As improbable as it seems, I was in Las Vegas at a sales meeting. I was working for a laboratory company that no longer exists and our big annual meeting was held at the Hyatt Regency Lake Las Vegas (its now a Loews property). If you've ever been there, you know this is far from downtown Las Vegas and at the time it was at the very beginning of the development in that area. It was very isolated. I remember driving out there and wondering what kind of a deal they must have gotten to have us be schlepping out so far. Little did I know how isolated it would soon feel.
It was an exciting week. I always love to spend time with the people I work with that I normally only communicate with on the phone or via e-mail. Its a great time to connect. In addition, I was leaving the meeting a day early to get home and literally jump on another airplane a few hours later. We were heading to Scotland for a trip of a lifetime with our friends, Sharon and Randall to celebrate Bob's 40th birthday. There was much to look forward to.
On a weird but very real side note I also remember buying some new perfume just before the trip. It was a pink sparkling bottle of Yves Saint Laurent's Baby Doll. Kind of a girly scent for me and a bit out of character...but I remember thinking that it smelled so fantastic. I never really liked it after that week--scent memory association, I guess.
I had arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday night, so by Tuesday morning I was pretty settled in and had scoped out the property, etc. Most of the other attendees arrived on Monday and we'd had a kickoff party that night. I was up early on Tuesday morning watching the Today show. At 8:53am (5:53 am in Vegas) Katie Couric announced that a plane had crashed into the WTC and they started a live feed of the towers burning.
I watched for a minute or two and then called Bob at his office. At the time he was working at CIA headquarters in Langley. When he answered, he knew nothing about it. I remember distinctly saying "Where the hell do you you work? I though you people were supposed to know everything? How little old me in a hotel in Vegas know about this and you don't?" He stayed on the phone with me for awhile after they put it on TV in his office and we chatted and said goodbye.
A few minutes later I watched live as that second jet slammed into WTC2. I was watching the TV from the edge of the bed and I remember jumping up and screaming "NO WAY! NO WAY!" and then pacing around the room as I continued to watch. There were two women on the phone with Katie and Matt and I remember one of them was describing it from her office in a tower nearby and she saw the plane fly right past her window. She was confident and calm about what she saw even though I remember Matt saying it didn't look like a big plane to him. The other woman was on the ground watching from near Battery Park and she was very upset but doing a good job of describing the scene.
I can't remember if I talked to Bob again after that but I think I must have. I then called my colleagues, Jay T. and Al E. to see if they were awake and knew about it. Jay had seen it. Al had not. We agreed to meet in the lobby in 15 minutes. When I got down there, people were gathered in a breakfast cafe shop that had a TV on. There was standing room only. Most of the people there were from my company--the hotel was fairly empty except for our group. We got coffee and all watched together as the third plane hit the Pentagon. One woman I worked with got very upset--her dad was a General and she had every reason to think he was at the Pentagon that morning--and she ran out of the place.
A few minutes after that the news anchor person reported that there were other unaccounted for aircraft. She went on to say that their was suspicion that that aircraft was headed toward Washington D.C. I'm sure she mentioned the Capitol and the White House, but the only words I heard clear as a bell were "potentially headed toward CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia". I felt the blood drain from my face. I looked at Jay and he looked at me squarely and said, "Calm down. Just calm down." I wasn't aware that I was not calm until that point and then I noticed my hands were shaking. I then ran out of the place the same way I had seen my coworker do just moments before.
Once out of the crowd and breathing again, I began calling Bob. No answer at home. No answer at work. No cell connection (all circuits busy). Jay and Al followed me out and tried to talk me off the ledge. After 30 minutes of this I was outwardly much more calm but inwardly much more concerned. Why wouldn't he be answering his phone at work? I had just talked to him about 50 minutes earlier.
The next period of time is a blur in my memory. I think its odd that I can remember those two women on the Today show but I can't remember what happened here. The next clear recollection I have is of ending up at a table in a room with three or four phones on it and if all three of us repeatedly dialing all three numbers over and over and over again. I think our logic was that he was somewhere reachable--but the circuits were all jammed and if we could just sneak through some gap he would answer.
I have no idea how long this went on. It felt like close to two hours. Then, suddenly, he answered to a call placed by Jay. I remember his happy, relieved face as he handed me the phone with Bob on the other end. He was home. They had evacuated headquarters and it took a very long time to get off the compound and get home in all of the traffic. And of course, the cell circuits were useless so he couldn't call me.
I felt so relieved. And in a weird way I felt foolish and selfish. Of course he was fine. So many people weren't. I'll be forever grateful to Jay, especially, for standing by me and being a rock.
That issue resolved, it was on to other matters. What would we do about the meeting? How would we get home? Did anyone else have any friends or family members affected? We dropped into deliberate low and stead gear from an organizational standpoint.
The rest of Tuesday was surreal. Everyone just milled around. The meeting got cancelled and we got little direction from our management team about how to get home. Clearly, there would be no flights for some time. I don't remember much substantive but I recall that it now began to dawn on me that we were traveling overseas in 48 hours. Would that happen?
On Wednesday we made the interesting decision to go to work in our Las Vegas laboratory. I worked there often, so it wasn't totally weird. We just wanted out of that hotel and away from the isolation and sadness. Somehow, going to work seemed an antidote.
During that day we learned that our CEO (heretofore referred to as The King) had secured a private plane to take him and some of the executive management team home on Thursday. At that time it was believed that commercial passenger aircraft would not be running again until the weekend. It's an understatement to say that this really upset people. One has to question the leadership of someone who would leave 70 people who work for him behind while he flys home in a private jet. Granted, he wasn't leaving us with no food and water on a desert island, but nonetheless, people were seriously freaked out and had no idea what to do and where to go and how on earth they would get home. .
Jay was offered a seat on that plane. He turned it down. It was hard for him. His wife and kids were here and I know he wanted to go. But he knew that to leave all of those people behind was wrong and he stepped up to provide leadership--for not the first time. He used all of his energy and effort toward convincing The King to get another plane (at a cost of about $44,000). Between Wednesday and Thursday there was negotiations, logistical planning, human resource accounting, etc. We created a master list of who was with whom and where they were going. Two groups departed in rental cars headed for the east coast--NY/NJ/New England and Nashville. Others who lived in the West departed as well. On Thursday, the King and his cronies took off on that private plane just as our plans were becoming solid.
In between all of this we were making dozens of reservations through our travel agent under false names (which she'd ostensibly change to our real names later if the flights actually materialized) from all sorts of locations. Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, San Francisco, Oakland. You name it, we had three spots.
Bob and I also decided with the Wrights to cancel our trip to Scotland. By now there was a real sense that we were going to war and we did not want to be overseas in that tenuous situation. Though stories abounded of travelers who could not get refunds, that was not the case with us. United totally refunded our non-refundable tickets and all of the hotels and bed and breakfasts in which we were booked released us from our reservations with kindness and expressions of grief for our country.
On top of all of this, our specimens could not move either. Every day, the Las Vegas lab shipped specimens to the Virginia lab for testing. Specimens had not been shipped since Monday. And one of my key national customers was the most affected by this. So, I started advocating for this to be handled as well.
In the end, Jay prevailed. On Friday morning at the crack of dawn, the remaining group of us piled into a private jet (some of us sitting on the floor). And a second plane was packed with specimens and two more people, one of them being a vendor who had come to present at our meeting. Bob arranged to leave our SUV at the private terminal at Dulles and when we landed Jay and I loaded it up with specimens and drove them to the lab. Here's the only picture I have of that day. Its after we'd landed at Dulles and many folks had already taken off.
And with that, the terrible week was over. It was surreal and emotional. I will always be grateful for the friends I had there and for the sad and special bonding that took place. Almost no one on that private plane that day works where I work anymore but when we run into each other its the first thing we talk about. An odd fraternity, it seems.
This seems such a paltry tale in light of the experiences of so many people that week. But its how I experienced the events and it had an impact on me. I know how lucky I am. And I know how others were not. Every year on this day I think about those two facts and am grateful.
Finally, though the loss of life at the Pentagon and in that field in Pennsylvania is no less important, I strongly associate this day with the World Trade Center. As a girl growing up in New Jersey, their place on the skyline seemed eternal to me. I want to remember them not as a place of business or a place of tragedy...but as a place where the brilliance and commitment of humans could conquer the skies as opposed to a place where hatred tore hole in the earth.
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| Never Forget |
1 comment:
You are a beautiful, talented writer... I really enjoyed reading that account of your experience. I don't think I had heard that story in the 8 years I've known you. Wow.
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