle. Sometimes in the
early morning, I would see deer wandering out of Rock Creek Park into the
streets. On one of my first days in town, I looked at the building in front of
me, hot and frustrated that I was lost again. “Where am I?” I thought. A minute
later I realized I was staring at the White House, and laughed at my own
stupidity.
In DC, every lobbyist has a small TV in their office, to
keep on top of media reports and what’s happening on the hill. My fellow intern
and I sat in a corner area with two desks and the copy machine, outside one
lobbyists’ office. We had only been at work for about 20 minutes when she
started talking about something that was happening in New York. A plane had
flown into one of the twin towers, but we didn’t know anything more. We watched
the TV in her small office for a few minutes, then went back to our desks and tried
to work. The lobbyist grew quiet and gradually more information was released.
She had said goodbye to her husband just that morning – he was on a flight
headed for LA.
I didn’t comprehend the extent of what was happening for
probably too long. The initial images of the plane hitting the twin towers were
disturbing, of course, but the building was so large, dwarfing the size of the
plane on the television screen. I imagined a small personal two-seater Cessna,
and an office area with some blown out windows and lots of glass. I do think it
was the unbelievably beautiful fall day making it impossible to imagine
anything serious was happening in those first few hours.
I tried calling my parents to let them know I was ok, but my
mother was scheduled for a major hysterectomy operation, so they had been at
the hospital all morning getting her ready for surgery. When I finally reached
my dad at the hospital, he seemed confused about why I
was calling, and talked only about my mom’s condition.
The next 90 minutes increased the confusion. There were
reports that the White House, only three blocks from our office, had been hit.
We were advised to go to the roof and see if we could see anything, and then
they thought we should leave the building, and then stay put. Finally, it was
decided that I would go home with my fellow intern, who lived much closer to
work than I did. I protested that I could just walk home, still somewhat
enamored with what a nice day it was and the opportunity to leave work early,
but was shook to reality when someone said, “No, you can’t. The city’s under
martial law now – you shouldn’t be out by yourself.”
The other intern’s apartment was at The Cairo in Dupont Circle – the tallest residential building in the
District, although still only 12 stories high. It had been infamously covered
in the news that summer for being where the intern Chandra Levy lived when she
went missing in May.
In one of the most surreal moments of the day, we sat
quietly in her apartment on the 9th floor, in front of the TV that was
positioned in front of the tall living room windows. The windows looked out
across the neighborhood, and at the edge of the skyline, we could see the
Pentagon burning. At one point, we watched the national news, with Peter
Jennings reporting from his news desk, a small window in the corner of the TV screen with an image
of the Pentagon burning, while the real-life scenario hovered immediately behind
the television through the window.
The days and months after, as everyone knows, were equally
confusing, unbelievable and hard to reconcile...can we ever, when terrible
things happen? I learned to love DC and feel safe there – despite Chandra Levy
disappearing into Rock Creek Park earlier that summer, despite the unspecific terror threat that settled
over the federal buildings and monuments after that day. But when I finally moved
back to the west coast, after finishing my internship, college, and my first
post-college job in DC, I did it without regret.
