Tessa Blake 9/12/2001

received 9/12/2001

passing on my journal for the last couple of days.  it's long.  feel no pressure to read. feel free to pass it on. formatting is weird.  love you all...

11 September 2001

I woke up this morning around 9am.  Thought about taking my usual run, which takes me down the Hudson River, past the World Trade Center (where I always marvel at the Wall Streeters, dressed like real people, crossing on the ferry, living utterly different lives) to the Jewish Museum and back -- a good 5-ish miles roundtrip.  But I decided I felt creaky and sluggish and, besides, I ran yesterday. So, I left Ian sleeping, went into the other side of the apartment (we are staying downstairs, while my apartment is being painted) and started working ...

[I edited out some personal detail]

... But this morning I was just trying to get my new cell phone to talk to my laptop so that we could sign on to the internet this weekend in London ... So, this morning I wasdoing all the bits to get ready for our trip. I bounced from tech support at Motorola to tech support at VoiceStream,when  I lodged a complaint that was the polite equivalent of "I don't really see the point of subscribi= ng to a cellphone service that doesn't have service" when the sweet and beleaguered woman said "well, I think that might be as a result of the events in New York thismorning."

And then she read me the AP report and then I turned on the television to the Pentagon in flames.  And then I tried to wake Ian up by saying that the White House, UN, Pentagon and State Dept. had been evacuated, that theTwin Towers had been hit by two planes, that a third plane hit the Pentagon andthat there had been a car bomb at the State Dept.  But there was no way to tell him that our world had changed without it seeming like a joke.

He thought I was kidding and kept putting a pillow over his head until he heard me gasp at the image of the plane slicing through the south building.   He got up and we watched the north building collapse together.  Standing in our underwear, holding each other, without any language, without any way to make sense of it.  I don't actually remember what we said or what we did but before long we were dressed and walking west.

There were probably a hundred people walking up 8th Avenue, more still on Hudson and literally thousands walking up the river.  Women, beautifully dressed, covered insoot,  with no purses and no shoes.  Throngs of New Yorkers, conspicuously absent of their usual city bulk -- no gym bags, or back packs or brief cases or handbags. The rare couple who had found each other in the mayhem, plotting their imminent exit from the city.

I spotted my friend, Mark, on roller blades across the crowd and was glad to have a moment with someone I know and like, someone familiar, someone also dazed, also okay. We came across a middle-aged couple, rolling a small greencarry-on and walking a black lab puppy -- all of them covered completely with sootand plaster.  They were on their way tofind their 9-year-old son who was in school on 17th Street and 9thAvenue. When we saw them they had hobbled out of the crush to sit for a moment near where we were standing staring at the billows and the absence.

Mark offered him his bottle of water and then it became clear that theyneeded as much help as they could get. Help cleaning themselves off, help getting to the school with theirnow-broken bag, help making sense of not being near their son.  Ian and Mark brought them uptown while I gathered numbers from evacuated Stuyvesant Highschool kids who couldn't reach their parents as most cell phones were worthless.

 On my way home, I rounded up people up who were standing 12 deep at payphones in the neighborhood and offered them the phone in my apartment where the local service was working.

  I spent the next hour calling parents and telling them that their children were okay. And I will never forget what it felt like to tell a frantic father that Ihad seen his 16 year old daughter, that she was fine, and that she was making her way home on foot..

My friend Bliss was stranded in the city and came to the apartment as did Ian's sister, Michelle, and her roommate, Haley.  We gathered candles and water and watchedthe news.  We walked to St. Vincent's to give blood, to no avail.  Apparentlyhospitals are in desperate need, but don't have the capacity to take it.

John Annable, my asst. editor for FIVE WIVES, was temping at Merrill Lynch, next door to the WTC. After the first explosion, a voice came over the building intercom telling everyone that all was well and that they should continue with their business(which I suppose makes sense, given that you would try to evacuate the damaged building first.  I guess.).   Then, the second explosion shook the windows and everyone ran for the doors and out to the street, where he saw people jumping out of the windows.  

My friend Marla lived across the street, and had just dropped off her five-year-old daughter Samantha at her second day of pre-k,when she rounded the corner and saw the collapse.  They were evacuated to Stuyvesant= High until it wasevacuated.  She wasn't allowed back to the apartment to pick up her baby and baby sitter and she couldn't find her husband Evan who was turned back from his quest downtown.  Finally they all found each other -- the baby and sitter were transported to east 75th -- and reunited at a= friend's apartment in the West Village. When I last saw them, Evan was sneaking back to the apartment to get Shilo, their 9-year-old yellow lab.

Our friend Jamie ran south on Water Street and caught a ferry, just as the second tower collapsed. Terrified, people dove into the Hudson after the ferry, which had just left port.  Life preservers were thrown down to them and they were ferried in the water across the river to New Jersey.

My friend Dee-Dee wrote that she "Spent the day at the Chelsea Piers--at a makeshift hospital. We worked for hours getting ready for the casualties.   They never came."  

Apparently there are still people trapped.  But with somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000people working in the building, and only 1500 injuries have been treated inarea hospitals, it becomes astonishing amateur math.

I am struck occasionally by our innocence, at our perceivedsafety in this country, at our first real brush with life under siege.

I got an email from my friend Colin who has lived in theBalkans since the early 90's.

"Hope youare okay there.  I am here.  Safe in Bosnia.
Love, Colin."

I have felt desperate to help all day.  We were unable to donate blood or to getthrough to the Red Cross by phone or web in order to volunteer. We called my friend who runs the AIDS Clinic at New York Hospital to see if she needed help.  She had a staff ready to work and nowhere to go.  I felt envious in a strange way of the workers downtown who had something to do, something concrete.

 And then I heard interviews from the front -- people in uniforms --also desperate to help and unable to do much. And then I talked to my sister who was envious that I had the opportunity to be of service in a few small ways and that, from Boston, all she could do was watch and comfort her students and wait for her kids to get home and pray.

12 September 2001

Ian and I are heading out to help with a food mission in theneighborhood Still no way to metabolize anything.

Cried all morning reading emails from people, reportingthemselves safe.

I woke up thinking that we would all be forever marked.  And what happens next determines whether we will think of this as the place that delineated our lives before and after or whether this will be recorded as an event, a single horrific tragedy.

But for now, as a city, banalities are behind us,difference amongst people eroded.  For now.