McFreedom

Everyone seems to be talking about their memories of September 11, today. I was asleep when the planes hit the towers (I live on the west coast, so they crashed at about 6 am).

I'm not sure exactly when, but my youngest brother called and asked for me. My wife told him I was asleep. "Well, get him up!" he said. Figuring he needed help on some technical problem, she asked him what was up. He replied something about how New York was on fire. She came and got me, and as I got dressed to go upstairs, I turned on the TV.

Both towers had already collapsed, and southern Manhattan was on the TV, obscured by smoke and dust, some shot from New Jersey. My first thought was that someone had set off a tactical nuclear weapon, it looked that bad.

By the time I got upstairs, my wife had turned on the big TV to CNN. As I reached for the phone, I saw the first movie of the second plane going into the tower. My first thought was that it was terrible that they'd already put together a simulation of what had happened - it looked too Hollywood to be the real thing.

My brother was in a conference in Atlanta, which had pretty much spontaneously ended, and he was trying to figure out how to get back to his home in Raleigh with no airplanes flying. We talked for a bit, and I remember on the phone being overcome for the first time thinking about all the people in the towers.

We hung up, and I watched the TV for while. The doorbell rang; it was my new neighbor, whom I hadn't met, yet. He didn't have a TV set up, yet, and had been at SFO about to get on a flight to meet his fiance in Europe and they'd just sent everybody home. He wasn't sure what happened, so I invited him in, and we watched it together.

About noon I figured I should head to work, so I did so. I discovered the blood bank was already turning people away. People criticized the Red Cross in the aftermath, but I think they forget the sense we had at the time that this was only the leading edge of something much bigger. I donated money and blood (eventually) and I was not at all unhappy about them holding the money in reserve and eventually destroying the blood - I gave both those things in part to prepare them for the next attack. That it didn't come is much more important to me than that my bodily fluids were burned because they weren't needed.

After a few hours, it became clear that I wasn't getting any work done. I was just watching TV or listening to the radio, and I figured I could do that just as well at home, so I headed there.

Our house is on a hill on the Penninsula, overlooking San Francisco Bay. We're right above the San Carlos Airport (SQL), a little regional airport. We're right on SFO approach, and you can see Oakland approach across the bay. At night you can easily see 15 planes around the bay area; often it's more like 25. Commercial jets fly south just to the west of us, turn east and fly back north over the bay, constantly.

I invited my friend Jeff over, and he and I sat on the deck and drank. I drank scotch (Macallen 18, I think); I don't remember what Jeff drank. We watched the two fighters doing CAP over the Bay - one to the north of us and one to the south. They both turned due east of my house. I've never felt so glad to see our military; I really understood the love for the military our grandparents had in a way I never did, before.

The next few days to me were most highlighted by the quiet - I could step out on the deck and not hear an airplane, except the ocassional fighter.

Three days later, when the flights started again, I remember my wife and I went out on the deck and cheered the first flight into to SFO.