Our 9/11 Story

On VE Day in 1945 my mother was on the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. She looked off the top of the observation deck and saw the air fill with ticker tape as the whole city poured into the streets. I was only three months old in 1963 when JFK was killed, but my parents remember where they were. Mom was in Germany with the three of us and my dad was in Texas that day while half his group was stuck across the Mexican border when it closed. I remember when Ronald Reagan was shot, too. It was my senior year of high school (1981) and I was in either accounting or notehand class that March afternoon when they announced it over the PA system. By the time I drove home after school they were reporting his death (erroneously) on the radio.

9/11/01 started out with a bang. I woke up that Tuesday morning to the radio on my alarm clock. The DJs were talking about a small airplane that hit one of the Trade Towers. Weird. How does that happen on accident? I immediately thought something really bad was up. I got the three older kids ready for school, trying not to let them know the things we were all learning that morning. Tinkerbell was barely a year old and blissfully unaware. At least the kids would be sheltered at school, I thought. But the school had all the TVs on in their rooms that morning, and the kids saw the world go to hell in real time. Their teachers didn't understand why my children were so scared--they didn't know that Sweetie was across the Canadian border at the Toronto Film Festival. The kids were too young to pay attention to Festival dates and itineraries. He left on a plane and in their minds he just flew around in the sky until it was time to come home. Why couldn't one of the planes have been his?

My dad called. He was sure it was those crazy liberal environmentalists that had been protesting in New York the week before. For some reason I knew right away that it was Osama bin Laden, and I tried to convince my father of that. Interesting theory, he thought, but way off base. Then the towers crumbled to the ground. All the firefighters and police were dead? Not possible. Their radios just weren't working. These things never have the high body count initially projected. Right? Then the Pentagon and Flight 93. What is happening to us?

One thing I appreciate about myself is that I'm very efficient and calm in a crisis. After I hung up with my dad, I called Sweetie to make sure he was all right. I knew he was, but I still wanted to hear it from him. It took hours to get an open line, but the call finally went through. Things were weird up there. He had been in a film screening when they interrupted and announced that the towers had fallen. Most of the Americans ran out at that point. Some of our lovely neighbors to the north were full of theories that asserted that the US had it coming and we greedy Americans were finally reaping what we sowed. It's tempting to think that Canada is just sort of an extension of America, but there are some pretty strong philosophical differences there. Being in a foreign country during a national tragedy can be logistically complicating as well, as we were about to discover.

How does one get a stranded husband back across a sealed border when all the flights are cancelled and the airports shut down? First off, you call BYU travel, make yourself a complete nuisance until they listen to you, then beg. But begging doesn't work, so you then offer to do as much of the work as possible yourself. They like that. Lots of professors were renting cars and driving back from Canada, couldn't he do that? Or just buy a car? You would think that travel agents would have some basic knowledge of Canadian geography, but they seemed to think Alberta and British Columbia were right next to Ontario. I made call after call to the airline, railroads, rental car places, bus lines. I found the bishop's number in Toronto, the mission president's, that neighbor who moved to Ontario a few years ago that would never remember us but who might help.

Days passed by, and nothing was happening. He was running out of money. Eating became a rare occurrence so he could conserve any cash he had to use as bribe money if necessary (he went on his mission to Mexico--old habits die hard). Finally he called and said the border was opening for a few hours and he was taking a bus across it to the Buffalo, NY airport. What could I find out about planes? We didn't have our cell phones back then, so he called from any payphone he could find. They crossed the border at midnight, and it sealed shut again after they got through. He spent the night on the floor of the terminal, and got out on one of the only planes the next morning before the airport shut down again. I got him as far as Denver, but that's the best I could do. Just before I was about to drive the 10 hours to pick him up, he found one seat on a plane to Salt Lake City. He arrived home tired, hungry, and stressed, but whole, and the amazing good fortune of that was not lost on me. Total time--five days.

I will never forget 9/11. The images are etched in my brain forever and I will probably take them to the grave with me. My children have only the vaguest memories of that day, for which I am grateful. Someday we will face another unforgettable event in American history, and my kids, one of whom is an adult now, can talk about our family's unique 9/11 experience. I just hope that when that day comes, as I know it will, that both my family and yours are far away from the action.