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Checking in when the phones don’t work

BY MIKE MILIARD

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 6:15 p.m. — Barely a week ago, I was enjoying an idyllic Labor Day Weekend with my friends on a deserted Maine island. A good many of them live and work in New York City, and as the sickening events of this morning began to come into focus, I found it almost impossible to reconcile the perfect memories we’d just made with what was unfolding so close to them. And, of course, I was worried. Instinctively, I turned to my computer and, in many ways not wanting to know, shot a message to a friend in the Bronx.

Abby — what are you hearing down there?

The response came almost immediately.

we’re all stuck here — everything’s closed — my friend saw the second plane hit and saw bodies falling out of the building

I felt the wind knocked out of me. Seconds later, she wrote again.

the wtc just collapsed my friend saw it

I wrote back, asking if she’d heard from a mutual friend who works in the area. I dreaded the response, but was relieved when it came back.

yeah — she’s ok..... i’m sure she got evacuated, but i don’t know where the hell she’s going to go. there is fucking nowhere to go — all the bridges and tunnels and subways are closed

I sent a message to a Phoenix writer who’d just moved to the city, hoping to make it big as a music journalist.

you alive?

Luckily, he hasn’t yet found a steady job and hasn’t been looking too hard. He hadn’t gone into Manhattan today. His message came back with a relieving quickness.

Yes. I’m safe across the East River in Brooklyn. It’s a great day to be unemployed.

A tiny grain of comic relief. But soon I got another message from Abby. She’d had time to sit down and collect her thoughts.

we’ve got no t.v. just radio. and the internet has been jammed, too. I got more information from friends’ emails than from a legit. news source.

I don’t really remember at what point it sank in that New York City and the United States were under siege. Here in the city you are trapped. It is terrifying. There is nowhere to go!!!!! While I never felt like I was in immediate danger — who the hell knows, right? and you think about all of the people you know and care about in Manhattan who work downtown, or commute through the WTC (the Path to NJ goes through there) — it’s really scary. And it’s really sad. You are desperate for information and just feel really needy. Every time you thought it was over something else would happen and you would get all worried all over again. The phone lines have been jammed up all day — in the office and in the city. People have been scrambling to get in touch with family and friends. My phone has been ringing off the hook — i think everyone i have ever known has called or emailed me. There are lines of 30 people waiting for payphones. People are walking over the Brooklyn Bridge — that must look so sick. Downtown is burning and there is a mass exodus over another NYC landmark And the skyline is forever changed. Those were beautiful buildings filled with beautiful people. fuck.

Not long after, I got an e-mail from my sister. Ensconced in the woodsy protection of a small New England college, she wrote of the mixed feelings she had about her distance from all this.

in a way im thankful to be in the " college bubble, " but on the other hand i dont think im fully grasping the enormity of the situation. It’s hard to wrap your brain around this whole thing.

It is. But as the day progressed and I scoured the Web, scanning the coverage steadily accruing on the New York Times and Washington Post sites, reading the heart-rending eyewitness accounts on Salon and the incredulous foreign perspectives of the BBC and the Irish Times and Le Figaro, as I refreshed the home pages of the Drudge Report and Boston.com for the thousandth times, it became starkly apparent just how catastrophic it all is.

And it’s evident now that, just as the Gulf War will forever be associated with cable television, this day and the days to come will always be linked — for those without TVs at the office or unable to get through with telephones, for those blindly searching for information about loved ones or simply trying to make sense of the whole thing — with e-mail and the Internet.

After asking my sister for permission to use her words for this piece, she replied:

I don’t mind.... Write a good piece — it could be history

I wrote back:

I guess so. But I’d rather not be commemorating this kind.

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Issue Date: September 11, 2001






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