Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was eating scrambled eggs and bacon at a Rotary Club breakfast meeting in Northern California when everything went upside-down.
There was a TV playing the early shows there in a corner of the room, and suddenly everyone was paying attention to that. I wasn’t sure why, but then I saw skyscrapers in flames in Manhattan, and even as the editor then of a tiny little weekly mountain town newspaper, I knew my job had just changed.
Pretty much nobody over 30 will have direct memory of that day now – how has it been 25 years? – but my primary recollections of that time is how impotent we all felt.
Something that’s hard for people to get now is that nobody knew anything for those first days. As with any mass casualty incident even now, it can take a while for details to come out, something we really chafe against in our I-want-it-all-now 24-hour news cycle. There were rumours other world cities were being attacked, there were tales of 50,000 dead. For a few shaky days, it seemed like anything could happen.
Truckee, California was far, far away from the epicentre of the day, but I scurried back to the Sierra Sun offices where one of those absurdly tiny mobile TVs was scrounged up because we knew we had to do something that day. It barely got reception, and we balanced it on one shelf with the antennas pointing out the window and could fuzzily see a tired and strained Peter Jennings seriously narrating the news, grainy images of huge explosions that didn’t seem possible.
The limitations of the era were clear to me – my small staff of reporters kept clicking refresh on the news websites of the time, but everything kept crashing. We listened to National Public Radio, to find out what we could. Nobody was posting on TikTik or Facebook then, of course, and only a few early primitive blogs could be found with tales of the day.
America was so sheltered from the kind of sudden violence so much of the rest of the world had experienced through the 20th century – and still does today. In our blinkered innocence it felt like we were somehow special, which of course was wrong.
The one image that haunted me the most is the one of the second jet hitting the World Trade Center, hurtling in oh so very, very fast and just slamming into the building and through it. The speed! In an accident it would probably be slowed down some, but the total speed and deliberateness of it as it plunged through the building – unreal.
Nobody knew what was really going on, a terrible place for a journalist to be. I trashed the plans for whatever we were leading with in that week’s paper and my reporters bashed out quick reactions from locals, about what the local airport was doing, and tried to capture a moment in time that felt impossible to capture.
Paranoia was firmly in the air for months, years afterwards. There was the brief terrifying anthrax scare where even the smallest of post offices around America would freak out over the tiniest hint of white powder.
I still remember this gem from one of the Tahoe papers at the time:
“Inside city limits, a man on Capistrano Avenue called police Saturday night after he noticed a white substance inside a newly opened roll of toilet paper. It turned out to be lint from the paper, said South Lake Tahoe Police Officer Brian Williams.”
It was a very different media world then – we barely had email, social media wasn’t a thing and we were still in the age when you often waited for news to be served to you, on the 6pm news or the comforting thwapp of the morning newspaper delivery. Headline news was a luxury for those with cable TV. I only bought my first cell phone – a chunky Nokia – after the attacks, when the idea of being able to get in touch with your loved ones instantly suddenly seemed a lot more important.
Flags sprouted everywhere in the days after – hanging from buildings, flapping from awnings, attached to car antennas. Again, nobody knew what was going to happen next, a feeling I’ve only truly encountered a few times in the decades since.
It was the end of something and the beginning of something that I honestly think we’re still not through yet on this ever-turning globe. Twenty-five years from today, I guess I’ll be an old man. I wonder what the world will look like then.
• Meanwhile, over at the day job for RNZ, I’ve written two long pieces looking in-depth about how 9/11 affected life here in New Zealand — go give them a read if you like!
Explainer: How 9/11 changed how we fly in New Zealand forever
Explainer: How did the 9/11 attacks change New Zealand?
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