The Falling Man

Where were you on 9/11? That’s my generation’s “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

We were preparing to go to Manitoulin. We were excited. We were packing. We were hauling coolers and bags to the Jimmy (my SUV). This would be our first trip after having just bought our house. We had no money, all of it sunk into what was truly a money pit of new needs. If you’ve never bought a house, you have no idea how much crap you need to make a home. We needed to get away for a little while. But it couldn’t cost anything, either. So, we were going to Manitoulin. All we needed was food, and we would have had to buy that, anyways.

We did not want to return to a fridge full of rot, so I made a quick trip with the perishables to my parents’ while Bev took stock checked off the packing list. My mother met me at the door.
“Have you heard what happened?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been packing.”

“The World Trade Center is on fire,” she said. “It was hit by a plane.”

My mind was on the six-hour trip ahead of us. “That’s horrible,” I said. Then I said, “Well, it’s happened before,” latching onto a bit of trivia buried deep in the detritus scattered throughout my memory. “A B-29 crashed into the Empire State Building during the War.” (It was actually a B-25.)
I went home, thinking that I had to stop for gas on the way out of town.

We jammed everything into the Jimmy and were almost out the door when my father called. “A plane hit the other World trade Center.”

“Mom told me,” I said.

“No,” he said, “another one!”

That was weird, I thought. You’d think it was impossible that two buildings could possibly be hit in the span of 24 hours. Besides, how could anyone hit one, let alone two? They were huge. They were in plain sight. Hundreds of movies and television shows told me so.

“They’re saying it’s a terrorist strike.”

Wow, I thought. But we had to get on our way if we were going to make it to Manitoulin by supper.
We jumped in the Jimmy and were on our way. We thought we ought to listen to the radio for a while instead of CDs, at least until we heard the news; surely they’d report on what was going on. We were just passing out of town, lumber mills to either side when the music on the music was interrupted.
“The World Trade Center is gone,” they said.

“Gone?” I said. “Where could it possibly have gone?” There were seven buildings, after all. They were enormous. The Twin Towers were about 415 meters tall. They were 110 stories, both of them.

The radio station cut away to a television broadcast. We heard too many references to the visual footage and had no clue what they were talking about so we turned to CBC radio for their continuing coverage; they, at least, knew we couldn’t see what was going on. We remained rooted to CBC until we lost transmission, barely speaking as we tried to process the fact that at least two planes and possibly a third airliner had been hijacked and driven into the World Trade Center, the third narrowly missing the Pentagon, only then listening to CDs, checking to see if we could pick up Sudbury CBC after a half hour, and every ten minutes or so after that until we picked up the broadcast again.

What was going on? A state of emergency had been declared. All air traffic had been forced to the ground. Borders were closed. Were we at war?

Reports were still a mass of confusion when we resumed listening as reporters asked questions that few people had answers to, relying on eyewitness reports, invariably focusing on the human tragedy, the loss of those within, the sacrifice of law and fire personnel. We kept hearing mention of “The Falling Man.”

We pulled into Espanola, fueled up, picked up a meal-to-go and other essentials from the Independent grocery store there, overhearing the one and only conversation of the day, The Discussion.

When we arrived at Bev’s family’s camp on Silver Lake, just five minutes beyond Silver Water, we turned on the TV. Of course we did. We’re a visual culture now. We turn to the TV when things happen. Nowadays people would probably turn to Twitter, but it was 2001, not 2006.

The reception was crap, more snow than picture. There was a great deal of rabbit ear and knob adjustment—it was an old tube TV, perched on top the fridge and prone to fuzz when the fridge pump kicked on.

I finally got a clear picture. Clear-ish, anyways. It was still grainy.

The first thing I saw was a vision of the eponymous Falling Man, plunging headfirst past the rush of vertically stacked windows behind him, his clothing whipped and rustling about his body, one knee drawn up to his waist, the other trailing. His head was thrown back, his eyes downcast, as though watching the ground’s rapid approach.

My heart lurched. My breath caught in my throat. My knees grew weak. I had to sit down. Tears welled up, further reducing the clarity of the man’s tragic, terrible, terrified panic and courage, and his desperate decision to have chosen such a horrific end rather than to be incinerated in the hell that must surely have raged around him.