Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023

Mild | John Burroughs | Corners Top | Toxic Weeders | Grandson | Suicide Determination | Heavy Printing | Water Issues | Lights | Dubious Stats | Manzanitas | Ed Notes | Hoyman Ceramics | Keep Regelski | Whale Sighting | Richard Wilson | Loading Ships | Yesterday's Catch | Stoned Agin | John Dickerson | Facepainting | Parking Encounter | Biggest Flower | Shining Star | Hat Rack | US Deaths | Expat Reason | Do Better | Disowned | Bidenomics | Democrats | Ukraine | Hello Sailor | Emergency State | No Raises | Empire Fall | Inner Mind | 911 Observations | So Angry | Twin Towers | Never Mind

MILD TEMPERATURES will continue today. Warmer temperatures are expected Wednesday through Friday. Coastal areas will cool down over the weekend. Inland areas will remain above normal. Dry weather is forecast to prevail this week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 49F under clear skies this Tuesday morning on the coast. The fog has moved south for now but patchy fog returns to the forecast on Friday. We might get a little windy tonight.

JOHN BURROUGHS

Long time Boonville resident, John Everett Burroughs Jr. passed away peacefully September 6th, 2023 with his family at his bedside, he was 87.

John was born February 18th, 1936 in Chidister, Arkansas to John Everett Burroughs Sr. and Willie Cubbage Burroughs. Tragically, John’s mother passed away just four months after John was born due to complications of birth. Unable to raise a child by himself John’s father left John Jr in the care of his sister and grandmother.

John Jr. was the youngest of 6 children, brothers Bill and Gene Burroughs, and sisters Mary, Alice and Ann.

At the age of 13 John left Arkansas with his father and brother, Bill, to find work in one of the many lumber mills of California. They first settled in Mendocino and John went to school there for about a year. Next they moved to Comptche to work at the Philbrick Mill. About a year later John and his father moved to Philo where John’s father got a job as chief saw filer for the Philbrick Mill.

John enrolled at Anderson Valley High School and the following summer he got a job working at the Gowan's Orchards. John fell in love with Anderson Valley and he really liked the people in it, so when John’s father decided to return to Arkansas, John said he wanted to stay in Anderson Valley. John asked James and Jo Gowan if he could live with them until he graduated from high school and they graciously said yes.

While attending AV High school he made a lot of good friends and excelled in wood shop and basketball. John was given the nickname ‘Bullseye’ because he was such an accurate shot in Basketball.

After graduating from AV High School, John went to work for Kay Hiatt Logging running the high boom loader.

In 1956 John married Joan M. Berry from Boonville. With Joan's financial help the two newlyweds moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon so that John could attend Oregon Tech.

In March, 1958, Joan gave birth to their first child, Julie Karen Burroughs.

After John graduated Oregon Tech. the family moved back to Boonville. John got a job as carpenter working with Walter ‘Shine’ Tuttle. John also took on small carpentry jobs by himself, building up a reputation as a fine craftsman.

In early 1960s he joined the Carpenters Union. They sent him to work in Lake County so the family moved with him to Lakeport. Then he was sent to work on the Radar Station near Point Arena so the family moved back to Boonville. When the radar station was finished, John left the Carpenters Union, got his Contractor’s License and started his own business, John Burroughs Construction.

John’s first house build was a home built in Boonville, for Archie and Myrtis Schoenahl, a house that is still standing to this day.

When the State division of highways began widening highway 128 through Anderson Valley in 1965 John was hired to move the iconic Little Red Schoolhouse in Boonville to save it from destruction. He completed the job with great skill and success. John always said that job was one of his proudest moments.

In February, 1965, Joan gave birth to their second child, a son, Jeffrey Kevin Burroughs.

For the next 40-plus years John would build some of the most beautiful homes all over Anderson Valley.

John’s daughter Julie married Roger Walker and they had to beautiful girls, Sara Walker Mckeever and Jessica Walker. John doted on his only two grandchildren and he always had photos of them that he loved sharing with everyone he knew.

In 2015 John sold his house in Boonville and moved to Fort Bragg where he built a lovely house for himself.

John loved fishing. He learned how to fly fish for steelhead from Jack June, built his own fly rod and tied his own flies.

John and his son Jeff fished together a lot. Fishing for Trout in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, Salmon in Alaska (twice), and Steelhead on the Navarro River.

Later in life he continued his love for fishing, buying a 26 foot ocean boat he kept at Noyo Harbor in Fort Bragg. He and his good friend, Mike Reeves, fished together on that boat for years, right up till John’s health no longer allowed it.

John also loved to travel. In the 1990's John and Joan traveled to Europe and in 2014 John took his granddaughter Jessica to France. They both had an amazing time. John’s granddaughter, Sara Walker married Tim McKeever and moved to Oregon. She had two beautiful children, Rylee and Harper McKeever. It always pleased John whenever Sara and his two great grandchildren came to visit, he loved them all dearly.

John Burroughs had such a full life that it is impossible to mention everything he did and every friend he had, so we will save the rest for the memorial service.

Since John was cremated we are planning his memorial sometime in October, 2023. 

John is survived by his ex-wife Joan Burroughs, of Kelseyville, his daughter Julie Burroughs, son Jeff Burroughs and daughter in law Julie Taylor Burroughs, all of Boonville.

Granddaughters Sara Walker Mckeever and her husband Tim Mckeever. Great-grandchildren Rylee and Harper Mckeever all of Oregon, and Jessica Walker also of Boonville.

The family asks that all donations be made to AV Hospice and the Fort Bragg Cancer Resource Center.

LEGALIZATION’S TOXIC AFTERMATH

Editor,

Following the legalization of marijuana, I answer a lot of questions regarding why we are continuing to dedicate resources to the marijuana issues in Mendocino County. Many folks, including myself, hoped the legalization of marijuana would simply end the criminal issues associated with cultivation. Sadly, extremely dangerous behaviors which are associated with the illegal cultivation of marijuana are continuing in our county. 

During the month of August 2023, our deputies participated in several search warrants throughout Mendocino County. Over twenty locations were targeted for illegal cannabis, where serious environmental crimes were suspected of taking place. We worked with partnering agencies including California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and California State Parks. We were also assisted by CDFW environmental scientists, California State Water Resources Control Board, California Department of Cannabis Control, California Highway Patrol, and the Eradication and Prevention of Illicit Cannabis (EPIC).

During these operations, over 70,000 marijuana plants were located and eradicated. Over 9,000 pounds of processed marijuana and 23 guns were seized.

Out of the 20 locations, more than half had highly dangerous pesticides that are banned in the United States due to their toxic potency. All locations had severe environmental impacts, which included: polluting of the waterways, illegal grading, water diversions, dammed creeks, fuel/oil in the creeks, and water pumps diverting water from creeks. Several of these locations had deplorable living conditions with minimal food. One location had a poached deer.

Here are just a few of the very toxic chemicals we found being used in these grows sites. These chemicals are commonly known as, Monitor, Zinc Phosphide, Methyl Parathion, Methamidophos, Carbofuran, and Weevil-Cide. These are all banned in the United States. These recent issues are becoming a pattern.

These items can poison waterways and leave lands uninhabitable. The chemicals used have been described as “a circle of death.” Research has shown a quarter teaspoon can kill a 400-pound bear in minutes, scavengers then feed on the carcass and are also poisoned. This cycle continues until the chemical has killed several times. 

Many of these chemicals were banned from the US markets in 2009 however we are continuing to see them in the illegal grow sites. These chemicals have likely been smuggled from Mexico and South American Countries. 

This is creating a dangerous situation for persons tending the grow sites as well as the law enforcement teams who are investigating and eradicating the sites. As we continue to investigate these grow sites, we have adjusted our tactics in an attempt to keep our personnel safe. Working with the state’s environmental scientists has been a great assistance. I am hopeful state and federal resources may help us get a clear picture of what our next steps will be in the remediation of these locations. 

Sheriff Matt Kendall

Ukiah

FAMILY OF MISSING WILLITS MAN REQUESTS ACCEPTANCE OF CORONER’S RULING OF SUICIDE

by Kym Kemp

Family of a Willits man are asking the community’s understanding as they grapple with the death of Raymond Tyler who had been missing for 16 days before he was discovered deceased in what the coroner has officially ruled as a case of suicide by gunshot.

Raymond’s sister, Colene Brown, wrote us, “I have been overwhelmed with people messaging me their wild theories of how he went…I would be forever grateful if you could write one last article about Ray.”

She explained that the circumstances surrounding Raymond’s disappearance and ultimate demise raised numerous questions and fueled wild theories among the public. However, the coroner’s determination of suicide has brought a sense of closure to the family.

“The coroner determined he died of suicide by gunshot,” she wrote. Adding, “[W]hile there remains many questions about where he would even get a gun and why he was found right where he was dropped off 16 days later…, the investigation has been closed and determined suicide.”

She went on to explain, “I have had dozens of messages and I just don’t feel I can keep telling each individual person what happened. This is taking a heavy toll on my family…My request is simple: please let the public know how he passed so we can be left in peace.”

Colene Brown provided an obituary for her brother also in the obit section.

MENDOCINO VILLAGE WATER, TWO COMMENTS

Meredith Smith: 

This is all patently insane. For the very first thing, we all ALREADY monitor (and pay for) a monthly water allotment via the MCCSD (while supplying our own water from privately owned wells) and are required to submit readings to substantiate usage. I've never exceeded mine at the Mendocino Cafe. At Flow I have been assessed a huge new water development fee which the landlords have passed on to me resulting in over a thousand dollars a month additional rent, separate from my water/sewage monthly charges which have also increased. The rest of the bogus arguments, especially about earnings/income, I can easily debunk with my Documented Tax Returns quarter to quarter/side by side. Flow could not open at all and the Cafe was tanking until we got the tent up. No one wanted to dine indoors. Most still don't. We lost a fortune; the PPP money allowed us to pay employees to enable the Great Plates Delivered program which kept us afloat for the year and a half Flow was not open for business; my tax returns will demonstrate that even with covid and climate refugees adding to our visitor base I lost $500,000 albeit keeping full employment and doors open the best we were allowed while the Health Department mandate was in force concerning masking, separation between tables, etc. While I am grateful to have weathered the Covid Crisis thus far I am aghast at your characterization of restaurant owners carrying bags of money to the bank at taxpayer expense. Personally, I spent endless sleepless nights teetering on the edge of an abyss that seemed bottomless and a dept that seemed insurmountable. Respectfully, Meredith Smith Mendocino Cafe and Flow Restaurant

* * * 

Tom Tetzlaff

That the sewer district is nosing in with their grubby money hungry fingers is maddening. This is yet another reason to abolish the entire Groundwater Management (GWM) program as administered by the MCCSD. It is time to flat out end it.

Not only is GWM illegal for a variety of good reasons, it is ineffective at “saving” any water whatsoever and is dead weight to the community. Continuing it is a further waste of district resources, time and cost to the ratepayers and even more to the businesses we love.

Why this district stubbornly holds onto this seriously flawed program is beyond me at this point. It”s all about money I guess. It”s a good deal. They can make a law that requires you to pay for something and get nothing in return. Just like that.

If and when the MCCSD becomes the supplier of water then they can have at it and meter as they like. Until then, they need to bugger off and/or work towards fixing the problem instead of flogging the residents and businesses with more fees that add no value. Maybe we should charge the district for the water we are pumping over to them? ;)

Leave the tents, our wells, and our restaurants alone.

ODD IF NOT DUBIOUS STATS from the latest California Behavioral Health Boards and Commissions 2022 Data Notebook:

(We found these ill-defined and out of context numbers for Mendocino County — the only actual numbers in their entire ream of gibberish.)

Number of individual clients Mendocino County behavioral health department paid the costs for an IMD [institution for mental disease / psychiatric hospital] stay (either in or out of your county), during the last fiscal year: 36 [all out of county]. 

Total number of IMD bed-days paid for these individuals by county behavioral health department during the same time period: 7774 

(7774 / 36 = 216 days per individual.)

Number of individuals Mendocino County behavioral health department paid some or all the costs to reside in a licensed Adult Residential Facility [ARF / non-psych hospital] during the last fiscal year: 29

Total number of ARF bed-days paid for these individuals, during the last fiscal year: 8145

8145 / 29 = 281 days per individual.

Yet Mendo’s Mental Health Director insists Mendo needs a 16-bed Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF)?

(Mark Scaramella)

ED NOTES

I'VE NEVER seen Labor Day traffic as heavy as it was on get away Monday this year. I counted 63 southbound vehicles pass as I stood at the 128 end of my driveway waiting for a break in the outgoing tide so I could get across the road to Boont Berry Farm. And it wasn't until that 63rd vehicle, a pick-up hauling a whole house of stuff back to wherever sensed the pathetic old guy's desire to cross safely and paused long enough so I could lurch safely into Boont Berry. My return trip a few minutes later also required a long wait for a break in the lemmings' frenetic Monday retreat. One would think that as galloping inflation gallops on unchecked that a lot of the people making the Mendo commute would be forced to stay home, but here they are.

BOONVILLE is not pedestrian-friendly. Our dusty little tourist pit stop would be much more welcoming if it offered benches, trees, flowers, public art like Geyserville has. Geyserville, also an unincorporated area, was once as forlorn-looking as Boonville, but a small minority of its permanent population transformed its dolorous exterior to an interesting mile worth the detour off 101. We have, in the way of public art, only Glenn Ricard's unique outdoor gallery, a step in the right direction certainly, but only a beginning. I daresay there's a lot more money in Boonville, especially when you shake the bushes at the higher elevations, and maybe the CSD could divert a few bucks to a few downtown enhancements.

I'M READING a fascinating history of Ukraine called Borderland, A Journey Through The History Of by Anna Reid — in which the author mentions this slogan of one of Ukraine's fascist parties: “Vote for us and you'll never have to vote again.” And if that doesn't exactly fit the Democratic Party of the gerrymandered Northcoast, I'll eat one of my tastier hats.

A GUY WROTE on the AVA comment line: 

My answer to you is Joe Biden!!!! We have never seen a more corrupt Government. The Dems hate Trump so much that they used Covid to elect this horrible individual. And now we all pay. The con man’s America is a breath of fresh air compared to the hell we are currently standing in. TWK’s article speaks truth, and sometimes the truth hurts. Just look at California under the current rule. San Francisco’s beauty is gone, homeless rule the State, sanctuary cities have crime at its highest levels, illegals get better health insurance than you and I, insurance companies leaving California along with residents. But let’s keep voting this Moron in, while Dems forge a path for him to be President!!! The only thing TWK left out of his article was, you can’t fix stupid. And that’s the real truth of today’s Democratic Party.

ED REPLY: The Democrats are mos def half the prob, and Biden is like some weird cosmic joke, but a word in favor of Frisco, my old home town. The downtown area is a national disgrace, SF City government being the equivalent in competence of Mendo’s supervisors and our lead figures. But North Beach is mercifully free of the walking wounded except for a few shuffling on through, and most neighborhoods, except for some heavy infestations in areas of the Mission, are bum and junkie-free, or are confined indoors because they live there. The problem in Frisco, as in Ukiah, as in everywhere in the land, is that well paid, deluded helping professionals, with the best of intentions perhaps, maintain a large population of dependent people upon whom the helping pros feast. These armies of helping pros are, of course, joined at their plump hips to the Democrats, for whom they vote and are a crucial electoral bloc, hence another big addition to the prevalent political entropy. Prior to the government takeover by the deluded and the corrupt, circa '67, people who were unable or unwilling to care for themselves were confined to a humane state hospital system, dismantled by the usual “bi-partisan” consensus, the same bi-partisan consensus that’s brought us into constant wars with the Arab world as the same "bipartisan" stranglehold gins up war with China and has no exit strategy from the bottomless fiscal pit of Ukraine. Republicans don't have any solutions to the slo mo implosion of the country and always make everything worse, faster. Solution? Return to Roosevelt-era taxation to pay for all the social amenities we used to have, meaning our lightly taxed ruling class would again pay at 90 percent. There would be bi-partisan opposition, of course, because the very wealthy fund both parties.

GRACE HUDSON MUSEUM: 

Jan Hoyman's kitchen is filled with plates and bowls from other potters. For her, it’s a way to connect with others, to be a part of a community, which is part of what has motivated her career. Since the time she first fell in love with ceramics during a college class, she wanted to be the village potter, contributing to the lives of those around her through her work. 

Early on she met Doug Browe at a workshop in the Sierra Mountains. They moved to England where they apprenticed with village potters and refined their craft before returning to Michigan where they started the New Richmond Pottery. In 1982, friends at the Frey Ranch in Redwood Valley invited them out. (Frey Vineyards was the first organic winery in the United States.) They lived in a barn there and built a studio, later constructing their own home in Redwood Valley and a new studio in the old Creamery building in Ukiah. There, they established themselves on a national level, and taught their own apprentices. Now it is hard to find production potters, so Jan hires community members to create her work using slip molds and a ram press. Jan also supports the community, making bowls for Plowshares Empty Bowls annual fundraiser. 

Today, you can see pottery from the Jan Hoyman Studio throughout the Ukiah Valley, planters in yards or large personalized platters commemorating important events hung on display in homes.

WILLIAM FITZGERALD: “Keep Regelski.”

CHRIS SKYHAWK: In my last post I reported on my trip to the high ridges above the Cazadero (Sonoma County) area. I'm shocked that I forgot to report on the whales we sighted. Late afternoon we descended down to Salt Point SP; where we saw a very large number of Humpback Whales; it was the most I have ever seen in one sighting; there seemed to be 2 large pods in the same area one slightly north of the other; there was lots of movement, rolling in the surface; and Jen saw one full breach; the whale launched itself completely out of the water; even the tail was airborne, complete with the thunderous splash as it returned to the water… Spectacular!!

RICHARD WILSON, NOTED CALIFORNIA CONSERVATIONIST, REMEMBERED

by Mike Geniella

Leading conservationists are mourning the death of Richard Wilson, a scion of a Southern California  who chose to live his life out on the remote Buck Mountain Ranch in northeastern Mendocino County.

Wilson, son of a prominent Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon, grew up in Pasadena and attended the exclusive Thatcher School in Ojai and Dartmouth University on the East Coast. Wilson later used his connections and his family’s allegiance to old school Republican Party leaders to stop the damming of the Eel River at Round Valley and to promote stricter logging regulations after being appointed director of the California Department of Forestry.

Wilson died August 16, and after a celebration of his life at the Our Lady of Queen of Peace Catholic Chapel in Covelo, he was buried alongside his late wife Susan Valentine Wilson and a beloved son, Richard Alexander Wilson Jr., at a family cemetery on Buck Mountain. Word of the senior Wilson’s deathhad been quietly circulating among conservationists, government officials and close friends.

Wilson would have turned 90 on Wednesday of this week, said his daughter, Sarah Wilson. She grew up in Round Valley, and now lives in Santa Cruz with her family. Sarah Wilson said since last February she had been with her father at the Buck Mountain Ranch where he passed “quietly and with dignity.”

“It was very peaceful. My brother and I, and his oldest granddaughter and his youngest grandson were with him.”

Sarah Wilson said she was especially close to her father because she was in grammar school when her mother Susan died. “Dad was an exceptional man. I understood him on many levels, including personal, family, and professional.” Sarah Wilson said she attended boarding school in Ojai while her father lived in Sacramento when he was Gov. Pete Wilson’s CDF director. 

“Buck Mountain and Round Valley were always the center of our lives,” said Sarah Wilson.

Richard Wilson’s blueblood background did not often show itself. 

Wilson’s jeans were worn and his shirts sometimes sweat-stained. He sported a farmer’s tan because he spent most of his time outdoors, either high on the mountain or on the farm in Covelo where he and his wife Susan Valentine Wilson lived while their four children went to school in Round Valley. 

Wilson, however, tapped into his patrician Southern California background and friendships that went all the way to the state Capitol in Sacramento and onto the White House. His connections proved formidable when he joined forces with the local native population to stop the damming of the Eel River at Dos Rios and the flooding of Round Valley. It is home to one of the geographically largest reservations in California, a remote and wildly beautiful place with a dark history after the first white settlers arrived in the mid-19th century. Newcomers seized Round Valley’s best lands, and the federal government ordered the round up of members of five individual tribes forcing them to live together on reservation lands north of Covelo.

Wilson’s family first arrived in Mendocino County in the late 1940s, a century after the upheaval of native culture and the onset of violence that still haunts the community today. His father, a widely known Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon, bought the Buck Mountain ranch as a retreat in the 1940s. Wilson in the 1960s persuaded then Gov. Ronald Reagan to come to Round Valley to see firsthand how a planned state water project would flood one of the most beautiful valleys in the state. 

Richard Wilson and his wife Susan married in 1955 and decided to live on the mountain and expand the family’s Mendocino County ranch holdings. Karen Schilder Keehn, a Ukiah native and Stanford University classmate of Susan’s had married into Mendocino County’s legendary Crawford timber family, and son Billy Crawford helped the Wilsons figure out how to make timber cutting on Buck Mountain profitable while utilizing sustainable logging practices.

From his personal experiences on Buck Mountain, Richard Wilson became one of California’s leading conservationists, and eventual head of the state Department of Forestry (now CalFire) from 1991-1999 under then Gov. Pete Wilson. 

Richard Wilson advocated stringent forest practices at the state level to the chagrin of corporate timber bosses. He engaged in monumental political battles with big timber executives like Harry Merlo and Texas financier Charles Hurwitz. Internal Louisiana Pacific Corp. documents leaked in the 1990s showed Merlo had ordered the level of cut on the company’s vast tract of Mendocino County timberlands at the rate of three times growth. Hurwitz sharply escalated the pace of logging after his high profile 1986 junk bond takeover of venerable Pacific Lumber Co. in neighboring Humboldt County, grabbing an estimated $2 billion in timber profits out of the region before bankrupting the company 20 years later. About 440,000 acres of Pacific Lumber and the former L-P lands are now owned and managed by Mendocino and Humboldt Redwood Companies, an investment arm of the Fisher family of San Francisco.

Richard Wilson’s efforts to convince then Gov. Reagan to scuttle construction of the Dos Rios Dam in 1969, and his advocacy of more stringent logging practices firmly established his legacy as a leading conservationist. But those efforts were just two among others.

Wilson fought hard against a plan for a timeshare subdivision plan across 8,500 acres called ‘My Ranch’ at Dos Rios, a fight that pitted neighbors against each other and fueled a legendary land use battle in front of the county Board of Supervisors.

Wilson also brought famed horticulturist Alan Chadwick to Covelo and helped him establish a center for organic and biodynamic farming. Chadwick only stayed five years, but Wilson continued to help the Live Power Farm, which is now operated by former Chadwick students Gloria and Steve Decater.

Stephanie and Chris Tebbutt, operators of Filigreen Farms in Anderson Valley, were students of Chadwick, and they have remained longtime friends of Richard Wilson. They worked closely with Wilson on forestry issues while he was state forestry chief.

“Richard was a classic blueblood Republican with traditional values. He was among a generation of Americans who made our democracy the greatest in the world,” said Chris Tebbutt. 

But unlike today’s GOP leaders, Tebbutt said Wilson stuck to his core values and used them for the benefit of his family, his community, and the state.

“The likes of Richard Wilson are few and far between,” said Tebbutt.

Sarah Wilson cited her late father’s mantra about how people should live and work the land: “Tread with care.”

KELLEY HOUSE MUSEUM: 

Photograph of a ship being loaded at the Mendocino Lumber Company's shipping point. A smaller loading boat called a lighter is nearby.

The structure on the far left is the freight shed. Rail cars loaded with lumber supplied by the nearby lumber yard (seen in the background) would enter it from the back side. The wood would then be sent out the front on an apron chute that was lowered down to the anchored ship. This shed also housed the firewood that fueled the adjacent steam boilers, which powered the hoist engine, located in the smaller building nearer the edge of the bluff.

The long building to its right was another freight shed that also had rails coming to its back side, as well as a platform off the front above a second apron chute. Notice the long staircase that comes up from the beach below. Passengers arriving on vessels such as those owned by the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, which had a stop here, would sometimes disembark this way when ocean conditions were calm enough.

A tall flagpole was used to signal ships at sea and in the bay. The other buildings to the right are warehouses for shipped goods. In front of them you can see the pit of the Mendocino Point Blowhole, with its sea cave below. (Photographer: John F. Sims; Gift of Barbara Hamilton)

(Walking Tours of Historic Mendocino: Join our expert docents for a stroll and lively commentary. You’ll pass by early pioneer homes, historic meeting places and buildings that make up the Mendocino Historic District. hpps://www.kelleyhousemuseum.org/walking-tours/)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, September 11, 2023

KYL AYERS, Willits. Probation revocation.

JESUS BANDA-MARIN, Ukiah. Assault on peace officer, vandalism, resisting, probation revocation.

JEANIE BETTEGA, Covelo. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, probation revocation.

KEENAN COCHRAN, Mendocino. Stolen property-vehicle.

JASON CONNER, Redwood Valley. Protective order violation.

CORNELIO MARTINEZ, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

ALVINO MIRANDA, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

JORGE TAFOYA, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

KIMBERLEE THOMPSON, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

RONALD VALENTINE JR., Ukiah. Drinking in public, disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

PENSION BUBBLE

Letter to John Dickerson (1947-2022) from This Side of the Grave

Dear John,

I was at Fowler's Auto the other day buying a car and I ran into Jeff Fowler, Ken's son. Your name came up, John. 

I remember when you, me, Ken Fowler, Ted Stephens, Jared Carter and a few other private citizens tried to hold Mendocino County accountable for its ballooning pension debt. 

We failed. Mendocino County's unfunded pension liability is currently pushing toward $275 million. But you led the way in trying to fix the problem, John. You were our leader. How I miss your leadership, your intelligence, your sense of civic duty. 

Mendocino County misses you, John.

Your pal,

John Sakowicz

THERE I WAS....

Editor,

Lol double take and…

There I was ice cream in hand sitting in my car and a beautiful lady in a SUV is checking me out or just wants to be recognized.

After she gets right next to my passenger window she does an about face go back to her car and moves it five parking spots over. Huh so what changed her mind? Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in my car that was the “tell,” but in a fleeting moment it was fun. 

Sincerely yours,

Greg Crawford 

Fort Bragg 

VIA EVERETT LILJEBERG: The biggest flower in the world, blooms every 40 years, and lasts only 4 days.

IT IS OK

To be as you are

Human, a shining star

A bright glowing gas

Of physical mass

Taking up space as we speak

Tis not for the weak-hearted or meek

While standing straight and tall

It does feel odd

A bit wobbly & unstable at first

As the energy bursts

A luminescent rebirth

Of courage & grace

Shimmering stardust

We surrender to fate

— Mazie Malone

LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH, United States, 2021

• Heart disease: 695,547
• Cancer: 605,213
• COVID-19: 416,893
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 224,935
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 162,890
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 142,342
• Alzheimer’s disease: 119,399
• Diabetes: 103,294
• Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis: 56,585
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 54,358

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The people?

The people are lost, evolved into a mess of gimme lemmings. Young people with no future, working class people who do not like to work, and older folks that remember a much better America but do not have the wherewithal to do anything about it.

It is time for the true Americans to either politically separate, or get the heck out of Dodge.

SSA records show they are paying 9 million expats right now. The primary answer from those expats for their departure is the condition of DC, the politics, AKA the Deep State.

I wonder how many folks under 65 are either out of here or thinking about it.

JONAS TROYER

A lady asks: “How much do you sell your eggs for?”

The old vendor replies “50¢ an egg, madam.” The lady says, “I'll take 6 eggs for $2.50 or I'm leaving.”

The old salesman replies “Buy them at the price you want, Madam. This is a good start for me because I haven't sold a single egg today and I need this to live.”

She bought her eggs at a bargain price and left with the feeling that she had won. 

She got into her fancy car and went to a fancy restaurant with her friend. She and her friend ordered what they wanted. They ate a little and left a lot of what they had asked for. 

They paid the bill, which was $150. The ladies gave $200 and told the fancy restaurant owner to keep the change as a tip...

This story might seem quite normal to the owner of the fancy restaurant, but very unfair to the egg seller...

The question it raises is:

Why do we always need to show that we have power when we buy from the needy? And why are we generous to those who don’t even need our generosity?

I once read this somewhere, that a father used to buy goods from poor people at high prices, even though he didn't need the things. Sometimes he paid more for them. 

I was amazed. One day his son asked him “Why are you doing this Dad?” His father replied: “It's charity wrapped in dignity, son.”

I want to challenge each one of us to do better. We can do that.

HIGH GROCERY AND GASOLINE PRICES? MONOPOLY GOUGING IS NOT GOING AWAY

What we have is a Kakistocracy: Government by the least suitable or competent members of the group thinking aristocracy.

CounterPunch.org:

“Sometime since the start of the Ukraine War, prices went up and didn’t really ever go back down. At first the problem was the moronic sanctions on Russian energy, which made every trip to the gas station as expensive as purchasing a new laptop. That imbecilic fiasco lasted for months. But finally, the prices dropped. (The president wised up to the tornado of voter fury this wild expense, left unchecked, would unleash.) They didn’t fall as low as they were pre-sanctions, but were not so high that filling the tank drained the checking account. Utility bills, however, shot up and basically stayed up. Though they since sank from their insane 2022 highs, they’re still confiscatory. So is the cost of groceries. And forget shopping for household items — that puts a capital G in “gouging.”

Inflation is with us, period. It may have eased a bit from its recent 40-year high, but, the Washington Post told us August 10 “falling inflation doesn’t mean prices are returning to pre-pandemic levels.” This article then blames rent for most recently driving the inflationary mess, before listing six items whose costs gyrated wildly in recent years: used cars, rent, gas, airfare, cereal and baked goods and eggs. And when I say gyrated, I mean soared, then did not plummet. They may have dropped a bit, but they’re still in the stratosphere compared to where they were seven or eight years ago. And the kleptocrats in Washington couldn’t care less. Why should a multimillionaire congressman worry about the cost of butter? He probably only eats in swanky restaurants anyway.

Have you flown lately? Most sane people do it as little as possible, since it tears up the environment and exposes a person to covid more effectively than any other foray into the marketplace. But for those of us with far-flung family, it’s an occasional though regular necessity, and it costs a freaking fortune. Not only that, but the pandemic legacy of overbooked flights, cancelled flights and the nightmare of non-existent staff to answer telephone queries, makes the whole experience something only a masochist could enjoy. It’s hard to say what’s worse: the initial ticket sticker shock or the very real possibility that you’ll have to shell out for a hotel at some distant airport, because the airline cancelled your connecting flight.

Meanwhile the geniuses at the Federal Reserve decided last year that the cause of these skyrocketing prices was worker compensation. Hello? Could somebody please shoot the memo to Fed chairman Jerome Powell that wages are in the toilet? And while you’re at it, remind him that mega corporations in America discovered in a big way, at least at the start of this century, that they were monopolies and therefore could jack up prices whenever they felt like it. They also deduced that the government wouldn’t do anything about it, because antitrust laws are a dead letter as far as gouging consumers is concerned.

And if those giant firms were financial — well, surprise, surprise, they could do whatever they wanted, commit any idiocies or crimes and the government would bail them out. Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama was the great mind who pioneered this disgusting form of corruption after the 2008 crash. As a candidate, he promised to rescue the beleaguered little guy, but once elected, did a full 180-degree pivot and stabbed denizens of Main Street in the back. Obama showered Wall Street crooks with all the money the presses could print, thus guaranteeing hyper-inflation somewhere further down the road. We seem lately to have begun approaching that somewhere more rapidly than the stupids who arranged this meeting ever predicted.

Lately it’s become trendy for politicos, economic bigwigs and the propaganda outlets that pass for a free press to crow about “inflation going back down,” or “receding.” According to Zerohedge August 25, those claims really only reference the Consumer Price Index. But “true inflation is cumulative — A 10 percent increase one year and a five percent increase the next year is not a win, it means that you are now paying 15 percent more on average for everything you buy in the span of only two years.” Without a wage increase — and for the vast majority of Americans those are as likely as cool breezes in Phoenix from June to September — that means you’re 15 percent poorer.

“When CPI falls, this does not mean that prices on goods and services are going down, it only indicates that prices are rising slower than they were the month or the year before,” the article explains. So forget all the happy talk about Bidenomics, whatever that is, curing inflation. It’s just more hooey to distract you from your wallet being on a diet.

Worse, Joe “Master of Climate Change Doubletalk” Biden “has been dumping U.S. strategic oil reserves on the market for the past year,” to conceal the disastrous effects of sanctioning Russian energy. “Biden has artificially manipulated the CPI down, using one key resource. Now that his ability to dump oil reserves has ended, the CPI will rise once again with energy prices.” Unless of course, the U.S. buys oil from Iran, something the Biden Bunch has evinced interest in. It’s difficult to gauge the zeal with which the white house will pursue energy from Iran, but never underestimate the tenacity of its fossil fuel monomania. Anything, I guess, rather than going full bore on renewables.

But even with Iranian oil, we’re in for hard times. That’s due to foreign de-dollarization and major American creditors like China and Saudi Arabia ditching U.S. Treasuries, which they know very well are a huge liability in the event of Washington’s omnicidal and suicidal sanctions. USTs have lost their luster abroad, for a variety of reasons — brainless economic policies at home and foreign policy that only appeals to sociopaths. But when Treasuries are in trouble, and the dollar is in trouble, so are ordinary Americans. The solution is NOT doubling down on the nitwit policies that caused the problem in the first place, but that’s all our mindless leaders can imagine.

Years of sanctions on Syria have done zip to dislodge its president? The great minds in the white house have a solution: do more of what doesn’t work. Make ordinary Syrians so hungry and sick that they flee en masse to places like Turkey and Lebanon, and later possibly Europe. Same with Iran and Venezuela. True, sanctions torture the population, a price, in Madeleine “Let the Kids Die” Albright’s words that the Empire considers “worth it.” What sanctions don’t do is replace a government that imperial mandarins regard as odious, but the delusion that that they will has afflicted Washington for decades.

So eventually Bidenomics will be unmasked as the bad joke it is. The only benefit is that this reveal means that publicly napping, warmonger Joe “Russia Has Lost” Biden will nosedive in the election. Let us all pray Cornel West wins. Because if he doesn’t, the next stage direction is “Enter Trump.”

UKRAINE, MONDAY, 11TH SEPTEMBER

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un left Pyongyang on Sunday for Russia by private train, the country's state media reported Tuesday. The US, which had warned of a potential meeting between Kim and President Vladimir Putin, urged Pyongyang not to provide weapons for Moscow's war in Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden is expected to make a final decision soon on sending long-range missiles to Ukraine. It's a major step after months of Ukrainian requests, people familiar with the discussions told CNN. 

Moscow described the G20 Summit in New Delhi as an “unconditional success” after the final declaration stopped short of explicitly condemning its invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv said the G20 had "nothing to be proud of."

Russian and Ukrainian officials reported heavy fighting in a small area of the southern front, with no clear sign as to which side may have the upper hand.

— CNN

A DAY THAT NEVER ENDED

America thought it left the War on Terror behind, but the emergency never stopped expanding

by Matt Taibbi

Twenty-two years ago jet planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. Within two hours they fell, starting fires that still burned eight days later, on September 19th, when Attorney General John Ashcroft asked for a sweeping expansion of executive power, telling congress on a Wednesday to have a bill by the end of the week. “We need every tool available to us,” Ashcroft said, and congress quickly delivered with “roving” wiretaps, warrantless searches, “trap and trace” searches, law enforcement and intelligence access to grand jury information, use of FISA monitoring for non-foreign situations, reduction or elimination of predicate requirements for FBI investigations, and elimination of judicial review for most of these activities, among many other things in the USA PATRIOT Act. It all passed on October 26th, marking just the beginning of what turned into a long period of radical change. 

From 2001 to 2008 the U.S. internationally became the world’s Death Star, constructing the most fearsome military-intelligence state ever seen. Between 1.9 and 3 million Americans served in wars after 9/11, as the open-ended 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force led not only to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but deployments in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Niger, and parts unknown, the list of foes covered by the AUMF remaining classified. Passage of new military commissions law made Guantanamo Bay the face of an anything-goes secret justice system, kept filled with “combatants” by troops from a swelling archipelago of 750 foreign bases. A “targeted killing” program headed by a fleet of CIA-run drone programs was likewise kept busy by a vast global surveillance net, newly consolidated after the creation of the 240,000-person Department of Homeland Security, the largest federal reorganization since the Defense Department’s birth in 1947. 

It’s forgotten, but Barack Obama was sent to the White House in what a lot of the voting public at the time considered a referendum on the security state. The genteel Obama played up “constitutional lawyer” credentials, announcing in a national security address at the Wilson Center in 2007 his opposition to the “color-coded politics of fear” and “a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized.” Candidate Obama added it was time to “turn the page” with more peaceful means of “drying up” support for terrorism, a strategy that hurtled him past favored Hillary Clinton in primary season. Privately however he’d already met with people like Richard Clarke, who told him, “As a president, you kill people.” This is who Obama would actually be in office, an “idealist without illusions” who expanded the buildup, institutionalized the “kill list,” and in one of his last major acts, created a new counter-disinformation authority that helped birth the censorship state. 

The 5th Circuit Court’s decision in the Missouri v. Bidencase last week, which allowed the Department of Homeland Security (and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA) to squirm free of an anti-censorship injunction, underscored the central delusion of post-9/11 America. Voters thought they shut down the War on Terror in 2008, but American citizens were instead swallowed up by it, made subjects of the global dragnet. From the Towers to Trump to Covid to today, the emergency state not only never receded but tried continually to expand, looking to make the panic of twenty-two years ago a forever thing. How do we end this day? 

911, AN ON-LINE COMMENT:

It only took a dozen terrorists…

In hindsight, 9/11 looks like it might have been the beginning of the end of the American empire.

It spawned the worst and most destructive foreign policy in the country’s history. The government response to 9/11 birthed the constitutional abomination that is the modern warrantless surveillance state.

The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people. Bush’s failed foreign policy led to directly to Obama’s presidency, and indirectly to Biden’s, both of which are responsible for diminishing the U.S. at home and abroad, militarily and economically.

After two failed forever wars that wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, our government is now desperately trying to foment potentially nuclear forever war against Russia.

Meanwhile, all the massive surveillance powers claimed by the U.S. after 9/11 are being ruthlessly deployed against American political enemies of the regime via the most insidious censorship-industrial complex the world has ever seen.

And then there’s the crippling legacy of debt enabled by America’s response to 9/11. Not content to spend trillions on poorly thought out invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, our leaders spent as thoughtlessly at home, creating insane amounts of new entitlements, while doing nothing to put the country on a sound financial footing.

And where are we today? The ruling political party is criminalizing its opposition and attempting to throw its top political opponent and his supporters in prison, all under the guise of “democracy.”

We generally remember 9/11 as the day that the towers came down. I wonder if historians will look back on it as the day that America started to fall.

THINKING ABOUT 911

by Alexander Cockburn

September 12, 2001 — Did Osama bin Laden outwit US intelligence agencies in a deadly game of decoy or double bluff? Three weeks before the attack of September 11, security at the World Trade Center was abruptly heightened; six weeks before the attack a US Army base in New Jersey was placed on top security alert.

As regards the heightened security at the Trade Center, we are told that according to a businessman working in World Trade Building number 7 (the 41-story structure that collapsed after having been evacuated) “security was heightened three weeks ago, including the introduction for the first time of sniffer dogs and the physical search of all trucks prior to their being waved into the entrance from the street.”

The US Army base in New Jersey is the Arsenal at Picatinny. At the start of July the Arsenal was placed at a very high state of alert, with some staff locked in their offices for a period.

Set this information against the fact that Osama bin Laden, now prime suspect, said in an interview three weeks ago with Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, that he planned “very, very big attacks against American interests.”

So, was there an attempted attack some time in August, or was it merely a feint by the bin Laden units, to prompt an alert, then a relaxation of US security procedures?

The Pearl Harbor base containing America’s naval might was thought to be invulnerable, yet in half an hour 2,000 were dead, and the cream of the fleet destroyed. This week, within an hour on the morning of September 11, security at three different airports was successfully breached, the crews of four large passenger jets effciently overpowered, their cockpits commandeered, and navigation coordinates reset.

In three of the four missions the assailants succeeded probably far beyond the expectations of the planners. As a feat of suicidal aviation the Pentagon kamikaze assault was particularly audacious, with eye-witness accounts describing the Boeing 767 skimming the Potomac before driving right through the low-lying Pentagon perimeter, in a sector housing Planning and Logistics.

The two Trade Center buildings were struck at what structural engineers say were the points of maximum vulnerability.

The phrases “faceless coward” and “faceless enemy” have been bandied about. The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects: rogue states (most of which, like the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, started off as creatures of US intelligence). The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.

The explosions were not an hour old before terror pundits like Anthony Cordesman, Wesley Clark, Robert Gates, and Lawrence Eagleburger were saying that these attacks had been possible “because America is a democracy,” adding that now some democratic perquisites might have to be abandoned. What might this mean? Increased domestic snooping by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies; ethnic profiling; another drive for a national ID card system…

The aftermath of the attacks did not offer a flattering exhibition of America’s leaders. For most of the day the only Bush who looked composed and in control was Laura, who happened to be waiting to testify on Capitol Hill. Her husband gave a timid and stilted initial reaction in Sarasota, Florida, then disappeared for an hour before resurfacing at Barksdale airbase in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he gave another flaccid address with every appearance of bring on tranquilizers. He was then flown to a bunker in Nebraska, before someone finally had the wit to suggest that the best place for an American President at a time of national emergency is the Oval Office.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remained invisible most of the day, even though it would have taken him only a few short steps to get to the Pentagon pressroom and make some encouraging remarks. When he did finally appear the substance of his remarks and his demeanor were even more banal and unprepossessing than those of his commander in chief. At no point did Vice-President Cheney appear in public.

Absent national political leadership, the burden of rallying the nation fell as usual upon the TV anchors, all of whom seem to have resolved early on to lower the emotional temper, though Tom Brokaw did lisp a declaration of War against Terror. One of the more ironic sights was Dan Rather talking about retaliation against bin Laden. It was Rather, wrapped in a turban, who voyaged to the Hindu Kush in the early 1980s to send back paeans to the Mujahedeen (trained and supplied by the CIA in its largest ever operation), which ushered onto the world stage such well-trained cadres as those now deployed against America.

The eyewitness reports of the collapse of the two Trade Center buildings were not inspired, at least for those who have heard the famous eyewitness radio reportage of the crash of the Hindenberg Zeppelin in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 with the anguished cry of the reporter, “Oh the humanity, the humanity.” Radio and TV reporters these days seem incapable of narrating an ongoing event with any sense of vivid language or dramatic emotive power.

The commentators were similarly incapable of explaining with any depth the likely context of the attacks. It was possible to watch the cream of the nation’s political analysts and commentating classes, hour after hour, without ever hearing the word “Israel” unless in the context of a salutary teacher on how to deal with Muslims. One could watch hour after hour without hearing any intimation that these attacks might be the consequence of the recent Israeli rampages in the Occupied Territories that have included assassinations of Palestinian leaders and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians with the use of American aircraft; that these attacks might also stem from the sanctions against Iraq that have seen upward of a million children die; that these attacks might in part be a response to US cruise missile attacks on the Sudanese factories that had been loosely fingered by US intelligence as connected to bin Laden.

THE TWIN TOWERS: 2001

by William Grimes

1.

One morning on the train to work in an early year of ESPN I read in the Times an article about a company called Telerate that aggregated mass amounts of financial data and tailored it to the needs of its customers: banks, investment and trading firms, and newspapers. After a recent successful IPO, its share price was soaring and its founder, Neil Hirsch, was quoted in the Journal as saying he was looking to expand the company’s business into non-financial information. I wondered whether he might be interested in exploring whether his company could gather more local and diverse sports information from daily and weekly newspapers than we received from the wire services. We were expanding the length and frequency of SportsCenter and additional information would be helpful.

I called Hirsch and he invited me to meet with him in his office in the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). The WTC was then twelve years old, and I had never been in either building. In the lobby I was directed by a uniformed guard to a large desk where one of the two attendants, after inquiring of my purpose and checking my identification, handed me a name tag which I attached to my jacket lapel. With a whoosh the doors of the elevator closed, and before I knew it, I arrived at the one hundred and first floor where the views of New Jersey reached into Pennsylvania and the Brooklyn Bridge looked an inch long.

After a two hour meeting in Hirsch’s office I asked for directions to the rest rooms. With a wave of the hand he motioned to a side door and said, “Use mine.” In his private bathroom I saw something I had never seen before. The water in the toilet bowl was eddying, gently swirling back and forth. I looked twice to be sure my eyes were not tricking me.

Back in his office I described what I had seen. He obviously saw the confused expression on my face which he returned with a grin of amusement.

“Normal today” he said. “With winds of fifteen to twenty miles per hour, the top of the building sways seven to eight feet. That’s normal and causes the movement you saw in toilet bowl. On really windy days, when the wind velocity doubles, the water sloshes in there. It’s like watching water through the door of a washing machine.”

2.

It was a bright sunny, sky blue September morning, and I was breathing in the cool fresh air standing outside my apartment on 79th Street hailing a taxi to take me to JFK airport. I was going to Los Angles for a telecom conference, representing our BG Media investment in a company called i3Mobile. At the terminal I hustled up the stairs to the American Airlines Admiral Club to get my boarding pass and seating assignment. There were three representatives of the airline seated behind a wide counter and I was third in one of the three lines of passengers waiting to be serviced. Behind and above them on the wall was an electronic panel listing fifteen to twenty American flights by destination, and departure time. I saw my flight was “On Time” scheduled to depart at 9:30. Happily I was an hour early.

Suddenly the panel went dark. All the flight information disappeared. The three representatives were now whispering to each other. The fellow passengers in line in front of me were asking the American agents what had happened. I couldn't hear their response but I felt something happened to delay their flights and maybe mine too. A few seconds later the three representatives simultaneously stood up. One said, “Please step into the lounge and wait for further instructions.” As we were compliantly filing through the entrance to the lounge I saw the three representatives exiting through that door I had entered. 

Inside the large lounge, about the size of a basketball court, were a couple of dozen passengers, mostly seated in chairs and couches. The floor to ceiling glass windows provided a clear view of Manhattan, ten miles away as the crow flies. A large screen television monitor, positioned to be visible to nearly all, hung on the wall.

* * *

He looked like a used car salesman, though never having set foot in a used car lot in four decades, I didn’t know what a used car salesman looked like. He was exhorting viewers to consolidate all their credit card and other debts to simplify their monthly hassle of paying so many different creditors, and even better, in the process (somehow) reduce one’s total debt. The advertiser’s 800 number flashed fire engine red. As he began to repeat his pitch he suddenly disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a picture of the World Trade Center twin towers. It appeared to be a view from above, several blocks away. The picture showed one tower spouting balls of black smoke and bursts of orange flames. The text crawl on the bottom of the screen read NEWS ALERT and the time: 8:51 AM.

A female face appeared on screen and announced. “This just in to CNN. You are looking at a live picture from a traffic helicopter at one of the World Trade Center’s towers where smoke and bursts of flames are coming out of an upper floor window, or windows. We’ll have more details as they come in.”

I walked back to the wall of windows and could see a thin line of smoke curling above the two distant buildings. I thought of Sinatra singing “On a clear day you can see forever.”

CNN was now showing the tower in full screen.

The anchor’s voice: “We have confirmation that moments ago an airplane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We do not know what kind of aircraft it was or how many passengers were aboard, or what is happening inside the tower, but as you can see the situation there looks ominous as the smoke and fire seem to be spreading.”

I heard the howl of a woman somewhere across the room. “Oh my God! My daughter works in the North Tower! I forget the floor. It’s high up. No, No.” I turned to see her stamping her feet upon the floor, shaking her cell phone, talking to no one and everyone. 

A man standing next to me said, “Horrible. Must have been a pilot error. The weather is perfect.” Made sense. A small private aircraft had veered off course and before the pilot could correct the error the plane crashed into the tower.

8:54 AM. Most of us are standing, close to the TV screen. The female anchor was back, sharing half the screen with the fiery building. “We have Sean Murtaugh, the vice president of finance for CNN, on the phone. Sean where are you?”

A crackling noise, background voices, a ringing phone, news studio confusion. A male voice: “Sean, this is Ron Taylor. You’re on the air now. What can you tell us about what you have seen?”

“Yes, Ron, I’m in my office on the twenty-first floor of 510 Plaza, about a mile from the World Trade Center but with a direct view of the two towers. Five minutes ago I saw a plane flying low, on a direct line towards the building. It didn’t seem to be out of control and from the distance it looked like it was moving slowly but deliberately. No apparent effort to avoid the tower. And then it smashed into the Tower, the North Tower, I’m pretty sure.”

Ron: “Sean, what kind of plane was it?”

“A large one, a passenger jet, I think.”

The female anchor, stoic face, was back on half screen. “Can you see it now, Sean?”

“The plane? No, I think it’s embedded in the building. It’s difficult to tell with all the smoke where the plane is, inside the tower, or maybe it broke into pieces and fell to the ground.”

Full screen picture again. Muffled voices as the two CNN studio anchors were probably in discussion with the news director, speaking to various sources, deciding what to say next.

My mind was in overdrive. How could a large commercial plane with professional pilots not avoid hitting the building? Even a small plane with a rookie pilot could crash into something less formidable, like the nearby Hudson River, and have a chance to live. This airplane embedded in the building would very likely have no survivors. And how could the impact of a small plane make all this smoke and fire? Could it be that the fire was being extinguished from the inside? I answered my own question. No, because the fire was spreading, growing, not diminishing. There was no sign of ladders or fireman with hoses scaling the building. How could there be—the fire must be eighty some stories up.

A guy standing near me dressed for presumably a long flight in polyester sweat shirt and pants and wearing gold and green Nike shoes said, “Where the hell are the helicopters? They could be used to extinguish the fire.” A voice behind me said, “Not enough time to get them up there. It’s only been ten minutes, at the most.”

Another woman, the picture of a corporate fastidiousness in tailored gray dress, leather attache case in one hand, in the other a cell phone squeezed in her ear, was speaking in increasing volume. “Oh, no. No, that can’t be right. No. He’s in a meeting there, somewhere in that building….Now!”

I focused on the TV screen. A vortex of angry smoke and fire now engulfed a third floor of the building.

8:56 AM. Ron. “We have confirmation that the plane crashed into the North Tower was an American Airlines plane but we do not yet have the flight number or the number of passengers aboard. Scores of fire engines and police cars have arrived at the Towers. What looked moments ago like only one or two floors—the 85th and 86th we believe—were on fire, we now see smoke and flames coming out the vertical column widows of at least three other floors.”

I looked around to see how others were reacting. There was an odd mixture of confused babble and riveted silence. Some eyes fixed on the screen above, others paced the floor, and the few not standing seemed unable to leave their seats, all seemingly trying to collect their thoughts. Some reached out to others, animatedly speaking, gesturing with their hands. Others remained silent, forbearing or unbelieving. I heard someone say, “We’ll still get out of here in an hour or so. Can’t see a fire, even as a serious one like this, holding up air traffic in New York, not much longer anyway.” The track suit, head bopping: “Agree, agree.”

Another rising voice. “Jesus, that’s where the Cantor

Fitzgerald offices are. North Tower at the top. My brother-in-law works there. Holy shit!” An attractive woman had her arm around a young girl’s shoulder, holding her so close they seemed to fuse together, one body, four straining eyes.

Additional voices volumed up the din.

The flames were rising higher. There’s little blue sky on the picture above the North Tower. I thought of the only lunch I had at Windows on the World, the famed restaurant on the 110th floor of the North Tower. I was with John Ziegler, the commissioner of the NHL and New Jersey Devils owner John McMillan. It was a day like this….but it wasn’t.

My reverie ended with the nearby sound of sobbing, choking and I turned to see an older woman, head in her hands, sitting on a couch next to a man who was speaking in her ear, words of consolation obviously. I glanced over at the pay phone stand and each of the four telephones was in use, serious people, heads aslant, mouths agape, mostly listening. I imagined phone lines in New York were in heavy demand.

8:59 AM. On screen. “We have a woman on the phone. Rosa, can you hear me? It’s Ron Taylor from CNN.”

“Yes, I can Ron.”

“Your last name, Rosa, and where are you?”

“It’s Rivera-Cordoza and I am in my apartment in Battery Park four blocks from the Towers.”

“What floor are you on? What can you see and what have you heard, Rosa?”

“I’m on the fifth but I have a perfect view of the Tower and the smoke is everywhere, churning like I don’t know what…..”

“What exactly did you hear and see?”

“I heard a sonic boom. I thought maybe the Concorde was back in service. I could feel my windows vibrating. My TV went off for several moments and then I went to the widow and saw the smoke and a hole in the side of the North Tower building, the one nearest me.”

“Then what? What happened next?”

“Maybe a minute or two later I heard the screaming of sirens and looked down on the streets and there were fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. I’m looking out the window now and people are walking, stumbling up the street. There’s ashes falling everywhere. It’s mayhem.” Pause. “Oh my God, right below me there’s a pile up of people coming out of the building’s entrance I can see, like football players going after a fumble. Someone’s going to get killed. “

“Thank you, Rosa. We have another caller on line.”

9:01 AM. The voice of another woman on the phone. “It looked like a missile to me. I saw it the instant before it crashed.”

“Not an airplane?”

“No. Look, I can’t be sure. I was taking my garbage out and I heard an unusual sound above, a whooshing noise, best way I can describe it. I looked up and it was speeding towards the tower. I believe it was a missile, you know the kind you see in ….”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jankowski.”

I observed that all commercials on CNN had been cancelled.

9:05 AM: Ron Taylor’s face reappears, sharing the screen with the burning building. “We have just been told the South Tower of the Trade Center has been struck by another airplane. We are trying to get a picture of the South Tower. There’s debris and ashes falling everywhere.”

Pause. Silence in the lounge.

“It is confirmed. Here’s the video, a replay from two minutes ago. See the plane approaching. Impact. High up in the tower. My God, the South Tower has a large hole in it. The airplane entered the building and its nose has come out the other side. Fire, balls of flames. Two buildings hit. It’s a calamity. Tony, roll that tape again.”

I scanned the lounge, focusing on people’s faces and their moving hands, telltale signs of uncertainty and fear. I was seeking some knowledge, some understanding of what was happening from others seeking the same thing. Nearly everyone was now totally consumed by the pictures of both towers ablaze. There was shock, no panic. It was all happening too fast, too much information never having been processed before, people unable to comprehend. I thought of the only other time my world was knocked upside down by a horrific event. The November afternoon in 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. America was stunned, shocked, forever changed.

This was different, Horribly different. I—and we were watching this disaster live on the television monitor and were able to see through the lounge window lower Manhattan, the smoke-filled sky.

9:09 AM. A man with ram-rod posture who I hadn’t noticed passed by me and said, “It’s the Reds. The Cold War never ended. The Russians have elephant memories.”

Full screen. Both buildings spewing black smoke. Ron’s voice: “It’s inconceivable these plane crashes are the result of pilot error. It has to be hijacking.”

9:12 AM: “We are going now to our CNN White House correspondent, Major Garrett, who is in Florida with President Bush. Major, you’re on.”

Major’s image appears in full screen. “Yes, Ron, the president was at an elementary school preparing to speak to the students, and Andrew Card, his chief of staff, says he has been advised of these attacks and has left the building. Card says he will report to the American public soon. We will, of course, try to be with him as this tragic day unfolds.”

9:18 AM. Full screen fire. Female anchor voice: “The FBI has confirmed that these flights were hijacked. It has not yet been determined who or what group is responsible.”

I heard someone say the word terrorist. It resounded with immediacy throughout the lounge. Terror. It was not a word with a realized meaning in our country. Yes, there was that attack on the World Trade Center back in the early nineties. But I’m not sure anyone was killed and it only destroyed a portion of the base of one Tower. Terror happened elsewhere, far beyond our seas. The word, to me, suggested shared and wide-spread fear caused by organized groups. Political conspiracies victimizing innocent victims. Terror began with reality that one malicious incident, one evil event has occurred and then spreads, creating mass fear, and like network effects, the more people who feared it the more frightening it becomes.

Now with two buildings hit all commercial flights in the air in America were being ordered to land at the nearest airport as CNN had reported minutes ago, could there still be more planes in the sky with other destinations to crash? 

I heard someone say, “It was Muslim extremists who bombed the World Trade Center before.”

Here in the American Airlines terminal with at least one of the crashed planes being an American airline carrier, maybe another American plane was heading to the American terminal at JFK. Here, an unplanned gathering of American frequent flyers, united in their moment of growing dread, divided only by individual interests of self-preservation and their own private psychology of the meaning of fear and terrorism. How many gradations of fear need exist in one’s mind before fear becomes terror?

9:21 AM. A uniformed man appeared in the entrance to the lounge, his voice rising above the din.

“Your attention, please. I am the American Airlines Admiral Club manager. As you know there has been a terrible accident at the Trade Center. All flights have been cancelled for an undetermined duration. We ask you to gather your personal items now and exit the terminal. Proceed to the parking lot across the street. We are arranging transportation for you there….”

A voice: “Transportation to where?”

Another: “What’s all this about? We want to go home.”

Another: “We are Admiral Club members. They have a reason for telling is to go to the parking lot. Let’s go.”

The man in the track suit called out “Is it terror attack?”

The manager exited.

An elderly couple who had not left the couch during the furor were now standing, the man leaning on a cane, the woman clutching his other hand. The woman said in a voice those of us near her could clearly hear, “American Airlines will take care of us. They will provide transportation. American will never abandon us here.” Faithful, longtime Admiral Club members.

Heads were shaking. Mouths twisted in grimace. Bodies moving to the exit. I watched the little girl skipping to keep pace with her mother.

I looked up at the television monitor but it was dark, lifeless.

3.

Jay was saying, “It's one of the reasons I moved out here. Not the only one but if I went through analysis, or something like that—which is not my shtick—I'd probably learn it was a major reason. I've not told the story, not the whole story to anyone before. After all these years, nearly half my life, it's always there, back of mind, middle of mind, somewhere where nothing else, no other memories live.” He smiled at the use of this solecism. “And I decided that’s what I want to do now. Tell you. Speak the words, hear how it sounds out-loud. Let’s do it.”

* * *

Jay could string a dozen sentences together without taking a breath. This I knew before today, having observed him frequently as a customer for four years at the bar of my favorite neighborhood restaurant on Chestnut Street where he tended. He worked the week day shift, opening the place at 11:30 AM, and that’s about the time I'd get there after my exercise program at Crunch down the street. Settling in that early, fifteen or so minutes before the other patrons arrived, I had the pleasure of chatting up Jay solo and he could talk you up a tree. Knowledgeable about things that fascinated me: Burning Man, Mission haunts, the Brooklyn of his youth, the ingredients of dozens of cocktails he mixed, and the history of rock and roll. Jay seemed to know the lyrics and the vocalists and bands of every pop songs and, occasionally if I or others at the bar so encouraged, he would sing along as the music from the satellite radio speakers that floated from somewhere above. He had an appealing alto voice when he hit the Frankie Valle high notes and he could twist and shimmy in that narrow space behind the bar like Chubby Checker. I pegged Jay mid-thirties with a persona crafted for a wide customer demographic.

He looked like a punk band rocker pictured in Rolling Stone magazine, like no one I had ever seen in the flesh. He was a bony guy with ebony eyes that twinkled with prior knowledge, self-amusement or innate intellect. I came to believe all three. His face, cheeks on down the neck, was mired in black stubble and his immutable clump of vertical hair, resembling a hornet’s nest singed in a nearby fire, elevated his height by three or four inches. Jerry Seinfeld would swear Jay was Cosmo Kramer. His signature attire was a chartreuse cotton dress-shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, displaying a dizzying array of multicolored tattoos. And always the narrow, solid color necktie, yellow or orange, never a pattern. From my seat at his bar, overlooking the fifteen beer taps on the wall and the scores of wine bottles in the glass door refrigerated canisters below, I could see his trousers were dark denim, no patches or holes, nothing that suggested current Gap fashion.

The bar at Della Rosa with its dozen stools, was probably ten yards in length, and Jay could cover that distance like an All- Pro corner back, often while one-handedly shaking an exotic cocktail. One of the regulars, Frank, a long time Marina resident and retired plumber with a penchant for profanity and a pink-colored Cosmo cocktail, said Jay was the best mixologist ever employed in this zip code. For me the pizza always tasted fresher and the IPA hoppier when he was behind the bar. Jay (I never knew his last name) was the real time radioactive isotope that fired up the place, a one of a kind character who made me and my fellow oldies feel young again. 

  * * *

“So this is where you hang when you're not hawking a new IPA on me?” was my greeting when I arrived that day. He was perched on a stool at the Fly Bar, a neighborhood pub near where he lived on Divisadero and Fulton. Jay had selected this venue for our talk, my interview of him. How it came that we were meeting is this past September 11 at Della Rosa I was chatting with the backup bartender, Otis, pinch-hitting for Jay, who was taking a cigarette break out on the sidewalk. I asked him, who would have been about ten years old, if he remembered 9/11. He shook his head, “Vaguely, but Jay, I know had an experience in New York that day. He mentioned he was there but I don't know the story. He's kind of sensitive about it, I think.”

* * *

Jay looked smaller today seated at the Fly Bar and even on this, his day off, he wore the chartreuse shirt and a stripe-less green necktie. He was drinking what looked like black tea in a colorless glass. He had been talking to the bar maid, a plump woman with orange hair and a nose ring. I ordered a Pinot Grigio. She poured it from an over-sized bottle. Her expression was one of momentary doubt, like what are you doing here, old man? After Jay and I exchanged the customary greetings he said, “Let’s begin.”

I pulled from a pocket my newest acquisition: a palm sized Olympus digital voice recorder and placed it on the bar between us. He nodded his OK and I hit the power switch.

“O.K. I was living in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and that morning I took the Number 2, the 7th Avenue line train to Manhattan to meet an old girlfriend I was trying to reconnect with. We both worked nightshifts in different bars and had agreed to meet at 9:30 for breakfast at a diner near where she lived on the lower West Side, way downtown. Since I was a little early I decided to get off at the Chambers Street Station and stroll the few blocks north to the restaurant. As I walked up the steps to exit the subway station I noticed the sky looked unusually gray like it was evening dusk. The only possibility of that I thought maybe the weather had changed dramatically since I left Brooklyn a half hour ago, dark clouds, a storm coming. As I reached the top of the stairs I smelled the smoke. I saw to my utter amazement maybe a dozen people running in the street, heading northbound in dress clothes, business suits, that kind of thing. What the fuck. I thought for an instant maybe it was another Puerto Rican day parade. That’s what went through my mind.

“Looking south, downtown a few blocks away, I saw what I momentarily thought was confetti in the air like in the parade for the Yanks when they won the Series. Then I saw huge balls of black smoke seeping out the windows of the upper floors of one of the World Trade Towers. The air was littered with not confetti, not anything like confetti. Falling dust: shreds of paper, scraps of metal, shards of glass, snippets of shattered clothing, strings of dangling wire and a snow blizzard of more dust and ashes. Fucking debris everywhere. I saw a chair somersaulting downward to the street, crashing a block from where I stood. The air had the smell of burning metal and chemicals, an electric fire. I began to taste burnt steel.

“Some smoke looked to be defying gravity, rising actually up from street level, coming my way, snaking around corners and through alleys, seeping through windows. At least it seemed that way. While at that moment it didn’t occur to me, later I thought the smoke was like the tidal wave in that movie, “The Day After Tomorrow.” Remember the one where because of climate change a tidal wave appeared in the Atlantic, slow at first, then accelerated and eventually engulfed Manhattan?” He paused to light up a cigarette, clearly a city ordinance violation but the orange head looked without notice and the other couple of barflies seemed to be disinterested in anything. 

“The smoke was moving uptown, in my direction and picking up speed, black clouds of mushrooming smoke. And in the next instant—and here’s something I’ve never told anyone but I’ve replayed the scene a thousand times in my head—I looked up and saw a human body falling, like a rag doll, arms and legs flung out haphazardly. Crazy. Must have been traveling eighty miles an hour, or some shit like that. I looked away as it smashed onto the street about twenty yards from where I was standing. The sound I can still hear. Nothing like it. No words invented to describe the sound of a human body wailing until the instant, the micro second, when it meets the cement street. Holy shit.”

The Fly Bar, Jay had told me when we arranged this meet, was his favorite local hang because it was a block from where he and his girlfriend lived and because of the “neighborhood heads,” his buddies, who hung out there. On the wall above the bar was a big screen TV on which Robert Mitchum was playing, black and white, the bad man in “Cape Fear.” In the back beyond the bar was a pool table with a low hanging lamp illuminating its green felt surface and a couple of heads, cues in hand, in nine ball focus. I heard the strike of the cue ball and then the rumble of scattering balls. 

We were seated at the bar near the window that looked out upon Divisadero. Jay pointed in that direction and said in an assured tone, “From here to about where that woman is crossing the street. That’s how far I was from the falling body.” He was nodding in confirmation, an estimate of a distance he would never forget. He paused, a faraway look in those now-doleful eyes, and signaled the plump orange bar maid, Jenny Lou by name, he called her. It occurred to me now with my second look that she might graduate from high school soon. “Make it an Irish coffee this time, honey.” I said, “Mine a Bloody Mary, please.”

I felt the need to press Jay on the falling man. I didn’t want to lose the momentum. “Was it a man or woman? Jay?”

“It was freaking awful. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman—it was a speeding blur. It just disintegrated on impact, a puddle of goo on the street. I thought it was lucky it didn’t hit one of the scores of people in the street bolting uptown. I thought I’d be sick. Shit happening live in Manhattan.

“Stuff was falling from the sky and people were running. That’s what it was, that’s what I saw, still see. Everything black and gray, smoke and dust. People in business clothes, some looking zombie-like, others with agony, fear on their face, running, trying to run, mouths slightly open, shoulders collapsed. Some with flapping briefcase in hand. Women clutching spiraling handbags. Everyone running uptown, away from the burning tower. I didn’t know at that point there were two burning towers. I saw a two-wheel street coffee cart, the kind you find on busy curbs in work day mornings with its proprietor inside, selling coffee and pastries. It was turned upside down on the pavement, a fucking wreck. No sign of the guy.”

He paused again, in seeming reflective mode, so uncharacteristic of Jay who seldom stopped talking even when customers spoke to him, or while mixing cocktails, changing beer kegs or inputting customer orders in the Della Rosa digital ordering device. Always talking.

“Jesus, Jay, what did you do next? Where did you go?”

“I had a thought.” A hint of a wistful smile like something had just popped into his mind. “If I were writing my story of 9/11 I’d call it Running Man. That, until what comes next, was the dominating event of the day, or my most conscious thought. Man, women and men, en masse, running in the streets of New York away from the inferno, like in that terror movie. No destination, just trying like hell to escape the dust, the smoke behind them was catching up fast.”

He paused again, and to give him the opportunity to rest that emotion, to lighten the mood a little, and to fill the void of a prolonged (for Jay) silence, I said. “Interesting you say that, Jay, because my favorite novelist, Don DeLillo’s acclaimed novel of 9/11, is titled “Falling Man.” Not because people were jumping from the Towers but because of a fictitious character, a performance artist in business suit and necktie, who a couple of weeks after the Towers fell, began to appear unannounced in city locations where he would position himself on a building ledge, atop a billboard or a platform above the train tracks and wait until a crowd formed. Then he’d jump head first toward the street, only to be saved at the last second by a safety harness which he had covertly deployed with his brother and which the crowd below initially did not see. He became known in the local media as “The Falling Man” and was arrested numerous times before his end came when he jumped from the upper reaches of the Guggenheim Museum and the safety harness malfunctioned. DeLillo uses the falling man as a metaphor of the horrors of that day when many people, like the ones you saw, actually leaped from the towers to their death. Just a little stream of consciousness, picking up on your Running Man. Maybe I should borrow that title.”

He nodded indifferently. I sensed he had lost interest in my monologue probably even before I mentioned the performing artist died. His 9/11 burden was heavy and I’d asked for it. He looked at someone across the bar while scratching his arm which provided me with a good view of his tattoos but I still couldn’t make out what the images represented. He returned his gaze to me and said, “But we’re not writing fiction, are we?”

4.

As it happened I was in the last group of passengers to leave the lounge. Maybe because I was showing the deference I learned long ago at military school, that in a moment of peril the young and stronger should defer to the needs of the elder and weaker. More likely, however, it was because I was further away from the departure doors of the lounge when we got the message to depart. Something instinctive caused me to hold back, not to push my way into the front of the line, to be considerate of others. Not all the Club members were behaving similarly. Later, in writing this story, I was reading Ian McEwan’s novel, “Enduring Love,” in which he wrote: “Cooperation is the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Selfishness too is written on our hearts.” In the next few hours I would see more of each.

In any event, standing at the top of the maybe thirty stairs leading down to the Baggage Claim and the terminal exits, I watched the clusters of three fellow travelers—the maximum number of people a step of the stairs could accommodate—hurrying downward as fast as they could, a little push, a little pull, a stumble here, a teeter there, miraculously without anyone falling to cause a pileup. I thought I was the last person to have left the lounge but behind me I heard a voice and turned to see a man I had earlier noticed there. He looked corporate in a dark suit and a polished full-grain burnt-leather briefcase in hand. Next to him was a younger guy, maybe thirty, also dressed for success. At my side, the three of us, the last departing group from the lounge, began our descent down the steps. It was slow going because others, from different stairs or elevators, were arriving at the terminal’s street-level floor, creating a sea of confused people striving to get to the exit doors.

As we piddled down the steps I said to the executive, which is how I labeled him in my mind, the executive, situated between the younger man and me, “Which way are you heading? Maybe we can share a cab?” I’m not sure whether this question was singularly motivated by finding someone with whom to share a ride or whether I was reaching out for a human connection in this moment of human disengagement, seeking a touch of that social cohesion.

He looked at me. “If we can get one. I’m thinking that may be difficult with everyone wanting to get out of here. We’re going to Westchester County. What about you?” I sort of wanted to go back home but Manhattan, even uptown, might be a dangerous place to be with perhaps with more planes heading for destruction. Then I wondered where American Airlines might take us with the likelihood of many people wanting to go somewhere else, different somewhere else's. Nonetheless, if I were fortunate enough to find my own taxi or to hook up with someone going to Manhattan, I’d say my thanks and be on my way. If there were no more taxis and buses, as I now suspected, I would happily go with them. From Westchester I could train to Darien and probably have an overnight with Tom and Marianne. Anything to not be marooned in the American Airlines parking lot at JFK on this blue and black day, the day to be forever remembered as Nine Eleven.

“Well, I was going to LA but obviously not anytime soon now. I live in Manhattan and agree that there may not be enough taxis here to accommodate all the people who want to get out of here, particularly if there are no specifics on when any available transportation will arrive.”

He nodded. “We checked out of our Manhattan hotel and were heading to Belgium but that’s not looking possible today. Our company headquarters is in Purchase, only about thirty minutes from here, and there are accommodations there where we can do some work until the planes are rescheduled. You’re welcome to come with us if we find a ride.”

9:36 AM. We reached the ground floor and followed the

swelling crowd towards the nearest exit doors. We couldn’t see any vehicles. Scores of people, bouncing off each other like bowling pins in collision, were clamoring their way towards the parking lot. Others were crowding at curbside hoping a ride would appear. The young man uttered something in the executive’s ear who nodded and said, “Good idea.” The younger executive then disappeared into the mass of the exodus. It took us maybe five minutes to advance the ten yards to and out the door of the terminal where to our dismay not a vehicle was in sight. Nor was the younger man. Most of the exiting crowd had by now crossed the street and were inching their way to the parking lot. A minute or two passed and not a vehicle appeared. Even the competitive taxi drivers of New York and the “gypsy” drivers had abandoned JFK. I was becoming resigned to the fact I would be joining the thousands in the parking lot. It was at this moment of dread I heard the beeping of a horn and saw the slowly approaching vehicle. There were still people crossing the street, not yet to the parking lot, and the driver of the van was sitting on the horn. Jogging alongside, one hand on the door of the passenger side of the blue van, was the executive’s young companion waving frantically, motioning us to join him.

The lettering on the vehicle read “Prime Time Van Service.” Connecticut license plates. It was slightly larger than a taxi with room for three passengers in the back and one in the front. Voices yelling, “Take us!” “Taxi, taxi!” “Take me! Please!” We ran the five yards to the van as the young man sprung open the back door and the three of us jumped in. Would-be passengers scrambled towards the van, grasping for the doors. The van crept forward. People begrudgingly moved out of its way, angry, anguished faces inches away from my window. One middle-aged man was able to grab hold of the van’s back door handle on the side where the young man sat. The door and the van moving at no more than five miles per hour but it was too much for the man and he let go and fell to the street surface. I couldn’t look back at him. 

As I settled in my seat feeling both lucky and guilty I saw the beautiful woman and her look alike daughter waving frantically at the van. I closed my eyes, too painful to watch.

There was room for one more person in the front passenger seat. Maybe if small like the woman and daughter two of them could fit in the back and I’d sit in the front. The driver, a burly balding man—sensing that the vacancy left room for at least one more person to escape the harrowing scene—said, “I can’t stop for another person. We might have a riot. I’m out of here. Hold on.”

The crowd cleared. The driver, with a glance back at us, said, “Manhattan has been sealed off. No vehicles allowed in or out. I told your friend here I’m am going home to Stamford. No stops. He said OK. So you all want to go or not? “

The executive, seated in the middle, replied, “Thanks. That’s good for us. Can you drop the two of us off in Purchase? It’s on the way.”

“I can do that but it’ll have to be at the exit off 95. I’ve got to get home to my family. No delays.”

“Fine. Robbe, call the office and have us picked up at the Purchase exit.”

“That’ll be $150 for the three of you. I should charge more and could get it but you got me first and this is a national emergency.”

As the van lurched forward the driver said, “Look at those poor people in the parking lot. It’s like that rooftop in Saigon when the people from our embassy were screaming for a seat in the helicopter to get the hell out of there. How they going to get those poor people out of there.” It was not a question.

Sitting by the window on the right side of the back seat I noticed the ring on the driver’s right hand that was clutching the steering. I recognized the stone was bloodstone, a green gem with sprinkles of red that resemble blood. How unusual, I thought, recalling my grandfather a wore a bloodstone ring, the birthstone for the month of March, and since we were both born that month he left that ring to me and somehow, somewhere over the living of life I lost it. In this moment of growing angst my mind rejoices in thinking of something so inconsequential. Do we divert our fears momentarily by relishing memories of mundane matters?

“Driver, I’ll stay on and get off anywhere in Stamford, hopefully at the train station, if that’s convenient.”

* * *

The van radio crackled with dispatcher directives, spasmodic static, and sudden new voices, strange language, coded messages. “Anybody uptown, uptown, uptown?” and “Come home, wanderer. Come home, wanderer.” Clear and muffled sounds of short wave radio deep in the night though it was not yet 10AM. Nearing the airport exit ahead was a long line of vehicles that had left the terminal before us. Nothing behind us but empty road. We were the very lucky last thing on wheels out of the airport.

9:58 AM: The driver switched on WINS All-News Radio.

“Give Us Twenty Four Minutes and We’ll Give You the World.” The world today was New York. I could hear the background sounds of the station’s signature ticker tape and the undulating screams of sirens.

I turned to the executive . “My name is Bill Grimes and want to thank you for letting me join you,” and leaning forward to look at his colleague said, “and you for finding this van.” I was tempted to add a comment about our good fortune but realized that would show no empathy for those thousands now stranded in the parking lot.

He offered his hand and said, “My name is Axel Coppens and my friend here is Robbe Smelts. We live in Brussels, Belgium, and work for the MasterCard Corporation. We’ve been here for a few days in company meetings at our company’s offices in Purchase, Westchester County, and were heading home. How about you?”

“I live in Manhattan and work in the communications finance business and was going to Los Angles for a telecom industry conference.”

The driver turned up the volume. “The North Tower was struck at 8:46AM by an American Airlines Boeing 757 that originated in Boston, flight number 11. The second plane was a United Airlines passenger jet that also left from Boston’s Logan and struck the South Tower at 9:03AM. We have no information on casualties other than the estimated one hundred and fifty passengers on each of the two planes. Inside the towers we don’t know but there must be a significant number of deaths and injuries. Both buildings are in flames and debris is falling out of both on the streets below. The entire World Trade Center area is blanketed in smoke and dust. People hastily scrambling to distance themselves from the towers, dodging the falling debris, heading east apparently to the ferries to Staten Island and north to midtown. This is Edgar Jameson, WINS Radio, reporting from downtown Manhattan near the scene of these terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.”

10: 12 AM: The WINS anchor with a heave in his breath: “Minutes ago the Pentagon in Washington was struck by a third commercial airliner. Parts of the complex are on fire. We will have a live report from the site in moments.”

Axel was speaking into his cell phone. “Any information on the status of their flight?” Young Robbe was on his cell also.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t charged mine in sometime and pulled it from pocket and checked. Less than half the battery life remained. I tried to call my neighborhood friend, Judy, but got a busy signal. My three kids were all in San Francisco, maybe not even be awake yet.

10.22 AM. WINS. “The degree of destruction at the Pentagon is not yet known and we are trying to get a cell call update but the telephone traffic is so great we can’t get through to our reporter who is in Washington. “

Pause. Silence in the van.

From the radio: “The South Tower has just collapsed, fallen to the ground in a sea of rubble and smoke. People have been evacuating with the help of police and firemen but there still must still be people in that building. People were seen jumping to their death.”

Jesus Christ! I hadn’t thought of that, people who had come to their offices for a normal day of work now having to decide whether to jump to their death or die from fire and smoke. What must it feel like during those two, three, or four seconds hurtling to the street below? What would one’s last thought be? People jumping and burning to death, here in New York. America. Terrorism. What the fuck! I couldn’t think about it anymore. I thought how lucky I was sitting in this van heading north to the Whitestone Bridge and then into Westchester and Connecticut. Safe.

Soon after the van was out of the airport, on the Cross Island Parkway, heading north in heavy traffic. Slow going. I asked Axel who was now off the phone whether he came to the U.S. often.

“I come for meetings about twice, three times a year. I’m president of MasterCard Europe and we usually have planning and budgeting meetings, that kind of thing in early September, you know.” This led to a brief conversation about the economy, particularly the Dot Com bubble burst and its effect on business. Axel was personable and easy to like which I fully acknowledge that in this situation nearly anyone sharing the moment would be easy to like. He drew our savior, young Robbe, into the conversation and he too was a good fellow. Companionship blossoms when buildings are falling and people are burning and jumping to death.

I wondered whether any looting had begun downtown near the fallen Towers. This tragedy is so immense, so hateful of America that I doubted even the worst of our criminals would take advantage of this horror. Americans of all color, race, religion and status, dying together. Mass murder.

11:16AM: “There is a report that a fourth passenger plane has crashed in a field in small town in the middle of Pennsylvania. No information yet about the carrier or its place of origination. Again another passenger plane possibly headed towards Washington, D.C has reportedly crashed in Pennsylvania, about one hundred and fifty miles from the capitol.” 

I looked at Axel. He was dialing his phone again. We were traveling under five miles an hour.

11:24: WINS: “The second World Trade Center tower has now collapsed. The entire area is under siege; police, fireman, first responders everywhere. Downtown is in a sea of smoke and dust.”

11:32: In the distance was the sun-splashed glittering steel suspension bridge that crosses the East River connecting Queens to Long Island. Called the Whitestone for the name of the upscale residential community wherein its southern end begins, I could see the four lanes of crawling vehicles in front of us and knew, if I didn’t already, that we were in for a long ride.

“Look, a checkpoint,” said Robbe. Ahead, a hundred yards was the Expressway’s last exit before the bridge. It was blocked by a phalanx of parked police cars, rooftop lights flashing red. Four lanes of traffic begrudgingly becoming one. Several New York State police officers with their wide brimmed hats, grey uniforms and high boots were waving the vehicles to the exit. One holding a long rifle, another was barking in to an electric megaphone. 

Four lanes merging into one. The bridge was most certainly closed. Where would we go now? Not to Manhattan, maybe somewhere in Queens or Brooklyn but that didn’t sound right. There would only be more traffic congestion and maybe mass disorder in the streets there. The only way out of here would be east into Nassau County and beyond.

Axel was off the phone and I forwarded my theory of where we were bound.

Robbe said, “Did you find out about their flight?”

“I couldn’t reach my wife and all they know at the office is her plane left London at noon London time, 6AM here, and is presumably somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. They don’t yet have information as to where it will land, not in New York for sure, maybe not in the United States.”

He looked over at me. “My brother and his wife were on their way to New York, a two week vacation in America.

They’ve never been here. I would think if the plane hasn’t turned back to London it probably will land in Greenland.”

I wondered how many planes from Europe were in the air and whether there were airports between the U.S. and Europe other than Greenland, or maybe Iceland, where they could land. Enough fuel, if too many plans need to be diverted for landing at too few airports. Those thoughts now I kept to myself having decided not to add to Axel’s worries.

His phone rang again. “Yes, dear. We’re all right. We were at Kennedy and now we’re in a van which was going to take us to Purchase but the bridge looks closed and I don’t know where we’ll go next. We are with an American man we met leaving the terminal and he thinks we will be heading east to Long Island. We don’t know yet but I’ll keep up posted. Love you so much.”

Pause. “Yes, dear. I’m safe and love you.”

Mass murder brings out from those who escape emotive words of affection and love to friends and family who perhaps had not heard those words from the witness of terror in a long time. 

* * *

Noon: We finally reached the one lane exit where we were halted by two heavily armed officers, one on each side of the van. The driver rolled down the window. A police face at his side and one now at mine.

“Where are you headed, sir? “

The driver. “To Connecticut.”

“License, please.”

I didn’t need to be told to roll down my window. This was a serious men, leaning in now, getting a good look at we three back seaters.

“Your destination. Originally and now.”

I responded. “We were at JFK waiting to board a flight. Myself and the two gentlemen here. We got the van and are headed to Westchester and Stamford.”

The cop took a long look.

“The Whitestone Bridge is closed to all but authorized vehicles. Follow the traffic. Only one way lane east on Northern Parkway to the ferry at Port Jefferson, the only way to get from here to Westchester and Stamford today.”

Northern Parkway was a two lane road, seldom used since the four lane Long Island Expressway was built a couple of decades ago. Port Jefferson was thirty-some miles from here. Top estimated speed today who knows. Then I knew we were in for a long ride because of all the traffic now heading east. At Port Jeff the ferry would be my fellow passengers only way to cross the Long Island Sound into Connecticut where they could be met by someone from their Purchase Mastercard offices. ETA? With this unprecedented traffic reduced to one lane east I thought those thirty miles would be likely be like ninety. .

We’re waved through.

11:51: WINS reports the Long Island Expressway, the wider four lane in each direction highway to the end of the Island had been closed by the Federal Government which meant there was no other road east except the one we were now stalled on. The driver switched the radio off. No one complained.

Northern State Parkway, built in the forties under the direction of the nation’s master urban planner, Robert Moses, ran eastward about thirty miles beginning here and ending at Hauppauge on the north shore of the Island. Long ago I was familiar with Northern State when I drove the Nassau County roads in my job as a claims adjuster for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. I remembered it was mostly one lane in each direction and that once driving too fast and coming around a bend on a rainy day I braked my company owned Ford Falcon too hard and the car spun a three-sixty. Luckily no traffic and the clunker never left the road. Where has this memory been for thirty years?

I’d never been to the ferry at Port Jeff but I knew it was located near where the Parkway ended and that it carried people and vehicles across the Long Island Sound to Bridgeport, Connecticut. My next thought was there would likely be a long wait to board an available ferry and so I thought arrival time for my friends to arrive at their offices might be as late as early evening.

Not a word was spoken for maybe the next hour. We were traveling on average, I estimated, eight to ten miles an hour. As far ahead as the eye could see there were nothing but vehicles, a modern caravan looking for an oasis on a one-lane parkway. We passed through Levittown-type communities, which without notice, became the next town. Fifty year old split level houses were crammed up against one floor bungalows, separated occasionally by small retail stores and intersecting streets. All along the two-lane road people were standing, watching in fear-face amazement this great exodus east. Every other block there’d be an American flag draped over a front porch or in the window of a retail store. Kids were waving stick-handle flags of red, white and blue. In one town on the sidewalk a couple of teenage girls were standing in front of a garbage can with a sign that read COLD WATER. No price. They waved paper cups as the vehicles inched by. We passed cars and an occasional truck abandoned off the road, some on sidewalks, out of gas or overheating. Every hundred yards or so a couple of police officers on foot were watching closely the crawling traffic. We passed a gas station with a long line of cars curbside waiting for a refuel.

1:37 PM. My cell phone rang. It was one of our mangers I planned to meet in Los Angles. “Are you OK?” I gave him a brief overview.

“We knew your plane was departing at 9:30 and that by then you wouldn’t have been able to take off. We left Newark at 8:15 on Continental and set down here in Cincinnati. We heard that no planes will be in the air for days and we’ve rented a car to drive back to New York. See you in a day or two.”

2:15: We had travelled maybe ten miles and we all needed a whizz break. The driver pulled off Northern a block or two from a gas station—we could get no closer—and we in twos, me with the driver, used the facilities. We bought peanuts, pretzels bottled water and Diet Cokes in the station’s store. Then we waited in line thirty more minutes before we could fill our tank.

What was my plan when we finally got to Port Jeff ? An idea struck. My boat was still docked at the Sag Harbor Yacht Club about seventy miles from where we were, maybe forty from Port Jefferson. I had employed Ronnie Lee, a veteran boatsman, that summer to care for the Chouette, my forty foot motor sail, to captain it when I hosted friends for an all day weekend sails. He was scheduled to take the boat later this week to a year round facility where it would be stored until next summer. I wasn’t sure which day but today was Tuesday and my odds were better than even he had not yet left the boat and headed off to Australia where he spent winters. If so, and if I could reach him, Ronnie could drive his convertible to Port Jefferson, pick me up and I’d go back with him to Sag and stay on my boat for a couple of days. 

After Labor Day Sag Harbor empties as the New Yorkers go back to the city. Life in September Sag was Fifties mellow—something that I would find welcoming. I was certain there would be no one working in Manhattan tomorrow or maybe even longer. I thought of the many subway lines located within a block or two of the towers. How long would it take to get them back in operation? And what about the bodies? How would they be collected and removed? The radio had reported “numerous people were jumping out the windows. No estimates yet on the number of casualties.

I dialed Ronnie’s cell and on the third ring I heard his languid voice. It never sounded better.

“I was thinking about you, in a plane going somewhere. Where are you?”

I told him and asked—I would have begged—if he could drive to Port Jef and pick me up. The time now was 2:35 PM and I estimated it would be another two hours to travel those last fifteen plus miles.

Ronnie said, “I know a restaurant there called The Lobster House. I’ll meet you there. Lucky this attack didn’t happen tomorrow. That’s when I was planning to take your boat in. I’m off to Australia the day after, you know.”

“Yes, damn lucky for me. And forget about taking the boat in tomorrow. I’ll be staying on it for a few days and I’ll get someone from the ship yard to come get it when I can go back to the city.”

I loved Ronnie.

4:27 PM: We exited Northern at Hauppauge and ahead as far as I could see was a line of several hundred vehicles waiting to board the ferry. I wasn't sure how many one ferry could accommodate but probably not more than thirty or forty cars but many more like my fellow passengers who were on foot. Knowing the ferry system in Sag employs only four ferries at a time and that the distance from Port Jef to Bridgeport, Connecticut across the Sound must be fifteen miles, it was going to be a very long wait before this van and these good fellow mates got off the Island. The van had not moved in ten minutes. The driver turned off the motor. From my view it looked like a twenty minute walk to the ferry dock where I assumed the restaurant, and I hoped Ronnie would be. I decided to walk to town.

“Axel and Robbe, I am going to say goodbye here. As you probably heard, I was on the phone with a friend who lives at the end of the Island and he will be picking me up here and take me to the end of the Island where I will be able to stay for a few days. I want to thank you both for allowing me to share your ride. I enjoyed your company and wish you well.”

Axel and I exchanged business cards.

He said, “Bill, you were good company and we’ll remember this day and the moments we shared together. Good luck.”

We simultaneously reached for each other’s hand.

“Driver,” I said, “what will be the fare?” thinking with the re-routing and delay he’d ask for double the one hundred and fifty.

He turned around slowly, “I’m not gonna charge you guys any more than the one fifty, except for gas. Make that fifty. I would have been delayed without you. And for you two going to Purchase, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take you there. It’s only fifteen minutes out of the way—assuming the traffic’s not like this. Today’s a day to be a good Samaritan, to be a real American.”

I reached into my pocket and handed Axel two fifties. He shook his head and thrusted one back in my hand. I thought about the driver and his bloodstone ring. A good guy, a good month to be born. A good goodbye.

5. 

Jay had worked that Irish coffee pretty well during my soliloquy and I was ready to plow away with “What happened next?”

“Well, here’s what happened next. I turned away from the towers and ran a block or so east. I passed a man struggling to maintain balance, blood coming out his mouth and a piece of metal, a silver shard sticking out of his stomach. Pure horror. I saw a cop—there were cops everywhere now. He was running towards the towers and I said, ‘Officer, there’s a man bleeding to death over there.’ He kept running.

“I thought I’d go the ten or fifteen blocks east to the Manhattan Bridge and walk over to Brooklyn and get back home. I looked up to see a frayed section of The New York Times sailing over my head. I turned right on Broadway and there was a dog lying motionless on the street, caked in ashes. Fleeing people skipped right over him.”

We both took long sips of our drinks and I said, “Jay, your descriptions of what you saw, heard and even smelled are terrific. Great material which I appreciate but can you say how you felt, the emotional, inner feelings, if you will.”

“Yea, that’s good. That makes it personal, more than what we know. It’s in here,” pointing to his chest and to his head “somewhere up here.

“It was surreal. A moving collage of images, police cars, fire trucks, ambulances moving people shrouded in gray and black. Not a glance, completely focused on the fire-free world ahead. Strangely, I thought, people were not screaming or yelling, they were just, running, stumbling as fast as they could. Time was suspended, I didn’t know what ten seconds or a minute meant anymore, what it felt like. Time was unmeasurable. There was noise: sirens and engines, the clamor of shoes on cement. What was worse than the noise was the air. Foul. I don’t know how to describe what I was breathing in. In human.” Jay paused to take a long swallow of his drink. “I think it was a combination of burning metal, gasoline and human bodies. There was no control over anything, all about…” He paused again, his eyes had that faraway look, focused on some distant place, somewhere out beyond that world in his head. “Yea, that’s it, I guess.”

I finished my Bloody in one long gulp, motioned Jenny Lou for another. I looked at Jay, got his attention wanted to squeeze out a little more detail.

“And then what happened?”

“Everything, the most important thing. I was now running north through a sea of moving people some of whom lost balance or were inadvertently bumped and fell onto the street. I dodged bodies, moving pretty well. A block or two later I pushed through the door of deli to escape from the congestion outside. To grab a quick breath of better air. There were a dozen people congregating around a radio behind the counter. They were talking more than listening. I knew it had to be news of the towers but I couldn’t make out what the announcer was saying. Too many other voices in semi-wail.

“It was then I saw her, the woman who haunts me more than the putrid air, more than the falling people, more the poor guy with a hunk of glass in his stomach or the dead dog. The experience with her confounds me to this day. I see her likeness in my dreams but never her face.”

I heard a guy’s voice from behind me near the front door.

“Hey there, Jay man, what’s you up to?”

“Just hanging out, dude. Catch you in a few minutes, OK?”

“Sorry, a friendly head.” He laughed and I felt somewhat pleased that Jay, forty years my junior, felt cool with using the word “head” in my presence, geezer that I was.

“Yea now, the woman was mid-thirties, maybe forty, I’d say. She was holding the hand of two children a boy maybe ten years old and a girl a couple of years younger. The woman’s face —she had to be the mother, the kids looked just like her—was expressionless like she was in a trance, her gaze fixed on what I couldn’t tell, maybe the counter activity. Maybe another world she and only she could see. Maybe nothing. The boy had the stoic look of a military high school plebe. I thought he was aware that bad things were happening but braving through it. The girl showed a couple of tear drops in standstill, half way down her face.

“A cop pushed through the door. ‘Everyone leave here now. Head north or east. Hurry. This is an emergency.’ Then he was gone.

“The people began hurriedly exiting the door but the woman didn’t move. Didn’t say a word.

“I said, ‘Lady, let’s go. We’ve to get out of here. Now.’ Her face turned in slow methodical way towards me. Her eyes looked, not at me, not in any human way, but through me, like I wasn’t there. No contact. Damnedest thing. Manhattan’s on fire and the lady’s death and dumb. Two kids in tow, scared to death, not looking at their mother, looking at me and the woman is like not there. Not a word.”

Jay breathing heavier, squirmed an inch or two in his chair. His eyes intense, reflecting what I thought was the terror coming.

“‘Focus on what I’m saying, lady. I’m leaving and you and your kids must come with me. Follow me.’ At this point the little old man behind the counter yelled, “OK, folks it’s closing time. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

“Still the woman didn’t move, didn’t speak. The kids were looking at her and the boy said, ‘Mommy. let’s go, please. We’re scared.’

“I grabbed her arm. ‘Hang on to me. Stay with me,” and led her out the door. “The crowd of running people, police cars and firetrucks on the street made progressing as difficult as exiting a sold-out rock concert at the Garden. Still holding the woman’s hand, we fought our way a block or two north until I saw an open liquor store and I led the three of them in to get a moment of relief from the corrupted air. There were several others in the store, bedraggled, panting, mostly quiet but fear ran all over their faces. I maneuvered my hand in the woman’s. I needed a better hold on her, no more time for urging or shoulder grab. Still she spoke not a word. The boy’s eyes were on me, watching this closely, sensing maybe I was the way out of this nightmare, that I was the leader or authority. Could have been because I was wearing that German military jacket I had picked up at the Army Surplus store, made me look a little like a cop or military man. It also occurred to me as I looked into the boy’s tearless brown eyes that I always looked up to my older brother when things went awry at home. Now I was big brother, maybe their only hope. The little girl whose hand I had replaced took her brother’s hand and we were all connected now, linked together. Then came the scream, amidst the shelves of liquor and wine bottles.

“‘Oh my God! The second tower has been hit. We’re under attack. Everyone out.’

“We scrambled out the door, four hands connected. We must have looked like a family with me the odd-looking daddy leading his brood out into the harrowing fray. Not that anyone looked at anyone else. Rubble was growing like kudzu, multiplying by the moment. Cops everywhere, sirens blaring, red lights illuminating falling grime, flowing detritus and the omnipresent dust. It’s the memory of the dust, the running frightened people that shaped my 9/11 but it was the woman, ghost like, who has haunted me all these years.

“We continued our way east, gripping hands, hanging on to each other, pushing through throngs of people heading in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge We stopped at one or two shops that were still open, only for a moment, to escape the dust. One I remember being a shoe store operated by a Chinese man who looked to be calmly inspecting his inventory. It was his family business and he was not going to let a fire fifteen blocks downtown cause him to lose a customer. Most establishments were closed. Lower Manhattan was occupied now by running people and first responders.

“We were a team on the run and yet in the thirty or so

minutes it took us to get to the bridge the women never uttered a word, not even a baby’s sound. She not once looked into my eyes. The girl was unabashedly crying now and the boy’s stolid look was gone, replaced by big boy fear.

“At the foot of the foot of the bridge there is a housing project with a small park and few benches. There were a dozen or so people, mostly elderly, in stupefied congregation. I led the woman and the kids to an unoccupied bench and gently pushed the woman into a seat. The children followed sans push. I suspected that we were now east of the wind and debris that was blowing north towards midtown. 

“I stood for a long moment looking down at the woman. I put my hands on her shoulders and drew close to her face. ‘Can I call someone for you?’ No response. The boy looked at me and said, ‘Mommy’s different today. She’s scared. I’m scared too.’

“I pulled the boy gently but firmly from the bench and he stood at shake attention. ‘Everything will be OK. You will be safe here. Don’t move. Take care of your mother and sister. Someone will come for you, very soon.”

I couldn’t have pulled them across the bridge with the swarm of people there, pushing, pulling, separated by inches. I wondered whether the bridge could withstand weight of the mass exodus. I felt they’d be safer here with so much police attention. Buses and cars would arrive soon taking people to safer destinations, So was my thought. 

“I have to go now. Do you have a phone number for someone I could call for you? Your father? I could call him when I have a chance, when I’m across the bridge.’

“The boy spoke hesitatingly. ‘My dad works in the World Trade Center. Don’t know his phone number, forget the name of the company. Mommy does but she’s not talking.’

“The woman looked up and for the first time her eyes met mine, the contact held for a moment and then she said, “Thank you.” She reached for my hand, held it for a second and looked away.

“As I began my trudge to the bridge, along with a few thousand others, I heard a man’s voice above the din. ‘Two passenger jets, a third one hit the Pentagon.’ 

“I walked, that’s not the word, I trudged, toiled, stumbled along with thousands over the bridge into Brooklyn.

“Of course I never have seen her again. She still hasn’t spoken to me in all my night dreams. I can close my eyes and see her face. I hope she and the kids are out there somewhere. The boy would be a man now.”

* * *

I remembered Jay saying it was one of the reasons he moved out here. I felt like another drink but Jay was done. I could tell he wanted to move on. I said my thanks and walked out the Fly Bar door. The sky was blue, the temperature perfect, high sixties and minimum humidity. It was a perfect day. Just like September 11,2001. Maybe a perfect day for the big quake.

Now the tough part: finding a taxi in San Francisco.

6.

8:30PM: Ronnie and I arrived in the old whaling village of Sag Harbor, parked the car and walked to the Corner Bar, a favorite of the locals. That night there were only two other patrons. CNN was on the screen above the bar and we watched in silence, commercial-free, for an hour. New pictures of horror, police cars abandoned, jumbled together like tinker toys; firemen, hoses pointed upwards, working their way into the buildings; gray people, caked in dust, dazed, doing the best scurry they could muster. The heart-breaking collage of smoke, fire and debris. Manhattan, Warsaw redux. Replays mostly now, except for brief interviews with local politicians all saying the same thing: terror will be punished, New Yorkers will rebound, our first responders are all time American heroes, and these deaths won't be in vain. President Bush saying something. I was on my second Kettle on the rocks.

9:50: I said good night to Ronnie and walked the quarter mile to the Yacht Club. Nearly every boat has gone, the moorings virtually vacated. The air was salt fresh. The moon full and bright. A few clouds floated past above like ancient galleons over a serene sea. September is the cruelest month.

I crossed the Club’s plank and there was the Chouette in its slip.

* * *

The next day I awoke with pictures of the towers in my head. Not sure I know who I am. I know I’m not the person I was yesterday morning. I wandered the streets of the three hundred year-old Sag Harbor where a small but important Revolutionary War battle was fought. A sole car of indistinguishable make and year chugged down Main. The town’s near deserted. Only the grocery store is open but there are few customers, none of whom is smiling. I purchased a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of chilled white wine. Back on the street, sounds of everyday life are missing, even the echoes have left. This is Nine Twelve and I hear in my head Boz Scaggs’s melancholy lament: “We’re all alone.”

Back in my boat I got through to Judy. She said the wind from the Towers had reached uptown, said the air had the odor of chemicals and charred flesh, said she couldn’t leave her apartment, said. “Don’t hurry back.”

I unwrapped the sandwich, de-corked the bottle of wine and sat on the starboard deck gazing out at the empty bay, not a ship in sight. The blue sky was cloudless. Missing today was the faint hum of commercial planes ascending northward or descending south on their flight path to and from Europe. The jingle of the few mast lines tickled by the salty breeze was the only sound in this new world. 

We’re all alone.

The boat radio airs an interview with Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He says, “The perpetrators are those we have suspected for a long time. Al Kata and Bill Lawton. We’ll bring them to justice.”

Yes, I know I didn’t know.

By evening I knew the history of Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden.

I also knew this was just the beginning.