the anxieties of blue skies
Every year when the anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster rolls around, I find people mentioning how on that day, both in Manhattan and here in Chicago the sky was insultingly clear and blue and beautiful presiding over unspeakable things. Halcyon blue, maybe. How planes came from that blue, how bodies plummeted from the higher floors of the building and broke mid-flight in that blue (most people were likely gone before they hit the ground). How a normal early fall day in one of the busiest cities in the world was bought to a standstill. Many, in New York and elsewhere, can't see a clear cloudless day in September and not think about planes crashing into buildings.
It was the end of my first summer working downtown here in Chicago, miles away from the damage, but subject to the same fear. After watching news coverage all morning, including a brief period at the beginning before I left for work when the first hit seemed like and accident (I probably wouldn't have walked over to ride the red line that day if I'd known what we'd know even an hour or so later.) Right as I was getting ready to leave the apartment, the news coverage I usually watched getting ready broke in with the first plane hit. I thought, how odd, then continued on my usual routine. On the train, I heard rumblings about a plane crash, but at the time, I thought they were just talking about what I had already seen. I didn't have a smart phone then, and I'm guessing most people did not, so I imagine many were oblivious to what was unfolding in NYC. When I arrived at work, I spent a good ten minutes talking to co-workers gabbing and gossiping, none of us logged into the internet. The security guard came in and told us another plane had hit, which seemed really confusing, and only after a minute did we truly grasp what was happening. In the melee, I wound up being stationed at the A/V desk upstairs b/c another staffer was running late, where I tried to get on the net, but it was the one time when the whole country was trying to do the same thing. We wound up closing the library after a couple of hours. I was actually more afraid to leave the safety of the buildings, especially since details were still hazy and planes unaccounted for.
The thing I perhaps remember most about that day outside of the devastation was that blue sky and how, mid-morning, I have never seen so many people on the street. I mean, its Chicago and its busy during holiday and summer seasons with tourists and for big events like Lolla, but this was the first time I saw everyone who worked downtown, women in tidy corporate skirts and dresses, men in blue and white work shirts, leather satchels and briefcases, all on Michigan Avenue at the same time. Everyone was either intent on getting somewhere, or wandering in a daze unsure if this was all reality. I funneled down the red line steps at the Harrison stop and boarded a packed train. As we came above ground in Lincoln Park, I half expected to turn around and the entire skyline to be ablaze or gone. It was not thankfully, but we didn't really know what was happening.
It shook something loose in most of us that never quite came back together. That sense of sureness and safety. I imagine it was different if you weren't living in a city. In the weeks beyond that I saw the best of people (communities coming together to mourn the dead) and the worst of people (hate crimes against those with darker skin or Middle Eastern backgrounds.) The incident, of course, started a war that nobody wanted. Imposed guidelines and factors that surely led us much to where we are today (and not in a good way.)
I was safe, obviously, this far away from the tragedy, well, as safe as any of us, but I couldn't quite convince my nervous system of it. My dreams were unusually horrific, often involving a city in flames or in ruin. One time, I dreamed that a child version of myself on the train told me I would be dead within a year. Because I was standing in the dream (an anomaly since I catch it so far north) I had it in my head for months that I should not stay on any train where I had to stand, which led to a couple late arrivals at work and getting on an off trains like a fiend. It went away in some ways, but did not in others. I sill can't see the NY skyline in the credits for shows like Friends and Sex and the City without the spectre of the towers still putting a catch in my breath. I still, after all the years, and countless documentaries, will not watch things related to it. The pain, even across a quarter of century, still feels raw and liable to bust open.
The Gen Z-ers on socials have been making posts about how they are tired of hearing older generations talk about it, and how it's just another tragedy, like Pearl Harbor or JFK and in some ways, they are right, there will always be another tragedy. Human history does not go long without them (the manmade kind). I think of things that happened in my lifetime, mechanical failures of space shuttles and things like tsunamis and earthquakes and deadly fires. Those are no less tragic, but the nature of the 9/11 attacks was vastly different. Amid the terrible things we've seen in just my lifetime alone --even just recently what happened in Nepal/Tibet and the flooding--this seems worse because we did it ourselves. (and actually, when you consider climate change, even the natural things are mostly our fault.)
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