Recollections.

What I remember most about that day was rage. Not just that it was happening, but that it was happening while I was stuck in southeast Kansas. The biggest news event of my lifetime, the JFK assassination of my generation, was occuring in real time and I was half a continent away, driving to a community college to lay out the first issue of a student newspaper.

We always use the words 'innocent morning' to describe 11 Sept. 2001. So it was when I woke up early before leaving for Ft. Scott. I checked the New York Times website first thing and saw a News Alert at the top about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I immediately thought 'Hm, must be bad weather, like when that bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in 1943.' I then turned on Sportscenter and went about my morning routine. For some reason ESPN had yet to cut in to the ABC newscast, and I didn't realize what was happening until I switched channels. Flipping down through the news stations, I came to Fox News first and saw both towers on fire. I didn't understand it then, but when they split the screen, and showed smoke rising above the Pentagon, I knew it for sure. Right at that moment the first tower collapsed on screen, but the reporter kept describing something else, and I stood in the middle of the living room screaming 'You fucking idiot! It's fucking collapsing my God!'

Not knowing what might happen, I waited until the last possible moment before leaving for school. The radio stations were broadcasting the main TV anchors, who were now ensconced in their roles, so I listened to Dan Rather for the next hour. Fires at the Pentagon. Evacuations at the Capitol. A dozen planes hijacked. Car bomb at the State Department. When the second tower came down, and he said that the Twin Towers were no more, I nearly ripped my steering wheel off, and considered stopping at the next farm house to watch their television.

I kept trying to call my mom, who was in Georgia at the time, but I was in and out of the cellular network until I got to school. Walking across the parking lot, I finally reached her.
"Have you seen what's happened??"
"What are you talking about?"
"The World Trade Center is gone! Two planes crashed into it! A plane crashed into the Pentagon! A car bomb took out the State Department!"
"Oh my God! I'm at Wal-Mart, I haven't seen a TV all morning."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
She would tell me later that when we hung up, she would look around at the other shoppers, still blissfully unaware, and think 'What is the matter with you people? How can you be so calm?' Such was the immensity of that morning, that once you knew, you couldn't imagine anybody else not knowing.

That little moment I saw at home before leaving was the only TV I would watch that day. When I wasn't in class I was in our converted newsroom, trying to make a newspaper appear out of thin air. In the previous week I had been so consumed, and defeated, by the prospect of having little content for my first issue. In some respects, that day saved us by supplying plenty of news for our pages. If that sounds callous, I apologize, for I know it too. We didn't talk about it much in class that day; nobody knew what to say aside from the latest words from Tom Brokaw or Aaron Brown, so it didn't matter all that much. I kept checking the New York Times website, and was puzzled when I saw that all of the secondary graphics were stripped away, including even the vaunted blackletter logo of the name, replaced only by the standard text of a web page. It would be some time until I realized that their servers were being so slammed by web traffic that they had to save bandwidth, or risk crashing. The next day they would commit the entire 'A' section to the event, the first and only time since the moon landing. That they used the same block-style headline was a given.

I finished the layout that night, and went to a friend's house to spend the night. When I walked in, she had on some stupid sitcom; she was tired of watching the news. I seethed, but realized that it was useless. The next morning the first words out of our English teacher was "Did you notice anything this morning?" When we looked at her dumbfounded, she said "You didn't notice the silence outside?" That's right, I thought; the grounddown was still in place. No planes would fly until noon.

I wouldn't get home until that afternoon, some 36 hours after the fact, and though I wished desperately to watch the multiple angles of the planes crashing in and towers collapsing, by that time the news producers decided that they had shown it enough, and that people should be spared more repeated viewings of the disaster. Peter Jennings looked like hell, but I trusted him more than anybody else on the planet that day. My desire to be in New York City covering the event switched to a desire to just be there with a bucket and a pair of work gloves. Hell, even the gloves were optional; I would've cleared away debris at Ground Zero until the skin stripped off my hands, and even that couldn't have stopped me.

I spent only one semester at Ft. Scott, and edited seven issues of the Greyhound Express. In addition to layout and design, I also wrote all of the editorials. I wrote up a quick editorial in the first issue asking for prayers and thoughts to go to the victims of that day, but in the issues that followed, I took a stance in the war that I knew would happen, and I didn't give a damn what the rest of the staff thought. Mine was a liberal, thoughtful stand in defiance of terrorism, yet doubtful of our leaders. I knew I didn't stand a chance, but I had to keep my sanity somehow.

A lot of crap was churned out in the media in response to 11 Sept., but one issue of Rolling Stone will forever forgive all of the covers they devoted to Britney Spears or Nick Lachey. Their tribute issue was a singular achievement; never again will I see such an amazing collection of stories, photos and design. From Jann Wenner's editorial (which I will always keep in either paper or electronic form) on the new global war to the endpaper photograph of a firefighter's burned helmet, I was enthralled at the magnificience of journalism when it chooses to humbly, yet forcefully, reflect our better angels.

I never cried on 11 Sept. I never cried the day after, or the week after, or three weeks after. But a month after the fact, when I was reading that issue, I finally broke down. I was reading an article called 'The Ironworkers', and it remains the only piece I ever saw devoted to those men called in to clear debris in the search for survivors. You see, my father is an ironworker, and though I always knew I couldn't follow in that line of work, I respected the hell out of it. I was calmly reading the article until I reached a passage which forced me to put down the magazine and cry for quite some time. Even when I was done I couldn't read it again for another few days. I may not remember the passage exactly, but at this point, as with many things, the words are truly secondary.

For these men, the feelings they had about what they were witnessing at Ground Zero had another component. These men were members of the same union their relatives had been in for decades, the same union that was involved in construction projects in Manhattan during the early 1970s. For these men, it wasn't just that these attacks happened. The buildings their fathers had built, had just fallen down.