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ONE YEAR LATER |
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 Joyce Kiefer is based in Sunnyvale, CA |
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in Real Life |
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
Sept. 11. No need to append the year. That date, how
I got its news, what I had to do next, my initial reactions and
my final one, will stick with me forever. Like Nov. 22. . .
Unlike other terrible events, such as the explosion of the Challenger
space shuttle, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 traveled way
deeper within me than the, “Oh my gosh, turn on the TV”
response. The attacks reached the level of fear and nightmare
that stemmed from childhood: buildings in collapse; airplanes
gone terribly wrong; American icons under siege, our country
finally attacked. Things like that don’t happen in real
life. I’ve always assumed that Americans live under an aura
of blessing, double-bound in California.
Soon afterward another equally deeply felt disaster came to mind:
the Loma Prieta earthquake of ’89 in the San Francisco area
where I live. Those 15 seconds of ever-intensifying shaking seemed
to have no limit in time. How would we all end up? Soon after,
a neighbor told me he just heard the Bay Bridge cracked open
and a car fell through, drowning the people inside. As a young
child I was afraid that would happen. Whenever I crossed that
bridge in the back of my dad’s car, I was always relieved
when it held up long enough for us to reach the other side. I
didn’t know how to swim.
The scariest thing is not knowing how a disaster–natural
or man-made–will end when you are in the middle of it. The
horror has dawned and you know that your life has been suddenly
reconfigured–if you survive. Any information brings a sense
of control, handing your life back to you, so you turn on the
radio and the TV. And you talk nervously to the nearest person.
As comprehension sets in, that famous law of physics takes hold:
“Any action is followed by and equal and opposite reaction.”
I think of the ricochet of a rifle against the shoulder after
you’ve fired it--something to anticipate and protect yourself
against. But there was no anticipation of Sept. 11 or of the
Quake of ’89.
My reaction to the actions of Sept. 11 was delayed because I
had to help others through theirs. I was managing a conference
of about 70 people at Stanford University. They came from all
over the country and the world. That morning my husband, Bill,
woke me to the news of the attacks. Still sleepy, I made my way
to the kitchen and turned on the TV in time for the crumpling
of the first World Trade tower. By now I knew it wasn’t
just New York that was under attack; the Pentagon got it, too.
Somehow, I didn’t consider a possible attack on our West
Coast icon, the Golden Gate Bridge. However, the terrorists did,
as we’ve recently learned. What I did wonder about was my
day at work. What happens now that we are instantly at war? Does
the show go on? What am I supposed to do that’s different
from my usual duties at these conferences–making sure the
caterers show up on time, that the place is clean, that everyone’s
questions are answered and that I find the information they need;
keeping everyone pleased.
I discovered my mission as soon as I arrived. My boss was in
tears, my co-worker–whose uncle works near the World Trade
Center–had gone home in hysterics, the first speaker was
an emotional wreck. The A/V technician showed CNN on the screen
in our lecture hall. Some of the attendees sat there, mesmerized.
Others stood huddled in small groups outside, speaking in low
tones. Clearly my mission was to personify the seamless dependability
we strive for in the presentation of all of our programs and
seminars. In non-marketing terms: To keep my head while all may
be losing theirs. For me, a real challenge.
As I grasped our situation, I recalled myself huddled under the
desk amid the shambles of our department offices in a different
place on campus the day after the Quake of ’89. The quake
had occurred at 5 p.m. the night before, but I snuck into our
red-tagged sand stone building the next morning in order to call
Bill’s family in Colorado because our home phone had stopped
working. With my desk as protection against aftershocks, I stared
at the expanding bulges and cracks in the walls and wondered
if I’d have been as cool-headed as Professor McGinn was
the day before. He was talking to a student in his upstairs office
when the quake began to toss his wall-to-ceiling book cases.
He said, “Let’s get out of here,” grabbed her
and ran outside. They threw themselves on the lawn.
Taking a deep breath, I now focused on the tasks at hand. I called
the caterer to say yes, deliver the midmorning coffee, lunch
is still iffy, I’ll call when we decide if the conference
will continue. We gave everyone two hours to decide if we should
cancel. As we’d hoped, the participants elected to stay,
even the young woman who then ran out of the auditorium in tears.
Her office was in the World Trade Center and she pictured herself
in the wreckage she had been watching on the telecast. “There
but for the grace of God,” she said.. . . But what about
her co-workers? We let her recover a few minutes outside by the
pond. Then I walked her to Stanford’s lovely Memorial Church
to think things over, to pray. I told her the church itself was
a survivor. It rose again after the devastation of two major
quakes–’06 as well as ‘89. When she returned she
wanted to donate blood for those thousands of victims in New
York who surely survived. I called the campus blood bank and
was told there were already too many donors in line.
Soon she and the other out-of-towners became preoccupied with
getting home. They spread rumors among themselves about which
planes and which routes would become functional first. As time
progressed they tried not to talk about 9/11 but within five
minutes of conversation the words would come out. They helped
each other call home and find transportation. At the end of the
week everyone chose to attend the University prayer service in
front of Memorial Church. No one chose to meet privately with
the counselor who addressed us in class.
Two weeks later Bill and I flew to the Midwest. Despite the sudden
dangers of air travel, we were determined to take a long-planned
trip to visit my husband’s family. We wouldn’t let
terrorists change our lives.
Driving the back roads of Indiana, I was filled with pride in
the U.S.A.. All those flags and signs that said “God Bless
America. United We Stand” on front porches and in front
of mom and pop stores told me that Heartland Americans, at least,
had rediscovered our country as a unified whole, that they no
longer took for granted the blessings we used to cherish.
When we returned I was amazed to see the same signs and flags
in the downtown of jaded San Francisco.
But as the year since 9/11 rolled on, the patriotism began to
seem a bit forced to me - all those memorials at Ground Zero,
fund-raising concerts, arguments about an official statue. Then
a cartoon appeared in The New Yorker, of all places, of
a fellow wearing a hat with a flag sticking out over his face.
The other person (his mother?) says, “It’s OK. You
don’t have to wear that anymore.” The customers at
Target agreed. After the Fourth of July all clothes with a patriotic
motif were marked down 75%. Plenty were left.
But I noticed something within myself and found it was true for
others, too. Whenever I began to become blase about 9/11 tributes
and special editions, one of them would jolt everything into
freshness again.
A few months ago I saw a documentary that two French brothers
set out to make about New York firefighters. They found themselves
on hand for the attacks and kept their cameras rolling. Of all
their remarkable footage, it was the background sound that I
found most horrifying: the thunk, thunk of bodies of those who
had jumped from the towers landing outside while the camera pursued
the firemen trying to route people out of one of the Trade Center
lobbies.
Pictures of the dust rising as the buildings collapsed gets me
every time. “Dust to dust,” I think. The words of the
priest on Ash Wednesday as he makes a cross with ashes on the
forehead. “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”
I recall an interview with a woman who complained that she couldn’t
keep that dust out of her Manhattan apartment. She, I thought,
had more than pulverized concrete on her coffee table.
Just before the Fourth of July I was oddly touched by something
that could happen only in Las Vegas. We were staying across the
street from the New York-New York Hotel. Set on The Strip where
hotel/casinos replicate someone’s bad idea of what an ancient
classic looked like (Caesar’s Rome, Camelot, Pharoah’s
Egypt), the NY-NY stands out for cleverly capturing the feel
of the Big Apple. A Statue of Liberty rises out of a pond with
a fire boat next to her., A roller coaster loops before the facade
of the hotel, which is made to look like a composite city block
in Manhattan.
On our first night Bill and I took a walk outside. It was midnight
and the temperature had plunged from 109 degrees to 90. The wrought
iron fence in front of the Statue of Liberty seemed to be covered
with something. We walked up for a close look. The fence was
transformed into a spontaneous tribute to New York firefighters.
It was heaped with T-shirts from fire departments across the
country. Never mind that firemen in the real New York City would
probably never see them.
A year has come full circle. I can still say that 9/11 and its
economic, political and emotional shock waves have not erased
my basic optimism that life in the U.S.–California in particular--is
as good as it gets in this world. We are not burdened by a sense
of fate, deserved punishment, resignation, or defeat. Anyone
can change their life for the better or at least try. As a young
child I huddled in the basement with my parents when the air
raid sirens blew during World War II, wondering if the Japanese
would attack us or if this was just another drill. When the war
was over, my parents told me that war is not “the way things
are” in America. We put the memories of air raid drills
and Victory Gardens behind us and resumed a “normal”
life that I couldn’t recall.
We should have been wiser about earthquakes. Stress builds constantly
in the faults deep beneath the feet, then suddenly jolts the
continental plates into new configurations without any detectible
warning. The San Andreas is one of many faults that seam the
Bay Area. The Quake of ’89 occurred on one of the lesser
ones. When the earth moves there is no escape.
Family history alone should have installed a wariness of the
earth beneath our feet. My mother was an infant in San Francisco
in 1906 when much of The City was reduced to rubble, first by
quake, then by fire. But nine years later San Francisco rose
again and put on a world’s fair. That kind of fearless optimism
left its imprint. We never cringed when the windows rattled and
the room swayed a bit. “Did you feel that?” It was
almost fun.
Both the Quake of ’89 and Sept. 11 challenged my assumption
that invulnerability can come with place. Like scary movies and
overactive imagination, these events presented a crazy world
where buildings collapse with people running before them in panic
and where houses sink sideways into the ground. It’s hard
to believe this world is “home.”
But fear of unexpected death does not define my final reaction
to both events. Neither does a sense of fatalistic resignation.
The optimism imprinted by the culture of my country and my family
is too strong for that. I and my countrymen do more than muddle
through and survive; we resume the march forward. We don’t
know how to do anything else.
But I can no longer shove bad things behind me and seal them
off in a mental box called “aberrations” or “the
past.” Neither should anyone else. The horror-come-true
lurks in the realm of possibility for all of us on Planet Earth
because an evil streak still runs deep within all human beings.
And because the Acts of God we call natural disasters were set
in motion when the earth first coagulated and began to spin.
Both are part of our present.
There are no official war zones or disaster areas. They are everywhere.
Survival of the spirit, I now fully understand, is going through
disaster–natural or man-made - without shunning those waves
of fear, horror, and helplessness but facing them to find what
God might teach us through them and what we might learn about
ourselves. I think this is why my personal reaction to 9/11 and
the public ones continue on and why, at the drop of a hat, I
and others in the Bay Area will tell where we were when the earthquake
struck 13 years ago.. It’s why we Americans continue to
build those little altars, even in Las Vegas.
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
The logo illustration is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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