Seven years after 9/11, my father (an historian) asked several friends, family members and colleagues to write down their memories of the morning the twin towers were struck. He collected these into a self-published account of that day from several different viewpoints. This is my contribution.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was in Chicago. I’d completed a couple of focus groups the night before and was to leave for Frankfurt that afternoon to continue the project. I was staying in the Westin on Michigan Avenue.

My memory of the sequence of events is a little hazy. I was looking forward to a leisurely morning before leaving for the airport. I must have been up for 15 or 20 minutes when the first plane hit. I had turned CNN on as I was brushing my teeth and brewing coffee. I saw the initial coverage and, if memory serves, I was on the phone to Rob when the second plane hit. I had called Rob immediately because I knew he’d awake and at the office; it was still very early at home. As well, Rob is from New York, and I immediately sensed that the plane was not an accident. After the second plane hit I watched for a while and then called Nancy. She was still asleep; I said something to the effect of, “Don’t be worried, I’m all right, but something really bad, of geopolitical nature, is happening.”

Since I have traveled for business for so long, I’ve long been cognizant of the possibility that something could happen – to me, to my family or the world – when I was far away from home. I can’t say I felt prepared, but I did have a plan of sorts, which was to get home as quickly as possible, no matter what and no matter how. As soon as I got off the phone with Nancy I started to make my plans. The airports were already closed – for a long time I had an automated text message stored on my phone from United telling me in anodyne terms that my Frankfurt flight had been cancelled, as if it were due to bad weather.

I called Amtrak. I was prepared for the possibility that Amtrak’s call lines would be swamped or that I wouldn’t able to secure a seat, but I got through promptly and was able to get a seat (albeit not a compartment) on that afternoon’s Empire Builder.  The call center rep was very pleasant and chatty – clearly she and her colleagues were watching events unfold on television just as I was. We talked a little bit about how odd it felt to be working and dealing with travel arrangements when so little was known and so much could be changing.

As soon as I had myself taken care of, I called my client, who was in the same hotel, and advised her to call Amtrak. Come to think of it I may have called my client before Amtrak – but I’m not sure I was that selfless. In any case, she had similar luck (and in fact better – she got a private compartment) finding a ticket back to San Jose. When she was off the phone with Amtrak, she called me back and said, “I want to get out of this hotel right now.” The hotel is next to the John Hancock Tower which, although much shorter than the Sears Tower, is nevertheless the second tallest building in a city of tall buildings. At that point none of us knew whether planes would be flying into buildings for the rest of the week, so while her reaction seemed a bit precipitate, I figured we might as well get to the train station early. (As it turns out, the train station in Chicago is right next to Sears Tower – in fact most of it is underneath Sears Tower, I believe, so it might not have been the best tactic. But Mary is the most schoolmarm, fussy client I’ve had and is not to be disagreed with, even in an emergency. She had more or less put herself into my hands after I told her to call Amtrak so I figured that if she wanted to check out, my life would not be made easier by disagreeing.)

I do remember taking the extra 15 minutes to shower – figuring it might be my last for a while – and feeling acute regret, almost fear, that I was leaving relative safety of my large corner suite for what was likely to many days of travel chaos. I was also disconcerted to leave behind CNN; even though none of us was learning anything new, the idea of having no news source at hand was even more disturbing.

By maybe eleven o’clock in the morning, we were in a taxi en route to the train station, both scheduled to leave in the mid-afternoon. The sight on the way to the train station was very odd. Every business in downtown Chicago had closed or was in the process of closing, and given what a commuter city Chicago is, waves of pedestrians were walking from the core of downtown toward the commuter rail station, which is part of the Amtrak station. It was the closest thing to the kind of exodus photos I’ve seen from the world wars. The mood on the street was somber but nothing more; I felt no sense of collective crowd panic.

Inside the train station the somber mood gave way to crowds and lines and noise, but it wasn’t really bad. We got our paper tickets promptly. The sense of urgency in the crowds was not as great as you might expect, I suppose because none of us knew exactly what to be urgent about or how. After I got my client situated in her first class waiting room, I circled around the rental car desks – my thinking was that if the trains were cancelled I could drive – but I could hear several businessmen talking in artificially calm tones about the fact that all cars were long since sold out. My next step was to go to the ATM. Fully expecting that I’d find it tapped out, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to take out $2,500. Not enough to buy a car but enough to get by for a few days if you are stranded in a small mid-Western town. (Later that day, after I was on the train, I found that I had left my ATM card in the machine and had to call Nancy on my mobile to have her call the bank to cancel the card, which added immeasurably to both our stress levels. So much for my cool-headed planning.)

I was suddenly intensely hungry in the way you can only be when you haven’t had breakfast but you’ve had a lot of stress. I walked out of the station and found one of the only restaurants remaining open which (great retrospective irony) was Middle Eastern falafel joint. I grabbed a couple of shawarmas and brought them back to eat with Mary, stopping on the way to buy us both novels at the newsstand. I found a novel I was interested in – no idea what it was – but even in this time of extreme stress and in spite of all my accommodations, my client made it clear to me that she had already read the novel I had picked out for her and would prefer the one I’d picked out for myself.

My train left just after Mary’s. Amtrak had stopped the trains outside of Chicago to do bomb checks, but given Amtrak’s usual on-time performance for transcontinental routes, I was amazed that we left only 45 minutes or so late. The train was mostly full but for the first few hours I had no one sitting next to me, and could call Nancy to let her know I was on my way home. There was no news on the train; the next morning, after we stopped somewhere in one of the plains states, someone bought a  single copy of USA Today that was gradually dissected and pass throughout the train. But that night was complete radio silence for all of us.

I was seated for dinner with 3 Microsoft salespeople coming home from a conference in Chicago. They de facto leader (probably their manager) was an awful, surly swine. They had quite a lot to drink and seemed inordinately satisfied that they had escape Chicago (as was I, but it was unseemly to discuss). In reviewing the day’s events, the man said, “Whoever they are, nuke ‘em.” That was my first inkling that our response to the events of that morning could be worse even than the events themselves.