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| Sky over Kansas, 9/11 |
A clear blue sky arched over Kansas on the morning
of September 11, 2001. I know that, can still see it, because driving home from
an early trip to the grocery I glanced up at the white paths of exhaust left by
planes curving back toward the airport.
We were expatriate New Yorkers living with our two
sons in suburban Johnson County, where fields of hay bales and meandering
horses lay incongruously across the road from supermarkets, high schools, and
corporate headquarters with their vast parking lots.
Leaving New York had made us unhappy. But in my
memory Kansas is always becoming a fonder place. I am trying to say that I am
glad we lived there, especially on 9/11.
At first we were shocked by the streetscape,
juxtaposed with the quiet village of tall green trees and winding streets from
which we had arrived about a year earlier. Here, busy streets
bound by sprawling church complexes and condominium developments headed south
in four lanes, dwindled to two and then one skinny road ending finally in a
little town with dust kicking up around the edges.
And circling perpetually overhead, the hawks and
turkey vultures in the astonishing sky where wind and light shifted constantly,
patterned intricately with clouds; sunrise or sunset always visible at the end
of the flat land beyond the next shopping center.
By September 11, 2001, these things had become very
familiar yet I did not feel an affinity with this place. Uneasily, I compared
my life to that of a young bride in mid-nineteenth century Kansas Territory,
waiting for the minister to pay a visit. Certainly I was still waiting that
morning at 8:15 Central Time, pulling into the garage to find the television
uncharacteristically on and the telephone ringing.
For many New Yorkers who had boarded early morning
flights to the West Coast, Kansas City would be where the planes set down.
There were so many that the airport became entirely compacted.
Among the passengers on these planes was a good
friend whose twin brother had called, panicking, to say that Chris had been
able to reach him and thought they would be landing in a few minutes. My
husband immediately left for the airport to get him. Then another friend got
through – her husband and two associates had also landed in Kansas City and
here was his information. I called my husband and he connected with Tom.
The car filled with passengers, Jeffrey drove
everyone to our home in Kansas. Tumbling out, bewildered and frightened, we hugged
and shivered in the noon sun.
One of the passengers had no personal or
professional connection to the others in the group. An executive in the
construction business, the mother of two little girls, Denise lacked even a
carry-on because she would have returned on the red-eye.
Sitting beside Chris on the descending plane, she couldn’t
place a call on her cell phone and had anxiously borrowed his to call her
husband. As they disembarked, Chris asked where she would stay in Kansas City
and persuaded her to come with him.
Several years later Denise reflected, “Getting off
a plane with a strange man in a strange city, climbing into a car driven by a
strange man with other strange people to a strange house…”
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| Sky over Chicago, 1994 |
She needed some clothing. We tried a few stores
before finding Wal-Mart open. Denise had never before shopped in a big-box
store and initially thought that one of the salesladies was my friend because
of her sweetness. Some of that was Kansas style, but also surely reflected the
catastrophic events of the day.
Enabled by our hi-tech household – a phone system
fitted for conference calls, plenty of computers, a fax machine – the group
conducted business and tried to figure out how to get back to New York.
We watched the horror unfold, shared meals and
talked about the world and ourselves, reflecting in a way that must be unique
to people who are brought together randomly in the midst of fearsome events.
Nearly a week after Tuesday, the five of them drove
east in what was surely the last available rental minivan for miles around.
After they left, I went outside and looked up at the sky. Everything around me
was my home.
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| Sky collage |
Collage + photos by Claudia Keenan
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/kansas-911-story.html
This should be in the NYT or New Yorker, really. One of your best pieces.
ReplyDeleteDenise read my account and made a correction: I couldn't reach Mike on Chris's phone.....so I called my mom and when she answered, all I could do was cry...so Chris took the phone and said something like "my name is Chris and I am sitting right next to your daughter and she is safe."
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