Katie

In 2001, Katie was looking forward to September 11. It was her friend’s birthday. As an 8th grader at a middle school in Ketchikan, Alaska, the day began as it usually did, with no radio or television and a two-block walk to school. “I started to figure out that something was wrong because everyone was talking,” she says. As she recalls piecing it together, she says her initial assumption was that there had been a bombing. “Ketchikan is a small place,” she says, “so I assumed it was happening someplace bigger.”

Her teacher announced to the class that there had been a plane crash. Then the principal came over the loudspeaker and called for a moment of silence. “Then my friend, whose birthday had been completely overshadowed, said sarcastically ‘What a great birthday present,’” Katie says.

She cannot recall whether or not school was let out early that day, but she does recall that the significance of the day’s events became clear when she went home. “That’s when the devastation of it hit me,” she says. “My mom was crying and I ended up crying about it as well.”

She remembers watching the news the rest of the night. “It was surreal, watching it all and knowing that people in those towers were going to die,” she says. “It was also confusing, because I didn’t know what it meant, and scary, because I thought if people can do that, what’s next?”

Her sadness that evening, she says, had a lot to do with her feelings about New York. “As a kid,” she says, “I thought New York was the greatest city in our country and maybe even the whole world.”