Illustration by Iain Duffus
I’m continually reminded that I owe fleeting, carefree moments to good fortune on a fateful day 20 years ago.
In the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the lives of our four immediate family members were converging in ways we didn’t realize until a couple of hours later: a daughter, Kate, working at the Statue of Liberty National Monument; a son, Michael, working in midtown Manhattan; and my husband, Tom (now deceased from Parkinson’s disease), and I returning to Richmond via an 8 a.m. flight from Newark International Airport.
Hurricane Erin had delayed our departure from Bermuda until a late-night flight to Newark on Sept. 10. We spent the night and were back at the airport at 6 a.m. on 9/11 to pick up our checked bags for the Richmond flight. With about 10 planes in front of us on the tarmac, our flight didn’t take off until around 8:40 a.m., minutes after United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco, which had been sitting ahead of us on the tarmac.
We later learned our pilot had pushed on to the scheduled Richmond destination because we were past Philadelphia when he learned that no planes were allowed to land in Washington, D.C. Once we landed — when someone at the airport announced it was closing for “an emergency” — we learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the fate of Flight 93, which had crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers foiled the terrorists who had taken control.
At Richmond International Airport, my cellphone showed no service to New York City, and dialing landlines in the area brought a busy signal. After driving home frantically to Midlothian, we reached our son, Michael. He’d been trying to reach his sister ever since people ran past him as he emerged from a subway station, black smoke filling the sky of lower Manhattan behind them, en route to his Park Avenue office.
“Everything is down in lower Manhattan,” he told us. “We’re going to have to wait until she contacts one of us.” What was unsaid was if Kate was able to contact us — we had no idea whether she was alive.
Tuesdays were her day off, the mornings when she took the staff boat to lower Manhattan from Liberty Island, where she lived in a duplex behind the statue. She always went to a World Trade Center coffee shop for breakfast and a copy of The New York Times. She was a trained EMT, training she’d received during her years as a biology major at Virginia Commonwealth University, and we knew that if she had survived, she’d be trying to help others.
Around 11 a.m. she called from Liberty Island to say only that she was OK, she loved us and the phone was needed for emergency purposes. She spent the rest of the day working at the triage center set up on Ellis Island, and for the next three days, she was at Ground Zero with other volunteers and New York rescue professionals searching for possible survivors.
Because of the shutdown of all transportation crossing the Hudson River on 9/11, Michael was unable to get home to his family in Montclair, New Jersey, so he spent the night in his dark 13th-floor office. All four of us could count ourselves among the lucky in the beginning of a new, strange war; we prayed for those who had lost loved ones that day.
We were aware of the unfolding national and global consequences. The Virginia Tourism Office, where I worked in communications, reacted right away to pull specific ads and took out a full page ad in The New York Times with the message — from one “Lovers” state to another — that “our heart goes out to you.”
This was the beginning of a 360-degree pivot for what consumers had perceived to be an uncomplicated, carefree tourism industry. For the next three days, I stared out my windows from a corner office on the 19th floor and saw no jet trails in the sky, no commercial planes taking off or coming in for landing at Richmond International Airport. The herons that flew west every afternoon were undisturbed by roaring engine noises as they went about their feeding.
I fervently prayed there would be no U.S. rush to judgment, but I recognized with each passing day that we were experiencing a milestone in world travel: the end of following comfortable routines in boarding aircraft, taking almost anything aboard that we chose and traveling anywhere we desired with few checks in place.
Today, it’s heart-wrenching to commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 while embarking on the renewed fight against a coronavirus variant, having so far lost more U.S. lives to COVID-19 than in World War II, Korea and Vietnam combined.
Again, more than once in facing the pandemic, the tourism industry has had to prove its flexibility and adaptability. Resilience through our concern for one another is again the hope for our destination.
Martha Steger is a freelance writer and editor who worked for 25 years as public relations director for the Virginia Tourism Corporation. She has received state and national awards for her articles, essays, poetry and short stories.
