Where Were You?

It was 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning when I began my biweekly scamper across the width of Columbia University’s campus. I had just finished up my class on the early English novel and I had five minutes to walk the five blocks and go up the eight flights that would lead me to my genetics class. I was always late to genetics, which was all right by me because it was far and away my least favorite class that I was registered for in the fall of 2001.

As I reached the black, iron gates that separate Columbia from Broadway Avenue, I was surprised to find that all but one of the six was closed. As I walked through the open gate, I caught sight of yellow police tape that was prohibiting entrance into the 116th Street Subway station. More than the average number of people chattered away frantically on their cell phones on that particular morning.

A bit frazzled from the between class rush, I stumbled into the classroom to find my normally pleasant, thirty something Canadian professor speaking in a tone that was quite different from his usually ho-hum cadence.
“What happened?” I asked naively.

He explained that two airplanes had flown into the World Trade Center. After the first one had hit, him and a colleague had gone up to the building’s roof and seen the smoke. That’s when a second plane hit the other tower. I was surprised, but I don’t think that his concise description fully conveyed the magnitude of what had transgressed. I started piecing together the shut gates and the blocked subway station.

He made an attempt to go on with class, but we were all distracted. Some administrator stopped in and somberly informed us that classes for the rest of the day had been canceled and that we should return to our dorms. The professor let us go. I returned to my building and found about fifteen people huddled around a T.V. watching the same four minutes of footage that was being broadcast over and over again.

It was frightening to watch. This was five miles downtown from us, these were streets every one of us had walked on. It looked like a volcano had erupted amidst a concrete jungle, covering everything in grey-white ash and destroying and preserving different beings and objects at its whim. The attack on the WTC was no volcanic eruption, though. Volcanoes don’t fly passenger planes into buildings, they don’t aim to kill innocent people.