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January 21, 2003 ~ Where I Was When...
Tuesday.
I don't usually post this sort of thing, but Shelly posted it a while back and I thought that it would be interesting... I'm not sure if the dates given are completely correct. Let me know.
where were you when...
1. When John F. Kennedy was shot (11/22/1963)
Considering that my mother was only four years old at that point... Somewhere other than in this body.
2. When Mt. St. Helens blew (5/18/1980)
I was six months old, in Portland, Oregon, so of course I don't personally remember it. The blast could be seen all the way to California. My mother says that, when the ash began to fall like grey snow and everyone was wearing those facemask filters that cover just your nose and mouth (to allow you to breathe), she tried to use one on me, but it was too big for a newborn and covered my entire face. I of course don't remember anything about St. Helens exploding, but I grew up with the lore surrounding me. My father had quart bottles in his workshop filled with ash from different areas. Some thin, some thick and course, some from right outside our house and some from little towns in Washington. And, of course, with Mt. Hood looming over Portland and predictions that it could explode soon too, volcanoes were a very real and constant threat to my imaginative childhood mind.
3. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (1/28/1986)
I was at home watching it. I was six years old, in Kindergarten. I don't remember whether I was in morning or afternoon classes (kindergarten was in half-day classes), but the shuttle would be taking off when I was home. My mother had promised that we would watch the launch on our tiny TV set. Like most children, I was fascinated by space travel. I remember the countdown, then the little shuttle going up, up, up with that bright light behind it, leaving a white trail, but then the white trail split into two trails, and I asked my mother why, and she said she didn't know, then the announcer said that there was something wrong, then the little shuttle with it's bright light became an too-bright light, and things shot off from it, and I realized that it had exploded, and the announcers didn't know what to say, and my mother was very sad, and I didn't understand what was going on. It took me a while to connect that explosion, that bright light, to deaths, actual deaths of actual people, tiny people in that shuttle. Afterwards, the media pictures. I remember the group picture of those astronauts being shown everywhere, and everyone explaining that the woman, the one woman who was on the shuttle, was a school teacher, and her students had been watching the launch, and everyone thought that it was especially tragic because a woman astronaut, a very rare thing, had died, and I remember wondering how the other astronauts would feel about that, about how she was singled out as an especial tragedy when all of them had died, in the same way. The challenger explosion is one of the very few images that I remember from TV at so young an age.
4. When the 7.1 earthquake hit San Francisco (10/7/1989)
I don't know where I was, but I remember the scary pictures of buildings collapsed and roads cracked open and cars abandoned. I remember hearing stories about people who were there, and people being hurt, and dying.
5. When the Berlin Wall fell (11/9/1989)
I don't remember where I first heard about it. I remember nighttime pictures of people running about, and rubble. My parents and teachers explained that it was a wonderful thing, that it would bring about new peace in the world. At the time, I didn't even have a very clear grasp of where Berlin was or why there was a wall there or why people wanted the wall taken down. We learned about it though, in our classes. We even had a school assembly and musical, where we sang songs about peace and about people changing the world and about a better future, and there was a little fake brick wall constructed on the stage and a procession of kids who charged through it and broke it down. I remember how everyone felt hopeful, how all of us kids really believed that maybe we would have peace for good.
6. When the Gulf War began (1/16/1991)
I don't remember whether I was at home and heard it from the news or if I was in class and heard it from my teacher. I remember the pictures of our missiles flying through that night sky on the television. All of the adults whom I knew told me that it was a very good thing that we were attacking, because big evil Saddam Hussein in Iraq was invading poor tiny little Kuwait just because it had oil, and that was bad and we needed to stop him. Everyone told me that Hussein was insane, a crazy, oppressive dictator, and so he deserved what he got. He had tons of terrible, evil weapons that he wanted to use to kill innocent people. My father worshipped George Bush Senior. And so us kids worshipped him too. I remember drawing comic strips with my brother about how stupid and evil Saddam was, and my brother would always find creative new ways to have Saddam blow up in the end (his personal scud-missile vending machine, for example). We called Hussein "So-Dumb, Insane." Yes, we were good little zombies, not questioning, brainwashed quite well by the war fervor sweeping the nation. It was so simple. No complexities. I will never forget that feeling so that I never fall into that sort of mindset again. I do remember one moment when I was wondering, "Since Hussein is the evil dictator causing this, why are we bombing his people instead of him?"
7. When OJ Simpson was chased in his White Bronco (6/17/1994)
Of course I don't remember where I was. What the hell!? Is that supposed to be a huge, world-changing event? Something burned into the memory of everyone on the planet? I was in high school. I didn't even know who O.J. Simpson was. I do remember thinking, "Why is everyone watching some random white SUV drive down the freeway? And why didn't the Police cars just block it and be over with it, rather than following it at about 100 feet behind for a few hours?"
8. When the building in Oklahoma City was bombed (4/19/1995)
I don't remember where I was when I heard (in class, maybe?), but I remember being shocked, concerned, and sad for all of those people.
9. When Princess Di was killed (8/31/1997)
Whatever television show I had been watching was interrupted by it. I remember watching for a while, then becoming disgusted with how the reporters were interfering with the emergency workers (with the added irony that it had been reporters that had caused the accident to begin with). I remember turning it off and then reading about it the next morning.
10. When Bush was first announced President (11/7/2000)
The night of the election, I was sitting in my dorm room constantly refreshing the CNN table which showed who had won which states. I finally gave up around three a.m. when it became clear that no president was going to be announced that night. I remember feeling very, very angry when they announced it, since it seemed to me that it was still a very uncertain thing, and I remember thinking that such things shouldn't be rushed until the votes had been carefully and patiently recounted.
11. When the 6.8 earthquake hit Nisqually, WA (2/28/2001)
I didn't find out until the day after it happened. I remember the moment vividly. Since my college life was such a bubble (no TV, small campus away from town) I didn't find out until the next day when Morgan and I went grocery shopping. I remember coming out of the front door of the store and glancing at the newspapers in the stands. "Pacific Northwest Hit by Major Quake." Adrenaline shot through my body when I read that. Remember, all of my relatives are in Oregon and Washington. As soon as I got home, I called my mother, my grandmother, and I enquired about my dad. All were fine, so I spent the next few hours reading news accounts of the quake from Portland and Seattle.
12. When terrorists knocked over the World Trade Center (9/11/2001)
"Knocked over?" That's a weird way to put it, not accurate. And they hit the Pentagon and took one other plane too, which many people seem to overlook. Anyway, that morning I was sitting on my bed in my dorm room, writing a poem for my poetry class. I was having some writer's block, not wanting to force a poem that hadn't floated quite to the surface yet.
I slid off of the bed and was looking for a book when Morgan, who was sitting at his computer, said in a somewhat disbelieving voice, "Melissa, someone flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center towers, and they hit the Pentagon too, and there was another plane... I guess they don't know, maybe there will be more..." I remember the chill that went down my spine, how I dropped what I was looking at, how I stammered the question, "The Trade Center and the Pentagon?" Morgan and I wondered who could have organized such a thing, if they would continue their attacks, how nothing like this had every happened in America before, how all of the news sites were down because too many people were trying to go to them all at once. Morgan told me how he had first heard when he received an email from one of his lists that said that America is under attack, they hit the world trade center and the Pentagon, and how he had thought that it was a joke, because how could anyone ever hit three huge important buildings like that without being stopped? And nothing like that would happen in America. He followed the link to MSN and saw a grainy picture and thought that it must be a fake, that maybe someone hacked MSN and was playing a terrible prank. But then he received another email, and then he tried to get to Washington Post or CNN but both were overloaded. Then he told me.
We left the room, made our way to Cannon Lounge on main campus where everyone was gathering. Someone had put ABC on, and I watched TV for the first time in four years. By that time, both of the towers had fallen, and I had a hard time grasping the concept that the World Trade Center towers simply didn't exist anymore. I felt numb, watching the newscasters cry on national television, watching the planes hit again and again, watching those two huge buildings fall over and over and over again, watching the huge black billowing cloud of smoke rise from the Pentagon. Pictures of people screaming and running down the streets of New York. I kept saying to myself over and over again, "All those people, all those people. Dear God, all those people." I knew that I was getting a very small taste of the feeling that people in more volatile countries than my own get day after day. "So this is what it is like."
After a half an hour, I didn't want to watch anymore. We went to class, because there would be familiar, friendly faces there. We didn't talk about poetry. We talked about what had happened. I went to my work meeting and we talked about what happened.
That evening, after a very long day, I turned on my laptop, sat in the beanbag, and I read. I read and I read and I read and I read, every news story that I could get my hands on. I read about first-hand accounts, I went to the online diaries of several New Yorkers and Washington DC residents. I read about everyone's personal reactions. I read political analysis documents. I read Bush's speech and wondered at his use of the word "evildoers." I read about people jumping from the windows. I read about the fire men, about the police men, about everything that I could get my hands on. I read about the last minute phone calls from the planes. I wanted to be everywhere at once. I wanted to know everything there was to know. I kept refreshing the news sites, half-expecting to find news of another attack. I didn't go to bed until 5 a.m., and even then I did not sleep. For months afterward, I could not shake that habit of refreshing the news every few minutes. I hated waking up in the morning, because I always had that feeling that something else may have happened while I was sleeping. Those were some very intense months.
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