So, What Were You Doing September 11, 2001?

Shocking events will often leave vivid memories. Where were you, and what were you doing, when you about heard "X?"

Several events have left their mark in my lifetime, including:

• Assassination of JFK (I had just returned from lunch recess to Mrs. James' 2nd grade class);
• Newark riots (watched on NBC);
• Assassination of RFK (at the kitchen table, reading about it in the paper, the following morning);
• Resignation of Richard Nixon (hiking on the southern leg of the trail encircling Lake Louise, in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada);
• Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan (in the basement of the Student Union building at the University of Arizona, at lunchtime);
• Destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger (entering my lab at the Ft. Valley Experimental Forest Station, 5 mi. NW of Flagstaff, AZ);
• Death of Princess Diana (heard about the accident on the evening news, just prior to going to bed);
• Destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia (just pulled out of my driveway in Sacramento).

On September 11th, 2001, I awoke (~ 9:30 a.m.) to the sound of a car radio blaring in the DMV parking lot outside my bedroom window. Clearly, the listener felt something important was going on, and the radio was loud enough that I could make out some phrases, but it was quite baffling. The radio announcer said that the President's plane would soon land in Washington, D.C. This was strange - didn't the President's plane land nearly every day in Washington, D.C.? So, I decided something must be wrong with the President's plane, like maybe the landing gear was stuck, or something, so I ambled over to the TV and turned it on, with the thought running in my head, 'well, this ought to be good for a laugh.'

Despite people's repeated assertions on TV that the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed, I refused to believe it for at least an hour, attributing pictures of falling debris to a falling facade rather than to the structures themselves (When I tuned in, they weren't showing pictures of the second plane's impact, or pictures of the collapse taken from the distance, but rather of close-up pictures that couldn't readily show the scale of the disaster.)

Later that day, walking the streets, I noticed the absence of aircraft in the sky, and it was eerie knowing the few planes left in the sky were solely military aircraft. I wondered where those aircraft were going, and what was going to happen next. I also worried about Al Qaeda-piloted kamikaze Central Valley cropdusters dropping nerve toxins unannounced in Sacramento for at least a week or so.