impregnable. The structural design had called for each tower's skin to be its main strength, through light glass-and-steel facing threaded by steel columns. These columns gave the buildings their stiffness, while a cluster of central columns and steel trusses helped hold up each concrete floor. “Redundancy” is what the engineers call that structural backup which ensures a building's resilience, even if damaged—a word that also fit the WTC aesthetically and, now, historically. The twin towers were very strong, nothing compromised in the way of construction, an engineering tour de force; but no building, as we discovered, is meant to take the bruntof a jetliner, gorged with jet fuel, shearing through its midsection. When they collapsed, they fell straight down, not forward. Like the good soldiers they were.
MY FIRST INKLING of an attack on the Twin Towers came from a FedEx man. He rang my doorbell around nine-fifteen, and when I started to sign for my package, he said, shaken, “Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke from here.” Indeed, looking down Sackett Street in Brooklyn toward the river on that infamously sunny day, I did see a plume of grayish black cloud at the end of my block. My first response was, So what? Planes do crash. As I went inside, the phone rang and it was my mother-in-law, telling me to turn on the television. My mother-in-law is something of a TV addict, especially if bad weather threatens; she'll keep the tube on just to track a storm. I had been looking forward to a day of writing, now that my daughter Lily was beginning second grade, and so I said rather testily that I couldn't turn on the television just now. But something urgent in her voice disturbed me, and so, against my usual practice, I did put on the TV in my office, and saw rebroadcast footage of a second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Now I was gripped, shocked, queasy, as I realized something unprecedented was happening.
Still, I wandered over by habit to my desktop computer, and tried to punch in a few sentences. Maybe because I had been so fixated on this subject, I began to think the horrifying event was directly connected to the geography of the waterfront: Manhattan's slender, elongated shape, surrounded by rivers, made it easier for the hijacking pilots to hug the shore and spot the towers. My concentration, needless to say, was poor, but I resisted giving myself up entirely to this (so it yet seemed) public event. I am the kind of person who can write, and does, as a consoling escape from anxiety, in the midst of carpenters, street-riveters, or other distractions. Around ten-thirty I was still writing with the television on, when my wife, Cheryl, called me from Lily's Montessori school and said she was sticking around, in case they decided to close and send the kids home. I replied—the resolve had suddenly formed in me and I needed to be out in the streets—that I was going for a walk by the Brooklyn waterfront, to seewhat I could. “Why don't you stop by the school afterward and look in on us?” she suggested. I said I doubted that I would, not adding that suddenly I felt a sharp urge to be alone.
The tragedy had registered on me exactly the same way as after my mother had died: a pain in the gut, the urge to walk and walk through the city, and a don't-touch-me reflex. I made my way down to Columbia Street, which feeds into the Brooklyn Promenade: the closer I got to the waterfront, the harder it was to breathe. The smoke was blowing directly across the East River into Brooklyn. There were not many people on Columbia Street, but most of those I passed had on surgical masks. I started choking without a mask. Cinders and poisonous-smelling smoke thickened the air, and ash fell like snowflakes on the parked cars and on one's clothing, constantly. It was what I had imagined war to be like.
This was two hours after the attack, and you could no
MY FIRST INKLING of an attack on the Twin Towers came from a FedEx man. He rang my doorbell around nine-fifteen, and when I started to sign for my package, he said, shaken, “Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke from here.” Indeed, looking down Sackett Street in Brooklyn toward the river on that infamously sunny day, I did see a plume of grayish black cloud at the end of my block. My first response was, So what? Planes do crash. As I went inside, the phone rang and it was my mother-in-law, telling me to turn on the television. My mother-in-law is something of a TV addict, especially if bad weather threatens; she'll keep the tube on just to track a storm. I had been looking forward to a day of writing, now that my daughter Lily was beginning second grade, and so I said rather testily that I couldn't turn on the television just now. But something urgent in her voice disturbed me, and so, against my usual practice, I did put on the TV in my office, and saw rebroadcast footage of a second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Now I was gripped, shocked, queasy, as I realized something unprecedented was happening.
Still, I wandered over by habit to my desktop computer, and tried to punch in a few sentences. Maybe because I had been so fixated on this subject, I began to think the horrifying event was directly connected to the geography of the waterfront: Manhattan's slender, elongated shape, surrounded by rivers, made it easier for the hijacking pilots to hug the shore and spot the towers. My concentration, needless to say, was poor, but I resisted giving myself up entirely to this (so it yet seemed) public event. I am the kind of person who can write, and does, as a consoling escape from anxiety, in the midst of carpenters, street-riveters, or other distractions. Around ten-thirty I was still writing with the television on, when my wife, Cheryl, called me from Lily's Montessori school and said she was sticking around, in case they decided to close and send the kids home. I replied—the resolve had suddenly formed in me and I needed to be out in the streets—that I was going for a walk by the Brooklyn waterfront, to seewhat I could. “Why don't you stop by the school afterward and look in on us?” she suggested. I said I doubted that I would, not adding that suddenly I felt a sharp urge to be alone.
The tragedy had registered on me exactly the same way as after my mother had died: a pain in the gut, the urge to walk and walk through the city, and a don't-touch-me reflex. I made my way down to Columbia Street, which feeds into the Brooklyn Promenade: the closer I got to the waterfront, the harder it was to breathe. The smoke was blowing directly across the East River into Brooklyn. There were not many people on Columbia Street, but most of those I passed had on surgical masks. I started choking without a mask. Cinders and poisonous-smelling smoke thickened the air, and ash fell like snowflakes on the parked cars and on one's clothing, constantly. It was what I had imagined war to be like.
This was two hours after the attack, and you could no
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