Graphing the end of a world

Below is an image of a very personal relic of 9/11. It is the page from my reporter's notebook, recording the very instant when the first of the Twin Towers fell. I was a New York Post columnist that morning, and ran from my apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront, notebook in hand, minutes after the second plane hit. I told my wife I was going "to get as close as I can" to the fires. I knew the only way for me to get downtown was to hoof it over the Brooklyn Bridge, so I set out from just south of Atlantic Avenue, going as fast as I could on foot.

I stopped at a little Arab Muslim-owned convenience store to buy a couple of bottles of water, figuring I'd be in for a long day covering a major fire. Everyone in the store was buzzing about the fires just across the harbor, which you could see from the street outside the store. People kept running in and out saying, "The towers are on fire," and suchlike. The owner was on the phone, laughing and smiling and talking to friends. I watched him: he looked as if he'd just won the lottery. That was the last time I shopped at that store.

I pressed toward the bridge, and saw there on Hicks Street a woman stopped in traffic. She was young, and black, and well-dressed. She had a distressed look on her face, and kept punching the keypad on her cellphone. I pulled mine out to call Julie to tell her she should probably cancel her doctor's appointment in Manhattan that morning. The phones were down. A few minutes later, I stopped at a pay phone on the corner of Montague and Remsen to call her to tell her not to go into the city today. In front of me in line was a young woman in a daze. When she hung up, she pointed to the burning towers and said, "I was supposed to be there. My son, my three-year-old, wouldn't let me go. He kept crying. He made me late. He saved my life." She wandered off in a daze. I called my wife, gave her the news, then hustled on through Brooklyn Heights toward the bridge.

When I got to the bridge, there was already a steady and thick stream of dazed people, some bloodied, ambling over the pedestrian walkway out of lower Manhattan to safety. I stopped to interview some of them about what they'd seen. I kept stopping when I could get people to talk to me, and recording their comments. At some point halfway across the bridge, a man with a boombox or a portable radio, can't remember which, called out to the crowd: "They've hit the Pentagon!" I was so angry at him for spreading what I was sure was a crazy rumor.

I went on, stopping along the way to get quotes. Then I reached the last pillar of the bridge before descending into Manhattan. There I ran into Jessie Graham, my NYPost colleague. She was out riding her bike, as she didn't come to work till later. We talked for a short while, and stared gape-mouthed at the smoking towers. Finally I said to her, "Come on, let's get down there."

No, she said. "Those things are going to come down."

I looked at her like she was crazy. "They're not going to fall down," I said. "They're the Twin Towers."

Then, seconds later, the crown of the south tower did a little twist, and there was that horrible, horrible roar, which I can hear inside my head as I type this, as the south tower collapsed. You can see on the image below the precise moment this happened, because I had my pen to my paper. At the top of the page were quotes from bystanders gathered just before the tower went down ("This is Tom Clancy. This is unbelievable." "Plain and simple and act of war." "This isn't a pizzeria w/10 employees.") But look under the line I drew -- you'll see a shaky line falling away toward the bottom of the page. That's where my pen was on the paper as my knees went weak and I literally began to fall down. I reached out and grabbed Jessie to keep from going down.

Then I wrote, in a crazy scrawl:

explosion, fell to ground people on bridge sobbing,

one woman

It's not there anymore!

It collapsed!

A short, stout young black woman in front of me threw her head back and her arms open. She looked at the sky and bellowed an apocalyptic line from Scripture: "And every knew shall bow, and every tongue confess!" She added: "It ain't over, people!"

I decided not to try to run toward the cloud of God knows what hurtling toward us, channeled by the canyons, but instead to go back to Brooklyn and be with Julie and the baby, and protect them. Nobody knew what was coming next. I didn't realize it till I got home, with a light coating of dust from the tower and carrying a croissant in a bag (I'd stopped on the way home to bring Julie some breakfast, figuring it would be a nice thing to do) that I was in some kind of shock. I got about half a block away from my front door and my cellphone rang for the first time that morning.

"Hello," I said. Then I heard Julie shriek. Suddenly, our front door opened, and she ran toward me holding baby Matthew, sobbing. Because she couldn't get me on the phone, she assumed I was dead. She remembered that I'd told her I was going to get as close as I could. If I hadn't stopped to interview those people, I'd have had time to have gotten to the towers. But I didn't know that then. I couldn't get what she was so upset about. She told me later that I was in a fog.

We went inside and I called my folks to tell them I was okay, and sent a note via e-mail to friends with the same news. Then I wrote my column for the Post, filed it for the extra edition, and then tried hard to figure out where I was.

The story of what it was like to cover the events of that morning is well-told anecdotally in a book called "Running Toward Danger," published by the Newseum. You should get this book if you are a journalism student or a media junkie. It captures the immediacy of the day. Here is an entry they published from my interview with the editors. I'm speaking about events on the afternoon and evening of 9/11:

I went out to water the plants in the back yard. There was an airplane ticket from the World Trade Center sitting in our garden. It was from May. My wife, Julie, and I went to a Lebanese Catholic church memorial that night. Some of the people there had grown up in Beirut, and they told us, "Once you smell burning human flesh, you never forget that smell. That was the smell over Brooklyn today." I realized then what was in the ash that was covering our back yard.