I watched it fall: Leaving lower Manhattan

I won’t forget it, how could I? It was the most horrifying event that has ever transpired on American soil. People bring up parallels to Pearl Harbor, but this is different. Never before had something so terrible happened to us. Nothing had ever happened to us.

I remember waking up that day and thinking that I didn’t have any clean laundry. I had to go down three flights of stairs to the basement to get the wash that I had left in the machine from the night before. I had this job working in a mailroom of one of the buildings on Fulton. They always made me dress in slacks and a button-down shirt with a tie just so I could sort the mail. I ended up trading in the slacks and button-down for some khakis and a polo but no one seemed to care.

That’s how the day started. I thought I was going to be late because my pants weren’t dry. I put them in the dryer and went back upstairs to finish getting ready. It was after 7 am by then.

The pants were a little wet still when I put them on. I didn’t care so much about that but I figured someone would think I had a bad case of ass sweat or something. They’d dry on the way in to work so I didn’t mind. I headed out, tuned into my iPod as I went to ignore the sounds of all the other people around me.

I got to work late. The guy who was supposed to be my supervisor but who was really just a glorified version of myself, chastised me for being late. I kept the iPod on and just nodded as he berated me.

I went to work, sorting the mail; I did the same thing I did every day for the last 18 months.

“Did you hear!” said the woman standing beyond the wooden door covered in pink and yellow post-it notes. Of course we hadn’t heard anything at all. She explained that a plane had hit one of the towers. None of us in the mailroom seemed to understand what she was saying. “It’s been all over the news!”

For anyone not living in the city, the towers were tall, but they could have been ten miles high and you still wouldn’t have seen them unless you were either far away from them or right up next to them. All the buildings were huge, so leaving my building just gave me a great view of the building across the street. You couldn’t even see smoke from where we were.

Fire engines and police sirens could be heard from all over, but that’s not unusual in New York. What was unusual was how quiet everyone was. I know that seems odd but it was this big hush that had fallen over the city, everyone holding their breath waiting for something to happen.

That’s the sad irony to this tale. The towers were about a mile away. There wasn’t really anywhere for me to go to see them. We all went and gathered in the gym in the basement of the building I worked because it had televisions in there. Here were about a dozen people sweating their breakfast off when we burst in to watch the news.

The news played over and over the first plane hitting the tower. No one understood what was going on, most of the people thought it was an ad for a new movie. It really took a while to sink in, so that we knew that we were watching something real.

No one wanted to move. One guy, I’d only seen him a few times before, he was sort of like a jock, always too loud and always in perfect shape, he started crying. He was the first one to suggest we go outside and look.

No one went.

We were all still watching the TVs when the second plane hit. Everyone gasped. The one lady who had been standing on a treadmill the whole time, just letting it run while she stood on the rails, hit the emergency off button and we all noticed the sudden loss of the sound of the spinning conveyor. It was deathly silent.

Someone’s cell phone went off just as the television replayed the second hit. There was a commentary going on about what we were seeing. Someone said something like: “it’s like the Hindenburg” or something to that effect but we didn’t pay any attention.

The newscasters got very emotional as they were telling us about what was happening just up the road from where we were. My supervisor was the one who finally said that we should go. Just go. Nothing like this had ever happened before, we should see it.

So we left.

One by one we gathered ourselves together and left the room. There were about fifty of us by that time. More and more pouring in through door to the workout room as we tried to get out. “We’re gonna go see,” said my supervisor to a bunch of people staring open-mouthed and wide-eyed at us.

We moved like a tribe of Indians; all of us pushing through the hall together, up the stairs to the main entrance. A lot of people were already standing outside. They were all looking, trying to see the towers, trying to see some sign that everything was really happening.  “For your safety we recommend you stay inside,” said the front desk guy. He said it from his position staring out the front window right next to the door.

At that point, the collective will of the group had taken over and we just continued moving, heading out of the building and into the street beyond. Traffic had stopped, blocked as it was at the end of the street by emergency vehicles and spectators. We walked down Fulton, there were a bunch of us to start but our numbers thinned out pretty quick.

It took a long time, we didn’t rush, just walked. People would ask as we went trying to find out what was going on.

Traffic was a mess. There were police and barricades going up as we got closer to Broadway. But by that point we could see the towers. We could see the smoke billowing out of the top of them. Both towers were engulfed in smoke and flames. Someone had to tell me that people were jumping off the top of the building because I didn’t realize it was people. They just kept jumping and falling.

The sky was so thick with smoke. There was no light at all coming through. It was practically night. I watched and didn’t watch at the same time. I saw the emergency vehicles, the stopped traffic, the onlookers, the people who just didn’t know or didn’t want to know what was going on. It was really loud. For as quiet as it had been when we were standing there in the gym watching it on TV, it now got only that much louder as everyone everywhere struggled to hear themselves over everything else around them.

There was a lot of speculation about what had happened. No one really knew. The idea of terrorists was completely absent at this point. We thought it was an accident. A horrible accident, but one which bystanders were ready to point out, that had happened before.

A plane flew into the Empire State Building once. And the towers had been bombed once before. No one was quite sure what to think or how to feel about what we saw.

Then, all at once, there was a groan and a tremble and the first tower collapsed. It happened fast, no one even new it was falling, just thought there was an explosion or something. Everyone panicked, everyone started running. We scattered like insects not quite sure what was going to happen when the tower hit the ground. There was the biggest crash I’d ever heard. The ground was trembling forever as we ran. It was like an earthquake. An enormous cloud of dust and smoke and debris came rushing through the street, covering everything in a gritty residue.

I watched it fall, and then I panicked and ran away.

It was hard to breathe, we were all choking. I just kept walking, away from it. I wanted to run but I didn’t, it was like a half-hearted run/walk/jog that I did. I headed back the way I’d come, staying ahead of the cloud of dirt that was spreading slowly down the street behind me. I diverted off Fulton and onto Nassau and just kept walking.

I lost my iPod somewhere, I never did figure out where. All the businesses in the area closed down for the rest of the day, they were all shut down for about a week. I never went back.

I didn’t have a cell phone at that time; this was before instant connectivity of the text messaging generation we have now. I remember that it took about seven hours for me to get home. I walked a long part of that way. I couldn’t take the subway, they were warning everyone to stay off of it. The buses were okay; I ended up catching one eventually. Traffic was a mess so nothing was moving very fast in any direction.

I called my family when I could to let them know I was okay and they convinced me that I’d had enough of life in New York. I ended up leaving two weeks later. I just packed up and left, never even went back to my job. I had an experience that I’ll never forget, no matter how far away I move. It lingers in my memories like the grit and dust that coated all of lower Manhattan that day.