We arrived in SF a bit before1:00am Pacific Time, 4am NY time and – well, even earlier, or later, Iceland time. There was hardly anyone around. I found my way down to the United lost luggage counter, which also deals with lost people who have missed the last flight of the day. They explained that they wouldn’t put me up since I had missed my flight for weather reasons (and actually I had missed my real flight for reasons unconnected to United altogether). They could give me a list of hotels near the airport, or I was welcome to take a little hospitality kit and borrow a pillow and blanket to sack out at the airport.
I debated my options. The first flight to Seattle was at 6am. There was no way I was paying for a hotel just to turn around and come back to the airport for a flight 5 hours later. If I was going to stay at a hotel, I might as well rebook on, say, a noon flight. I was seriously considering this. I asked them about my checked bag – I didn’t need anything in it, but I wanted to know where it was. They explained that it was secure “in the back” and that since it was checked through to Seattle it would be on the first flight out in the morning. That settled the question: I didn’t want my bag sitting in SeaTac while I snoozed in SF. I asked to be put on the first flight in the morning, took my hospitality kit, and hiked back up to the gate.
I had spent a lot of time in SFO in the 90s. Most of the seats in the gates at SFO have arms on either side, but there are a few where a span of three seats goes unbroken by armrests. And then I found the prize: four seats together, with nary an arm between them. My bed for the night. Well, it wouldn’t be the first night I spent in an airport, though SFO had none of the diversions found in Dubai duty-free. Still, it was pretty quiet, and I had my eye shades and ear plugs and a pillow. I actually managed to get a couple of hours sleep.
I got up a little before 5am, brushed my teeth, and was first in line to get a boarding pass when they opened the counter. I called my friend Sheri in NY. “Guess where I am?” It was one of those funny, I-can’t-believe-I’m-not-home-yet stories. Then, since my cell phone batteries were getting low (I had not packed a recharger with me) and I was going to be boarding a flight soon anyway, I turned my phone off. First flight of the day, and the weather was good, so there were no delays. We boarded sometime around 5:45.
[A continent away, the first aircraft – United Flight 11 – was striking the World Trade Center]
Our airplane was one of the emptiest I’ve seen in a long time – perhaps half full. I was the only person in my row on the right of the plane; there was one guy in the row across the aisle. Pushing away from the gate, I once again tuned the headphones to channel 9 to listen to the pilots and ATC. There was some chatter, but it was still early and the flights were leaving without delay. We took off on schedule at 6am. [The second aircraft was striking the south tower. Sheri, watching the news and at that moment suddenly cognizant that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons, desperately tried to call me back – but of course she got no answer.] Bored, I put the headphones in the seat pocket and picked up my book.
We took off normally and reached cruising altitude for a few minutes. Then the plane suddenly began to descend. I looked up from my book, mildly puzzled: we were not yet close to Seattle. I picked up the headphones to listen. Music. That was odd; sometimes the pilots put music on the channel 9 the entire flight, but why would they switch to it in the middle? I started to feel uneasy. The pilot came on the intercom: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Air Traffic Control has asked to land as a precautionary measure. There is nothing wrong with our aircraft. We will be landing in Eugene Oregon in a few minutes. This would be a good time to put away anything in the overhead bins or use the bathroom. We will be turning the seatbelts sign on shortly.” He paused briefly, then said “We will give you more information later.”
A “precautionary measure,” dictated by ATC. That was good news, at least as far as we were concerned. We were making a rapid descent but nothing as extreme as some I’ve experienced in normal airline travel. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the aircraft. And if there had been, it wouldn’t have been ATC asking us to land; it would’ve been the other way around. But there had been something strange in the pilot’s voice. The way he had said “precautionary measure” had sounded odd, strained. Whatever it was, something bad had happened. I regretted I hadn’t kept the headphones on: I would’ve heard the initial call from ATC, before the pilots switched Channel 9 to music. I ran through every scenario I could think of. The one that seemed most likely, though I didn’t like it very much, was that there had been a crash at SeaTac. That would’ve required closing the airport, and rather than have planes stack up overhead they would divert them to other airports. I briefly considered a bomb threat, but it seemed unlikely that would shut down the entire airport. The only other thing I could think of – and you can thank Iceland for putting the idea into my head – was that one of the volcanoes had erupted. Hood, Adams, Rainier, St Helens again, even Shasta or Baker; any of them could belch a bunch of ash that would divert every flight in the northwest. But that seemed even more unlikely, since volcanoes generally gave plenty of warning. But the warnings came as earthquakes, and the February 28 quake in Seattle had closed SeaTac. Could there have been another one?
I looked around the cabin. No one seemed particularly concerned, though there were a few exasperated expressions. No doubt morning meetings would be missed. I was tempted to blurt out, “This is my fault. You’re all victims of my travel karma.” But of course I didn’t. I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to get to Seattle. Like some kind of bad dream, the further I went the longer it seemed to take. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, running as fast as she could to stay in one place.
The descent and landing were uneventful. I peered out the window at Eugene: an airport I never would’ve had any reason to visit. It looked small, and empty. We pulled up to the gate, the seatbelt signs went off, and the pilot spoke on the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, please take all your carry-on baggage with you. Your checked luggage will remain secured in the aircraft.” There was a pause, a longer one. “The information we have is that an aircraft, is that two…and we’re finding this very hard to believe – “ An aircraft. Two. In that instant, running scenarios in my head, I expected him to tell us there had been a mid-air at SeaTac. Two aircraft. “But ATC tells us that two aircraft have hit the World Trade Center in New York.”
A mutter ran through the cabin. Confused conversation. Seated near the front, I walked off past quiet flight attendants and a grim looking cockpit crew. None of the usual “Thank you, have a nice day” routine. I was still confused. How could two aircraft hit the world trade center? I was thinking light planes, or commuter flights, helicopters maybe. I was thinking it had happened simultaneously, both in the same tower, and still in terms of a mid-air collision. One seemed possible, but how could two hit? And why would that have any effect on flights on the west coast?
In the gate area there were the usual televisions, tuned to CNN. As we got off the plane we clustered around, craning our necks to see. The sound was off but the closed captioning was turned on. I found myself reading an interview between a reporter and some witnesses on the scene
“You were in the tower?”
“Yes, Tower 1. We just got out. We were afraid it was going to tumble.”
“The other tower did tumble.”
I couldn’t make any sense of it. “Tumble”? What the hell were they talking about? Big buildings like that don’t just "tumble."
One of the gate agents called out to us, suggesting that a larger TV with sound could be found further towards the center of the terminal, in a café. As a group, we picked up and trouped down there. We found seats and tried to make sense of what we saw on TV. At first it was hard to separate what was live breaking reports and what was tapes of earlier events. They kept showing a shot of one of the towers standing next to a cloud of smoke. I kept trying to parse the scene, looking for the other tower through the smoke. Gradually, as the cold horror settled upon me, I began to understand what the voices on the TV were saying: that tower was gone. Then, as we watched, the other tower collapsed. I’m not sure of all of what I said, but I did gasp “I was just in New York yesterday.”
“I live in New York,” replied the man beside me. I looked over at him. Young, trim, good looking, wearing an expensive suit. Classic Wall St. type.
“In Manhattan?” I asked.
“Yeah. My apartment has a view of the World Trade Center.” We both looked back at the screen.
“Not anymore,” I said. Writing this now, it sounds like a line from a comedy of the blackest sort. But neither of us saw it that way at the time; it was a grim expression of truth, trying to make sense of a new reality by putting it into words. He nodded.
The man seemed remarkably calm. He tried his cell phone, gave up, and pulled out his Blackberry two-way pager. I didn’t want to interrupt him, and the news pulled me back. All around us, people were sitting watching, silent, their heads in their hands like their brains couldn’t take the weight of the sights their eyes took in. I tried my cell phone, running through everyone I knew in NY. Nothing but busy signals. More flights arrived, more people joined us, asking questions. Without taking our eyes away from the screen, we updated them with what we knew. Two planes, no three. One at the Pentagon. A bomb at the State Department, maybe. A fourth plane, unaccounted for. People falling, or jumping, from buildings. Fires. Smoke. Collapse. Death.
One guy, an arrival off another flight, demanded to know why the airliners hadn’t been shot down. I started arguing with him that you don’t just shoot down airliners, even if they had been hijacked. But privately I wondered why the pentagon, with more time to prepare, hadn’t had any apparent defenses. The TV drew us back, and our argument evaporated as we lost its thread, sucked down into the maelstrom on TV.
Somewhere in there, I found myself saying: “Everything is different now.”
Next: Oregon
