Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

Three years ago today, when the world stopped turning, I was in an office building at 1211 Connecticut Ave. NW, near Dupont Circle, about 4 miles from the Pentagon – and 1,322 miles from home.

A bunch of other journalists and I were around a conference table munching doughnuts and sipping coffee and juice. The conference was called to teach us how the insurance industry responds to disaster. Two officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were ready to talk about national flood insurance.

Just before 9 a.m., the conference organizer stepped into the room and told us a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Some of us wondered if it was a bad joke, considering the topic of the conference.

Most humor is gallows humor when a bunch of working press gets together. It is a coping mechanism that emerges after you’ve seen a certain number of dead bodies; heard a certain number of screaming, hurt people, in wrecks, fires and the like; had to try to talk to a certain number of grieving survivors – threshold numbers that are different for everyone. It makes you callous – not to people’s pain, but to your own.

Someone flipped a switch and a big flat TV screen seared the image of the twin towers, one with a terrible gash, spewing black smoke, into our minds. It’s the kind of iconic image that, for Americans and our friends, will last as long as we shall live.

Part of the reason that particular image is so lasting, I think, is because of the emotional-mental flip it required, at the time, to comprehend it. Anyone who saw the damage from the first crash before the second plane hit saw a tragic accident. It was only after the second plane that anyone realized it was something more – that we were under attack. Our minds, and hearts, had to go back to that first impression, reprocess it and re-file it.

So, just before 9 a.m., we were looking at an accident. Someone flipped the switch, the TV screen disappeared into the ceiling, and we resumed. One of the FEMA guys started talking – and before he could do much more than introduce himself and his colleague, the conference man stepped back into the room and said a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.

One of the FEMA men’s cell phones went off, and he left. Then the other FEMA guy’s cell phone rang, and he left.

The next hour or so are hazy in my memory. A plane crashed into the Pentagon. The plane went down in Pennsylvania. This wasn’t just news – and I was in it.

Some of the journalists went to work. They saw it, I’m sure, even through the emotions and the confusion, as the story of a lifetime. It never even occurred to me to “work” this story.

Journalist friends will be surprised, and some might be embarrassed for me. But it never crossed my mind. If anything, I would have expected someone to interview ME for a news story. I love D.C., but it’s not my home. I was a visitor in the nation’s capital. The conference broke up. My work was done.

One thing came to mind: I have to get home. It’s a natural reaction – especially for one who venerates and romanticizes ancestry, family history and place the way I do. My family, and my home, were out west.

Pioneers and others on the dark, treeless Plains in the 19th century kept their bearings because wagon masters always pointed their wagon tongues toward the North Star at night. In the morning light, they’d know which way to go. Between D.C. and Oklahoma the next several days, at night when I put down my head, images and thoughts of home, my wife, my kid, the dogs, and, not far away, Mama, my brother, sisters and in-laws in Oklahoma and Texas served as a North Star of sorts, keeping me focused.

Just before 10 a.m., still in the conference room, with the phones, cells and landlines, jammed all over the East, maybe the whole country, I borrowed someone’s computer and sent an e-mail to my wife.

At 8:55 a.m. in Oklahoma, this message popped up on my wife’s computer screen at work, from a name she had never heard:

From: XXX XXXX
Sent: Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 8:55 AM
To:mywife@work.com
Subject: Note from (me).
Government buildings closed and evaced. Everything grounded. Phones down. Will call when able. Our speakers this morning were from FEMA. Ha. Sigh. I love you. I might rent a car and drive home. :-) … Won’t be checking here for a reply.

She replied anyway, and I managed to see it:

Want me to call friends to drive you somewhere? Get a car, now, get out of that town!!!

For several hours in D.C., no one knew what to expect. A bomb scare at the State Department, supposedly involving a car, reminded me that terror can come in small packages as well as big airplanes.

What to do? The airports locked down, my flight out of Baltimore the next day was out – like I was going to get on a plane. Nothing makes me feel more helpless than being in a bad situation in one place and my vehicle in another. That, as much as anything, is why I don’t like to fly. I hate being at other people’s mercy.

In addition to getting toward home, my immediate mission was to get away from the District of Columbia. It seemed a very real possibility that the government would declare marshal law and closed the district, trapping me and everyone else.

My wife managed to get ahold of a colleague in D.C. who was gracious enough to give me a place to stay that night, as my wife worked to arrange for her sister, in Ohio, to come get me.

Some of this seems silly now, for me to want that desperately to get away, and to get to, and for my sister-in-law to be willing to drive so far, to “rescue” me. Others just sat tight. I can’t explain how powerful and with what clarity the idea – “Well, it’s time to head for the house” overcame me. And my Texan wife and her sister had the same crystal-clear idea about getting me home.

Just before 11 a.m., I walked the half-mile or so from the conference back to my hotel on Dupont Circle. The streets were jammed with cars, the sidewalks filled with people. A fighter jet screamed overhead, seeming to brush against the tops of the buildings. Remember that in D.C., no building is taller than the U.S. Capitol. The jet was just about tree-top level. The ground shook under my feet.

I have tactile memories. What I mean is, right now, I can feel the same feeling on the bottom of my feet as I felt the instant the ground shook under them three years ago today. The only other tactile memory I have is this, and it will tell you how powerful an experience it was for this Okie to be so far from home, in such an uncertain situation, in D.C., with the Pentagon, just cross the Potomac, in flames: Right now, 15 years later, I can still feel my dad’s clammy chest on my fingers and palms, from when I did heart massage as my brother attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, in the floor of my mom’s living room, where we stretched Daddy out after he slumped over in his wheelchair and died.

Back in my hotel room, I started throwing my things together. The Pentagon attack, of course, was local news in D.C., not national news. On TV, crawlers across the bottom of the screen, not common until 9/11, told of every closing known but did not mention the Metro, Washington’s subway system. Downstairs, the concierge had told me he thought the subway was shut down.

I raided the hotel room fridge, stuffing $4 Snickers bars , $3 cookies and $5 bottles of water and soft drinks into my luggage. (A fancy glass bottle of high-dollar water is still in my kitchen cupboard today, one of several personal historical artifacts I’ve kept).

My wife had arranged for her colleague to pick me up at a subway stop in Maryland, just across the D.C. line, and I aimed to get there whether the subway was running or not. With a big suitcase in one hand, my soft briefcase in the other, I walked out of the hotel fully prepared to hoof it across the District of Columbia and somehow find the subway stop.

Luckily, the Dupont Circle Metro stop was open, as was the one in Maryland, the northern-most stop on the Red Line. Some of the others were closed, it seems like, though I don’t know for sure. Anyway, I was glad.

One of the oddest things about my experience, and this is supremely ironic for a newsman, is how circumstances unfolded to leave me so ignorant as to what was going on anywhere. From the time I left the hotel, I neither saw nor heard any news for many hours – this at a time when the rest of the world was glued to their TVs. I did pick up a Washington Post “EXTRA” put out by mid-afternoon, but of course it had more questions than answers.

My wife’s colleague, whose name I had vaguely heard but whom I had never met, was to look for a “a big guy with glasses and a beard, in a white shirt and tie, with luggage,” at the Maryland subway stop. I was to look for a red Honda Acura. We found each other.

At his house in suburban Maryland, we called around to find a rental car, without luck. Many were caught behind fences at locked-down airports, I learned later. I’m pretty sure not one was available anywhere on the East Coast. My wife found one and reserved it in Kentucky, just across the Cincinnati River from Ohio.

Within hours, my sister-in-law, a gregarious and sweet redhead, took off with a friend from Lebanon, Ohio, headed for Maryland.

With nothing left to do but wait, my benefactors, bless their hearts, took me to dinner. It was at a Chinese place. The diminutive man behind the cash register had placed little American flags and some hastily drawn signs professing his patriotism.

I don’t want to know what it was like for people like him when the world stopped turning, because many people were ready to take out their anger on anyone who looked or talked differently from their own idea of what it meant to be American.

I don’t remember what I had to eat. I do recall that I washed it down with a zombie – fast.

Later, I put my head down on a borrowed pillow in a borrowed bed in a stranger’s house in an unfamiliar suburb 1,322 miles from home – and with everything that is dear to me so far away my heart and mind wanted to burst, I pointed my internal wagon tongue toward my own personal version of the North Star and tried to rest.

More anon.

END