The Dreadful Road Trip

I’m told that one could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon from my home on September 11, 2001, barely two miles away. My coworkers in Crystal City, immediately to the south, felt our office building shake (explaining their added nervousness during the recent earthquake). I wouldn’t know. I was stranded more than 800 miles (1,300 km) away attending a quarterly business meeting as the terrible events unfolded in New York, Washington and Shanksville.

September 11 was a Tuesday that year, a gorgeous sunny day in the Midwest. We’d flown to St. Louis, Missouri the previous afternoon from all corners of the United States. It was a logical choice: middle of the country, lots of direct flights, decent September weather. We were preparing to get down to business and start our two-day meeting when the news broke.


Under Attack

I called my wife instinctively before the telephone networks clogged hopelessly with others having the exact same thought. But my call passed to her voice mail. She was sitting in an office building in downtown Washington, DC, and she was eight months pregnant with our older child (the insightful one who loves maps). I got nervous as I saw events unfolding on television, as panicked office workers fled through city streets en masse.

Most of my DC friends walked home that morning, several miles. It was the only form of “transportation” moving at a decent speed. My wife did not have that option because of her condition. She had to remain in place for several hours which, thankfully, was located in a bunker-like basement. By then the city was a ghost town and she had the easiest commute of the year. I didn’t know any of that until much later in the day. So at the time it did little to relieve my mind. Helplessness is a horribly uneasy feeling.

St. Louis Union Station (# 0669). Photo by Don Barrett; (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
St. Louis Union Station

Air traffic ground to a halt and nobody knew when flights would resume. We were stuck in St. Louis.

Our New York crew left on the afternoon of 9-11 and drove all night. The rest of us checked-out of our hotel at St. Louis’ Union Station early the next morning.

The first streaks of light greeted our long, weary treks back to home and family. Even the folks who lived in Seattle and San Francisco returned by automobile that day. We didn’t have a choice. We had to return quickly to our offices for reasons I won’t bore you with. Our services contributed directly to restoration efforts.


To the Highways

Thus began my dreadful road trip, the one I didn’t enjoy. You can still see the gash of new counties on my County Counting map if you look closely. Frankly, counting counties was the last thing on my mind. I shared a car with two coworkers and we drove non-stop except to refuel. We chose the northern route back to Washington while others in our group chose the southern; either one is fine as they’re almost exactly the same distance.

Departure. Photo by Robert Gerbig; (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Indianapolis Airport

It’s funny how a few moments of the drive come to mind vividly while the preponderance became a largely-forgotten blur. The most intense memory, the highlight or lowlight depending on one’s point of view, happened as we approached Indianapolis, Indiana. Interstate 70 abuts Indianapolis International Airport. The sight of hundreds of jet airliners parked on the tarmac in the middle of the day, none of them moving, has been seared into my brain. Many of them were FedEx cargo planes that serviced its Indianapolis hub, a place that ordinarily processes 50,000 packages a day. Chilling.


Eerily Quiet

The shock of the previous day’s events along with a total airline meltdown canceled a lot of plans. Traffic was sparse as we cruised across the Heartland. We shared the road with very few other automobiles. Even truck traffic was light with modest exceptions. FedEx wasn’t flying but they were shipping by road, as were UPS and the US Postal Service. It was us and the mail carriers sharing an Interstate with few others venturing onto the highways.

The only time we encountered traffic — and I mean that in a relative sense because it only slowed us down to the actual speed limit — occurred in Columbus, Ohio. The day was getting into afternoon by that point. Local traffic mixed with intercity trekkers to cause a few brief slow-downs.

We checked-in with loved ones by mobile phone throughout the day. I didn’t know it at the time but my wife had a large map of the United States hanging on the wall behind her desk. She moved a push-pin to each new location as I called. Apparently her entire office tracked my progress as I inched ever closer towards home.

The cell phone network was fairly well developed in 2001. However, there was one stretch of non-existent coverage: between Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania border. Otherwise the rest of the trip went uneventfully.

Back Home

I returned to the office the next morning. Then I helped staff a 24X7 operations center we’d established, which lasted until we could restore vital services.

My path took me past the Pentagon on I-395 uncountable times over the next several months. It reminded me of the first time I gazed upon the Grand Canyon except in a most terrible contradictory way. No photo or video will ever come close to what one can see with one’s own eyes.

It’s been ten years and I’ve still not returned to St. Louis. [UPDATE: Returned briefly in 2017].


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5 responses to “The Dreadful Road Trip”

  1. Peter Avatar

    At least you were lucky that some of the other meeting attendees from your area had cars. I’ve heard that getting a rental car was nearly impossible, and of course one-way rentals are exorbitantly expensive.

  2. Phil Sites Avatar

    It’s amazing how certain images sear into one’s brain surrounding that fateful day. I was flying out of Washington DC with my family only about a week prior. I remember the terminal, the rainy day, the fiddling with my moms aging laptop…memories I likely would have forgotten had I not been shocked into realizing how close I was flying out of D.C. so close to 9-11 after the events happened. Back home in Billings, MT I still went to class that day (most professors canceled, I had one that refused). I remember driving around the town and the roads were so empty. The mall parking lot – nobody. It was a ghost town.

    I came back to Washington six months later (my birthday always falls on the 1/2 year anniversary, 3-11). I remember the airport security in Montana patting me down like I’ve never experienced before, I remember air marshals two and from D.C. I remember it taking a lot to just convince me to get on a plane. In D.C. we visited the makeshift Pentagon memorial then and attended a Wizards game that included a pre-game tribute. Earlier this summer we drove up to Shanksville and paid our tributes. It’s something I will never forget and I imagine the goes for everyone who experienced that day and the months and years that have passed since.

  3. Marc Alifanz Avatar
    Marc Alifanz

    Too bad I didn’t know you then. I was living in St. Louis at the time attending law school. One of the most memorable parts of that week was playing tennis with a friend on 9/12 (all classes had been cancelled and we had nothing better to do) and noticing the eerie quiet of no air traffic at all. It wasn’t the sort of thing we noticed straight off, but once we did it was unnerving.

  4. Carl Avatar
    Carl

    I’m from Missouri too. I can remember when Union Station still had passenger trains running. I went there in the early 60’s with my dad to pick up my sister who was returning by train.

    The thing I remember most about 9/11 is looking up in the sky and seeing no planes. A few days later when they were back I remember telling a co-worker that it was nice to see the planes again. Where I live you can almost always see a plane in the sky. You pay little attention to them until an event like 9/11 happens.

    When 9/11 happened my days off from work were Tuesday and Wednesday. I had to go to work that day anyway to attend a class. Back then I almost never turned on the TV or a radio before work so I was clueless as to what was going on when I got there. It turned out my class was cancelled. I stayed at work for awhile just to talk to people. Most were scared. I later went home to watch the events unfold on TV.

  5. Harry Avatar
    Harry

    I have a friend who was in Columbus, Oh. No rental cars were available so he rented a U-Haul truck and made it home.

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