They Jumped Together
On September 10, 2001 I got up early to catch a van ride from a resort in Panama to the Panama City airport. From there I flew, changed planes, flew, changed more planes, eventually flying into Fairbanks, Alaska in the early hours of September 11th. My mom was up, waiting for me to come in, wanting to hear about my trip. It had been wonderful. There was lots to see, lots to do, and I felt very much at home there.
I had gone with Suzan Clark, a friend since we first met working summer jobs in the University of Oregon's summer mail room. Suzan is as stallworth and steady a travel companion as you will ever meet. Long an world traveler, she does not get weirded out, fazed, or bothered by much that is out there in our diverse world.
Due to some scheduling snafu, I left Panama the day before she did.
After my trip de-brief for my mom, I went to bed about 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning. I was in full, hard, sleep when the phone rang. And rang. Furious, I stormed downstairs to answer it. It was my grandmother calling from Washington D.C., a city that my side of the family has lived in for at least 6 generations.
Grandmother was babbling. Something about how they were being bombed. Understand, my grandmother was just over 90 years old and lived alone. An alarmist by nature, she was easily spooked. I wrote it off to some odd whim of hers and deciding to share my annoyance, woke Mom up so she could deal with her mother.
I tried going back to bed, but now I was fully awake. Pissed off and awake.
I started brewing some coffee, then turned on the tube. And there it was. The Pentagon. On fire.
Over the next few days I was glued to the tube. At the time I was working for a multi-governmental agency outfit, the lead of which was the National Park Service. As a federal employee, with our center temporarily closed, I didn't have to go work. I could sit and obsess about what I saw unfolding on tv.
My friend Suzan, stuck in Panama.
Fairbanks got quiet. For the first time in my life I noticed how very still it is here without all the planes that constantly fly overhead. Downtown was virtually hollowed out. Alaska itself became an isolated island. Nothing coming across the border or through international waters and airspace. Moose hunters stuck out in camps with no idea why their chartered flights weren't coming in to pick them up. Tourists with no idea when they would be able to go home. Or how.
Eventually some of us at work decided to reopen our center, at least visiting us would give the people who had been stranded here something to do, someone to talk to.
Suzan eventually called. Upset and plenty angry, she had pieced together an elaborate plan to extricate herself from Panama. Mainly I think she just wanted to talk. We all did. The problem was: about what? There was so much going on. My grandmother was in a city on lock-down. I was living in a part of the United States that was abruptly cut off and set adrift. One of my best friends in this life was stranded in a country where she spoke very little of the language, semi-imprisoned in a hotel as the airlines decided to abandon their international customers wherever they were.
After a while things calmed down. My grandmother lived quite a few more years. Suzan's epic trip home ended up in the biggest newspaper in Oregon. I now work for a non-profit and live a quiet life.
There's just one thing:
At one point a television camera was pointing at the second tower. As I watched, sleepy and thoroughly pissed off, two figures dropped through the sky. Two people, two precious souls, chose their fate and jumped together.
These were people who had gotten up that morning, had some breakfast, slogged into work as they had countless mornings. Maybe he had turned on his computer and had taken a few moments to check the scores. Maybe she had changed into her work shoes, and was just getting started on her client calls.
There would have been no way to know that their lives would end in a few hours.
There would have been no way to know that their lives would end in a decision to throw their bodies in the void rather than burn.
They jumped together.
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