by Eric Ruark
Three people I knew died that day. Ethan, the one I knew best, was in the South Tower describing the events to his mother on his cell phone. The North Tower had been hit at 8:46 a.m. Ethan’s office was near the top of the South Tower. No one knew that it was an attack, yet.
At first, people assumed that a stray jetliner had hit the building. It had happened before. An airplane hit the Empire State Building back in the 1950s, so there was no immediate concern. The managers of Ethan’s building told everyone to stay put. Some people left. Some didn’t. Ethan was one of the one’s who stayed. He had a front row seat to a real TOWERING INFERNO drama. His phone went dead at 9:03 a.m.
I was uptown at Columbus Circle teaching a course on Integrated Marketing Communications at the New York Institute of Technology to a group of foreign exchange students from France and Spain. When we first heard the report, we thought that a piper cub or some-such small plane had hit the building, but when the TV cameras pointed south and the billowing smoke began to play across the screen, we all knew that something terrible had happened. When the second plane hit, we knew that we were under some kind of attack.
From my vantage point on the upper floor of the school building, I could see the trickle of humanity slowly form into a wave as people from the lower part of the city began to instinctively move away from the destruction and head towards the upper part of Manhattan Island.
School was cancelled. Mayor Giuliani declared a state of emergency and closed all the bridges and tunnels into and out of NYC. I lived in Connecticut. With the bridges and tunnels closed, there was no way for me to get home. I couldn’t even call home to tell anyone that I was all right. The cell phone antennae for the region had been located on top of the World Trade Center Towers. To all intents and purposes, I was trapped in Manhattan.
Fortunately, I had friends in the City. I left the school and began walking south, against the flow of foot traffic, towards Greenwich Village. New York City in an emergency shut-down was one of the strangest sights I had ever seen. People came out of their office buildings and quietly began to walk home. There was no panic, no pushing, no shoving. The busses and subways stopped running. The north/south avenues were cleared of traffic to allow the emergency service vehicles quick access to the danger zone; and no traffic at all was allowed south of 14th Street.
The South Tower collapsed at 10:05 a.m. The North Tower came down at 10:28 a.m. But no one knew the extent of the tragedy. As I walked south, I passed the open portals of several firehouses that would be draped with black in the days to come; past hospitals where the emergency room triage personnel waited at their doors for the injured that would never arrived.
It took me a while to walk the 47 blocks down to my friend Barry’s apartment. Barry was up on the roof looking at the smoke clouding the sky to the south. From the top of his apartment, he had an incredible panorama of Lower Manhattan. When I found him, he was standing at the edge of the rail on the roof with both hands gripping the rail. I looked south at a sky filled with smoke and roiling dust. “Where are the Towers?” I asked. He just looked at me and shook his head. One of the other apartment owners brought a TV to the roof and we watched the news reports with one eye and the rising smoke and dust with the other.
As night fell, everyone went on with their lives. Streets became large pedestrian malls with people quietly walking to and from the grocery store or to the nearest bar or restaurant. Quietly, that is, until an emergency vehicle passed; then they would move off the street and line the sidewalks and cheer each and every car, truck or engine that passed. Barry knew a little restaurant down on 12th Street that served an excellent Borscht and black coffee. We sat there eating and wondering what was really happening, and getting up with the others to cheer the emergency vehicles, and then going back to our meal.
It was three days before I could get a train back to Connecticut. That’s when I learned that Ethan and three other people I knew had been killed. At one time, Ethan’s mother and I worked for the same newspaper. She was the bookkeeper and I was a sports/feature writer. Ethan would stop in every now and again to take his mother out to dinner or shopping. Sometimes during the winters, he would come up from the City and join the broom-ball game out on the pond behind Mr. Schwartz’ barn.
It was a busy time for me. In addition to teaching at NYIT, I was also rehearsing “Dracula” for a Halloween production in the town of Norwalk. Because of the attack on the World Trade Towers, I had missed a couple of rehearsals. But I wasn’t the only one. Our director, Harry, was a Norwalk fireman who was specially trained to work with search and rescue dogs. He was one of the first people called in to search for survivors.
After rehearsals, he and I would sit around and drink and he would talk. He needed to get what he saw off his chest. The alcohol loosened his tongue and I played his sounding board. Harry was a small, wiry guy, maybe 5’6”. He and “Butch”, a Rin-Tin-Tin-like German shepherd, were sent in under the collapsed buildings through the subway station to look for bodies.
“You can’t imagine the blackness down there,” he said. “The only light is the one in your hand and if you turn it out, nothing. It’s like being totally blind. The only thing you can hear is the dog panting. You can’t even hear him walking. They’ve got special shoes for his feet so he won’t hurt himself on the jagged metal or broken glass. Just that ‘pant’, ‘pant’, ‘pant’. Some times the dog stops like he was supposed to when he comes across a body. Only there isn’t a body there. Just a clump of concrete. I thought the dog was goofy at first, that something down there was disorienting him until I realized that those clumps of concrete were all that was left of the people.
“When the Towers collapsed and each floor began to fall and hit the floor beneath it, they weighed so much that each floor pulverized the floor beneath it. But it just wasn’t pulverizing the floor; it was pulverizing everything that was on that floor. The human bodies weren’t just being crushed; they were being atomized. Then all that fluid, the viscera and the blood mixed with the powdered concrete and reformed into a lump. That’s what the dog and me are finding. Lumps of dirt that had once been human.”
You don’t see grown men cry very often. But if anyone had a reason, Harry did. Each night after rehearsal, he would drink, talk and cry. Then the next morning, he would go back underground and continue marking the lumps of dirt that his dog pointed to.
It took months before DNA testing identified the re-congealed glob of dust and dirt that was Ethan. The funeral was a quiet, somber affair. It was old news by then. US troops were in Afghanistan and one mother’s loss was itself lost in the backwater of the unfolding international drama.
Now, when someone asks me about 9/11, my mind immediately takes me back to that sidewalk where we cheered the firemen heading south and I see the blood color of the borscht against the white metallic table top, and I can hear the Doppler effect of the fading siren and I wonder where will I be when the next attack occurs?