Out of a Clear Blue Sky

Memories of New York City, September 11, 2001

HOW IT BEGAN: 8:45AM, Tuesday, New York City, September 11, 2001.

8:45AM. I woke right up.

My eyes just opened.

I didn't know why.

I had just lost my job, the beginning of the long long unwinding of the late 20th Century technology bubble. Of late, I had been waking up more or less on my own - but usually an hour later. My bedroom was cool, gently breezy, late summer morning peaceful. I felt fully relaxed, but surprisingly awake. Lying on my side, through my 5th story window, I was looking west, at the river, at the hills of the shoreline, New Jersey right across the Hudson from my apartment on West 141st Street.

A perfectly morning.

'OK,' I thought, 'I'm up, so let's get up.' I had some calls to make, so I plodded into the kitchenette, sunshine and green, to make some coffee, and while it was brewing, I called a company somewhere in Nevada.

8:55AM. I needed a replacement part for something - I can't remember for what now. I remember describing the problem, convincing the woman on the other end of the line, on the other side of the country, to send me the part, and she asked for my address. I said '141st Street, New York City - '. She stopped me: 'You live in New York City?' I said 'yes.'

Pause.

'Do you know what's happen at the World Trade Center?'

She didn't sound alarmed, but time stopped - it was an ominous, out-of-the-blue question, from someone somewhere in a little town in Nevada, so early on a perfect late summer morning . . . I said no, and she said 'a plane has flown into one of the towers . . . it's on fire . . .'

Around 8:45 a.m. on the morning of September 11th, 2001, people along the west side of Manhattan heard the piercing whine of a jet plane moving south down the Hudson.

Everything about its trajectory was wrong. Heading south along an airway normally reserved for northbound traffic, it was moving much too fast and much too close to the ground - nearly five hundred miles per hour, at an altitude of just nine hundred feet - more than twice the speed permitted for aircraft that low.

It took less than ninety seconds for American Airlines Flight 11 to hurtle the entire length of Manhattan Island.