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[This Just In]

WASHINGTON, DC
Plumes of smoke

BY JOEL HARDI

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2:56 P.M. — I suppose that as I stepped out of my building in Dupont Circle to head to work just after 9 a.m., the worst had already happened.

I walked to my car, which was parked a couple of blocks away on T Street, and cursed under my breath at the roofers who had double-parked their trucks full of tar, blocking me in. Twenty minutes later I was on my way, on my usual 15-minute drive to work as a reporter in Old Town Alexandria, still in plenty of time to follow House floor debate on a juvenile-justice bill scheduled for the 10 a.m. session.

I listened to the morning news as I drove, and everything was going all wrong, as if the orderly flow of news stories had been blasted apart, shattered into a series of unconnected details that came in unconfirmed, but undenied, too. Commercial passenger planes were missing — missing? — and one had crashed into the Pentagon. The State Department building where I worked four summers ago, now just a few blocks away as I neared the Lincoln Memorial, was on fire. A bomb had exploded in the Capitol.

The world turned upside down. And the news from New York was unimaginably more horrible. The World Trade Center had been toppled by more hijacked airplanes. How many people had been at work inside, I wondered, a hundred thousand? I felt sick and squeezed my eyes shut for an instant.

And suddenly, as I reached the banks of the Potomac, the plume of smoke from the Pentagon towered overhead, and it was all real and I was in it. At the Lincoln Memorial, my route across Memorial Bridge, toward the Pentagon and National Airport, was blocked — what next? With all other routes blocked, my car was heading toward Southwest and the 14th Street Bridge, and my ears turned back to the radio: " DC Police have closed the 14th Street Bridge. "

But the bridge was open, and I headed across. The bridge arches high above the Potomac, and as I reached the center, the full width of the Pentagon loomed ahead. The right side of the bridge was filled with cars, parallel parked, and their drivers were outside, watching the giant column of smoke undulate.

The sight was disturbing and reassuring all at once: the Pentagon had been attacked, but the building, at least from that side, looked undamaged. The smoke — an acrid, strangely stale smoke — filled the inside of my car.

At the other end of the bridge, as I exited toward Alexandria, traffic was at a standstill. I turned on my cell phone and started calling, first to the office: were we putting out an issue today? I tried my editor, then random office numbers, but each time got only 20 seconds of silence, followed by a single tone I had never heard before.

I got through to voice mail, then tried friends who had already left messages. But each time, I got the silence and the mysterious beep.

So for 20 minutes my car sat, idling in the same spot, in a sea of other idling cars filled with people trying to call their offices, their friends, their families. Some had turned their radios up so loud that I just turned mine off and listened through my car window. And all the while, through my rear window, I saw the smoke winding out of the Pentagon.

And all around, people were walking — most heading out of town, some heading into town, and a few seemingly just wandering around.

I had stayed in the left-most lane so that I could drive over the median and back toward home in DC, and now I decided to do it, and maybe ditch my car somewhere when the traffic got bad again. But soon the way back was blocked, and we were all motioned — by a phalanx of tow-truck drivers — onto the George Washington Parkway. And just like that, I was on wide-open road, driving 60 miles per hour past National Airport, on my regular route to Old Town.

With no clear way back into DC and no real desire to be there, I headed to work, stopping by McDonald’s on the way. By then it was well after noon, but the menus still hadn’t rolled over from breakfast.

I suppose that’s just one more thing we can sort out later.

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Issue Date: September 11, 2001






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