On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York being 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 did get to the World Trades Centre and I am
eternally grateful for 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
nonetheless 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 managed to get an email through to my
in-laws in Leeds and asked them to please phone my mother in Hastings to
reassure her.
We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports as Stan
managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe
too. Meanwhile almost 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, between jollifying adverts and distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. Those
presenters were without a tear out of place and the requisite perfect, 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.
*
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.
