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The Winds of September 11 2001
Posted by Kim on September 6th, 2007
Much will be written in the next several days about September 11 2001. Not much will top this though.
The wind came when the pillar of fire became, in what seemed a moment outside of time, a pillar of smoke. We had been standing on the Promenade that morning in our thousands watching death rage at the center of a beautiful September morning. It was a morning with a clear and washed blue sky; the kind of rare New York morning when you can believe, again, that anything is possible in that city of dreams that so often dissolve into disappointment.
Anything, of course, except the two towers whose peaks were engulfed in flames.
Anything, it would seem, but what we were seeing.
And it was a morning, as I recall, that had no wind at all. That was why the flames and the smoke from the flames went almost straight up into the sky, a long sooted streak that bisected one side of the blue sky from the other.
It was, except for this one insane thing happening in the middle of our panoramic view from the Promenade, a most beautiful day; made even more so by the absence of any irritating noise from passenger jets overhead.
The last two jets into New York airspace that morning would be the last for days to come. In New York you become so used to the sound of jets overhead in New York that you don’t really hear them. What you did hear on that day was the silence of their absence. When the sound of jets came back later that afternoon it was not the sound of passenger jets but of F-16 fighters, and we were glad to hear them.
But in that mid-morning all we could see and think about were the souls trapped in the twin torches about a quarter of a mile away from us on the other side of the East River.
At a certain point in that timeless time you noticed that specks were arcing out from the sides of the buildings from just above or just below or just within the part that was in flames. Looking again you saw that the specks were people flying out from the building and plunging down the sides to disappear behind the shorter buildings that ringed the towers. You tried to imagine what must have been going on in the offices and rooms to that building that made leaping from 100 floors or more above the ground the “better” option but you didn’t have that kind of space left in your imagination. And so you looked on and watched them leap and distantly, silently fall, locked within that morning that had no time, in which all of what you had known, believed, and trusted in came, at once and forever, to a sudden frozen halt.
And then the first tower came down.
How haunting. Never forget that day because if you do, America’s soul will suffer.
September 10th, 2007 at 1:05 am
… never forget that 19 evil islamomaniac terrorists slaughtered 2,996 American civilian and US military personnel, including 120 foreigners, in three states within three hours on 9-11-01! And over 1,000 victims have yet to be found or identified! They’re not resting in peace nor in a family grave.
~AA11~…~UF175~…~AA77~…~UF175~ GOD, deliver US from evil and LET’S ROLL !!! Amen.