9/11/2001

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing ten years ago on 9/11/2001.

I was sitting in a Boston hotel room waiting to leave for the second day of a conference I was attending.  I was watching the Today show on NBC (live on the east coast) when I saw the report of a plane hitting a World Trade Center tower.  Obviously something bad had happened, but it sounded at the time like it might be a small single engine plane, and who knew maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something.

After a while I turned over to watch CNBC.  They were also showing the smoke coming from the first tower when you saw the explosion in the second tower, and shortly after that, the replay that made it clear it was intentional, an attack was happening.  I forgot about the conference, and stayed in the room to watch.  The frantic reports were rolling in about the Pentagon, then other planes perhaps going down.  I even recall a report about a fire on the National Mall that turned out not to be true.

The rest of the day was just weird, mostly spent trying to figure out what happened, and how I was going to get back to Iowa.  Since I was stranded in a highrise hotel in a major city from which most employees had been sent home, I doubted if I'd even be able to find something to eat. In the end, the hotel had food, and let me stay for as long as I needed.  The conference had been abandoned, but it still took me two days, until Thursday morning, to find a one-way rental car and make the 20+ hour drive home.

One of the things I remember most about that day was the local news coverage that evening.  One of the hijacked planes used in the attacks had taken off from Boston's Logan Airport, where I'd been just a couple of days before.  A lot of local New England people had been on that plane, so it was very sad there, a much smaller version of New York City.  It certainly made what happened seem more personal, and less like an international story.