Dear Family,

In May the New York City office offered Emil, who is a structural engineer, a job as project manager on the construction and tenant finish of a high rise office building on the edge of the Hudson River, and I took a year’s leave of absence from Texas Tech University to come with him.  We are living on the New Jersey bank of the Hudson River, directly across from the World Trade Center, and I watched the attack from there.  Emil saw it from his office, which is just across the street.  He had an 8:30 am meeting Tuesday in the Queens but it had been cancelled, he would have gone through the WTC much earlier than the 9 am attack and would have been stranded in the Queens.   Although I go to Manhattan nearly every day, I was home when the planes hit.  I had spent Monday wandering around the lower Manhattan that isn’t there any more. Once in New Jersey I was so tired I could barely pull myself up the subway stairs.  On Tuesday I was still tired  -- I am, after all, sixty-three – so I didn’t go to the city.

I didn’t see the first plane hit. I was standing with my back to the window, heard a boom, and turned around to see smoke billowing from Building One. The plane was on the other side of the building so I had to rely on the TV to know what happened, and it was several minutes before they reported anything. All I could see was fire and smoke and what looked like water flooding down the side of the building.  Emil saw it better from his office window.  Later I saw debris flying down, and if some of it was bodies, I didn’t know that.  The second plane came up the river and disappeared behind Building Two, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see it again – it was like watching a cartoon where things disappear or go through solid objects. I didn’t think that it hit the building, because I assumed that my perspective was wrong and that the plane was much further away that it really was.  The mind tries to impose some kind of sense on things.

I was watching when the first building, the one the second plane hit, collapsed. It just suddenly wasn’t there any more. By the time the second building fell Emil’s office had been closed, so he was home and together we watched it go. Emil said that the vertical columns of the buildings held but that the intense heat and the superheated air softened the horizontal beams until they failed, or buckled, in those stories that were above the crash. This pulled in the vertical beams and then each floor crashed into the floor below, which is why the buildings went straight down instead of falling sideways. “Pancaking,” he called it, and although it meant less damage to the adjacent buildings and the people outside in the area around the base, it is also why almost no one inside the buildings survived.  Hospitals were standing by for hundreds of survivors who didn’t come. Emil also thinks that no one jumped out of those windows, as the television keeps saying, but instead they were blown out as finishes flashed.  In that superheated air, he says, just opening a door allowing oxygen in causing enough of an explosion to send a body across a room and through a window. We watched the area burn for the rest of the day; the television didn’t make clear how many other buildings were also on fire.

Two of Emil’s co-workers spent Tuesday night with us because they could not get home to Long Island and Staten Island. The husband of one of them worked at the Deutsche Bank across the street from the first building to go.  She finally heard from him about one o’clock. He stepped over parts of bodies to get out right after the planes hit and then just started walking north.  He got to Penn Station, on 34th Street, and then took a bus to a branch office of his bank, where he and various co- survivors starting planning banking strategy.  Our guests left in the morning, convinced that they could somehow get where they needed to be. They could get by Path to 33rd Street and then maybe walk across a bridge to Brooklyn or Queens and find a train or a ferry home. New Yorkers are a stalwart people.

It was so queer– a half-mile away people were dying in agony and here we sat in air-conditioned comfort, unable to do anything except drink coffee, sleep in comfortable beds, and watch a parade of ferry boats carry bodies across the river to where an army of ambulances next to the building Emil is constructing wait to take them to New Jersey morgues. Maybe ten thousand people were dead a half-mile away but the delis were making sandwiches and I had to go out and get some Pine Sol so I could scrub the kitchen floor where I spilled tomato sauce from the pasta we served Tuesday night. There’s the same disconnect visually. Although the rubble is five stories deep and what is beneath is too awful to think about, and although the city that I walked about it Monday isn’t there anymore, we don’t see devastation from our apartment. The buildings on the west side of the WTC are unscathed on the riverside, bordered by lush green grass, bright flowers and trees whose branches wave gently in the breeze. The river is bright blue and silver, sparking in the bright sunshine and terribly (I mean that literally) peaceful. We see smoke behind the first line of buildings but not the gray desolation that we see on TV.

Oddly enough, at night there are lights on in some of the partly destroyed buildings, although there are fewer lights each night. Fireboats line the east bank and police boats cruise up and down. Sunday night a huge hospital ship went past. The city has brought in Klieg lights for the rescue workers, so we still see the bright lights of lower Manhattan, just not the right ones and with a big hole in the air where the WTC ought to be.  Behind those lights, of course, is Brooklyn, all lit up. The air smells like burning plastic. Saturday and Sunday we watched barges carrying the rubble down the river as well as ferries carrying the dead, but this morning among the barges there are ferry boats carrying people to work on Wall Street.

We had a candlelight vigil Friday night at the apartment complex, and it included Americans of every faith or no faith. There were Sikhs in turbans, Indian women in saris, African-Americans in dreadlocks and suits, women with Muslim headgear, middle-aged Westerners in suits and ties, tough construction workers in hard hats and dusty pants, kids in grungy jeans, and carefully-groomed yuppies dressed to the nines. We could have posed for a politically correct poster but in fact it was just the people who live here, a cross -section of America, united in nothing but love of country and sorrow for the dead. May God bless all of us and keep all of us safe in these times that define but must not divide us.

Emil & Sara