A day late and a year old, here’s a memory unlike most. This is what I wrote last year, after trying for five years to get it down on paper. Thanks to all for sharing. Sorry this one’s so long.
My husband and I may be the only people you know who
did not see any of this happen. At the same time, we
may be some of the only people you know who realized
immediately who did it, and were not surprised
— horrified, but not surprised.
We were ten miles from “civilization” at the bottom
of the Grand Canyon. We had hiked down the day
before and were on the first morning of a five-day
stay. I was sitting alone on a rock by Bright Angel Creek
after our 6:30 am (MST) breakfast at Phantom Ranch,
watching the sunrise light up the oldest exposed rock
walls on the planet, thinking about how to spend our
down time that day before resuming hiking the next day.
It was a glorious day, with all the brilliant blue sky and
clean air we had worked so hard to escape to.
I wandered back to the hiker dorms just in time to
encounter a Phantom Ranch staffer telling my co-hikers
that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center — news
conveyed from the South Rim via the NPS Ranger in just
under an hour. It wasn’t until another hour had passed that
we realized the plane had not been a small jet.
Once we heard from the Ranger that both towers really
had fallen, the question came up of who would do such
a thing. There were not many hikers around; most stay only
one night, then leave. Those who were there, along with the
staffers we spoke to, had no idea what we were talking about
when we said it had to be Al Qaeda. For that matter,
nobody there recalled the 1993 attack on the WTC, or put
the current attack in the context of the 1998 embassy
bombings.
For us, as ex-pat New Yorkers, it was appalling that no one
remembered the previous bombings, or the 1998 fatwa promising
to finish the job. That day turned into a strange sort of teach-in.
Although we worried about our many friends in NYC, we
realized quickly that we had a responsibility to keep people
from becoming hysterical, and that our knowledge of the
background and likely scope of Al Qaeda capabilities, along
with our reflexive insistence on not jumping to conclusions,
were desperately needed.
There was access to one pay telephone for two dozen or so
people at the ranch, and we used it to establish contact with
a well-connected friend in Manhattan, who kept us better
informed over the next few days than probably many
Manhattanites were at the time.
Our co-hikers wanted to leave instantly, which made no sense.
The park was closed, and we knew there was no way to go
anywhere. We had lodging and food for a week, so we stayed.
Concern arose pretty quickly about the possibility that the next
target might be Glen Canyon Dam, upriver on the Colorado. If
it was destroyed, we’d have a few hours to scramble as high up
the trails as possible to avoid the huge flood that would wash
wash away the bridges and historic Phantom Ranch. By the end
of the day, we had managed to convince most people that what had
already happened was all there would be until the next time, which
would be years ahead, not hours.
So for the next five days, we vacationed, cherishing the surreal
privilege with the understanding that we were all charging our
batteries to deal with whatever awaited us at the rim when we
topped out. The Ranger on duty made the very sensible decision
to limit what she printed out from her computer, bringing once-
daily printouts of text only to the cantina where they were passed
hand to hand.
Visitors at Phantom come from all over the world, and although
there were no new visitors, people continued to dribble in from
backcountry trails and river trips who knew nothing of what had
happened. We never went on any of our planned day hikes, but
just sat by the Colorado River or Bright Angel Creek, thinking
or writing in our journals, or hung around the cantina talking
with others. On the day of remembrance about 18 people gathered
for a service under the big cottonwood tree, and we all felt very
connected to others grieving around the world, not just Americans.
Most of all, there was silence. Overflights have been an issue
at Grand Canyon for decades, and although there are no flights
directly over the central hiking corridor any more, there is usually
an inescapable amount of airplane sound. That week, the skies
were empty, and there were no passenger mule trains, and no
daily influx of dozens of hikers. It was the perfect experience of
the Grand Canyon, at a terrible price.
When we got back to the South Rim five days later, some of our
co-hikers headed straight to the TV, and went into the same sort
of shock as people who had watched all along. My honey and I
decided not to consume the imagery, but focus on reaching
out to friends. Our phone bill for those two days was astronomical.
Our co-hikers ran straight to the airport in Phoenix and got on the
first available planes back to Ohio. We chose to get permission
from Hertz to drive our rental SUV back, and that was sobering
— across Texas, in particular, it seemed not to have sunk in what
had happened. It was just another of those awful things that
befalls people who live in that filthy New York City or work for that
rotten federal government, from what we saw of local reactions there.
We listened to NPR all the way, although not every minute. We had
plenty of Carlos Nakai flute music on tape, and that seemed just
about right. We spent a lot of time talking about the inevitable
retaliation by the US, although we never imagined it would wind
up involving a unilateral war on Iraq, and about the equally inevitable
rise in isolationism and racism among Americans.
It wasn’t all cerebral: we also cried a lot. We still didn’t know if all
our friends in NYC were safe. (It turned out that the only casualty
was a miscarriage of a very much wanted pregnancy, but we didn’t
learn that for months.)
I will forever be grateful for having been so far from TV when the
attacks happened. When we got back, it seemed for weeks that we
were the only ones not completely deranged by the endless film loops
and 24/7 coverage. Friends sought us out for comfort and perspective,
and I like to think we helped a lot of people.
We eventually looked at the images, mostly still photos and a couple of
recommended documentaries, a year later.
Today, I believe that the TV coverage had an even more insidious
impact than we realized at the time. I’ve spent a lot of time writing
about and arguing against the rise in conspiracist thinking since 9/11,
never quite being able to fully account for the continuing allure of the
“Reichstag fire” school of thought represented by the David Ray Griffin
books and films like “Loose Change”. Now, a new essay by Tom
Englehardt published in The Nation this week adds a new level of
insight. The URL is below.
Like Englehardt, I believe that at some level, we all knew an attack that
looked like this was coming, and that
> “Except in its success, it hardly differed from the 1993 attack on
> the World Trade Center, the one that almost toppled one tower
> with a rented Ryder van and a homemade bomb…”
But to the cultural analysis Englehardt lays out, I’d add two questions
that I wish more people would ask themselves, starting with reporters:
–On September 10, 2001, did you know who Osama bin Laden was?
–If not, what effect if that have on your understanding of the next morning?
Those are real unanswered questions.
Thanks for listening.
Here’s the Englehardt piece:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=118775