The 9/11 memorial’s tribute lights, as seen from my rooftop in Brooklyn.
On Saturday, I went to the farmer’s market in Fort Greene, and picked up some striped bass and squid. That evening, I threw it on the grill, along with some chicken sausages. I had a lazy supper, then headed upstairs to watch a few episodes of Orange Is the New Black with the girls. Around 10pm, I climbed up the scuttle to the roof to get a view of the tribute lights. They were beautiful. I remember reading a few years ago how the lights were causing problems for migratory birds. Somebody figured out that shutting them off for periods of about 20 minutes could mitigate the problem. I’m glad it was figured out, and the lights were kept. The next morning over breakfast, I told my daughters how I had found out about the planes on 9/11.
The morning of September 11, 2001, I left my apartment in San Francisco around 7am. I biked in, wanting to get an early start on some programming for a web site I was working on. Back in those days, we didn’t call web sites applications or apps – they were just web sites, or sites, or micro sites. Web developers didn’t call themselves software developers, JavaScript was spelled javascript (it wasn’t serious AT ALL), css was totally fly-by-night, and html wasn’t a programming language any more than legos were considered construction material. The internet was a very casual affair. Junior varsity at best.
I let myself in through the side alley door adjacent to the Chinese/French immersion school. The interior lights were all out and I was the first one in. I didn’t bother putting my bike upstairs – I just set it against my desk, turned on my monitor, connected my laptop, and got right to work. During my bike ride, I had already worked out a tally of url endpoints I’d need for database and file operations. I didn’t think of them as url endpoints by the way – that’s my current interior monologuing vocabulary. Back then, they were just code.
My desk phone rang. Caller ID said A. Mullin – my boss. She didn’t bother with hello.
“Ben?”
“Hey Anette. What’s up?”
I cradled the phone as I continued typing and looking straight ahead into the monitor. There was a noticeable silence coming from her end, so I continued talking.
“Where is everyone?”
I took a quick look at my watch. 8:45 am. Somebody should have arrived by now.
“Is it a holiday or something?”
This was not a joke. Back then, I often showed up to work on days off.
“You didn’t hear?”
“Uh, no. What’s going on?”
I thought maybe there was some big accident on the freeway or the Bay Bridge. That would make sense.
“We’re at war. New York’s been hit. They destroyed the trade center.”
“What?”
Destroyed is a strong word. Assuming for a moment that Annette wasn’t exaggerating, nukes immediately came to mind. I wondered how long California would have until we got nailed. I alt-tabbed immediately to Internet Explorer and typed cnn.com. I asked in a clear voice: when. Annette’s voice started to crack.
“Early this morning. Oh my God Ben, it’s terrible.”
“I uh… can’t believe this.”
Her voice worsened things for me. Now I was sure it was nukes. In my browser window, the tiny blue Internet Explorer icon was working away, but CNN was not loading. Fuck. This was bad. I wanted to rule out the slim possibility I was being fucked with.
“You’re sure of this? How did you find out?”
“It’s all over the news. I’m watching it right now.”
“Yeah, I’m uh…” still waiting for goddamn CNN. 30 seconds and counting. “... trying to figure out what’s going on myself over here.”
I opened a few new windows (Browser tabs weren’t main stream until 2008, with the release of Firefox 3.0) and tried some different news sites: wsj.com, nytimes.com, nbcnews.com. Nothing. It must have been nearly a minute before I switched back to the CNN window.
Finally the page loaded…
At a crawl, like I was on a 28/8 baud connection from 1993 – the kind that displays an image a few lines at a time from top to bottom. It took at least 10 seconds to fully render. The multi-column word-dense layout of the front page was replaced with a single image: the twin towers with smoke coming out at the very top.
I don’t remember the exact wording of the caption, but it was something like New York Under Attack. I looked at the web page for a very long time. The fonts were all broken. There were thin black wireframe lines that showed up around a lot of the things in the upper left, the usual whenever a shitload of page elements couldn’t render for some reason. My best guess: caching servers totally fried, or maybe even destroyed.
“This is fucking crazy.”
“I know Ben. It goes without saying that work’s canceled today. Just go home.”
“OK. Um, thanks for letting me know.”
I sat at my desk unsure of what I should do. I needed to latch on to one thing: just one simple small tangible activity I could throw myself into where I could be of service. My roommate Don was flying to New York that morning. He might still be at home. I grabbed my stuff, got my bike, locked up behind me, and pedaled hard back home.
The ride was just under a mile. As I went along market street, I looked at the faces of the people I saw walking on the sidewalks, most likely totally ignorant of what was going on in New York City. They too would eventually have conversations with their versions of Annette and find out the news. They too would be bewildered and shocked and then rush home to be with their families. When I got up to my apartment, Don was coming out of the shower half dressed, still shaving.
“You’re not going to New York. I don’t think any flights are going to New York. For a while. I’m not even sure if there’s going to be flights for the next few days.”
Don looked at me like I was crazy.
“What are you talking about?”
“The twin towers have been hit in some kind of attack. I have no idea if more shit is on the way, but this is fuckin’ serious.”
I walked over to the tv and turned it on.
“You might want to confirm that your flight is cancelled. I just… I don’t think anyone is going anywhere on a plane right now.”
Don sat down on the couch next to me and the two of us watched the news for what seemed like 5 minutes. Dave woke up, came into the kitchen, and asked what was going on. I don’t remember what we said, but before long, the three of us were sitting on that couch, glued to the tv. And it was like that for several days.