William

At around 4:00 on the afternoon of September 10, 2001, William boarded the Amtrak Empire Builder in Portland and began his journey east to Montana, where he would visit his mother and father. After steadily rising throughout the evening, the track leveled out around daybreak on the Montana prairie. There was nothing unusual, initially, about the train grinding to a halt. “After a couple of hours I started to wonder,” he says. “People started getting phone calls. There was a lot of shrieking and shouting and gasping, so I stopped someone in the aisle to ask what was going on.”

New York had been attacked, he was told. The city was burning. Thousands were dead. “Five hours later we went to the next station – Shelby, Montana – and we stayed there for another five hours, watching television,” he says.

The rest of the trip was unusually slow because every time the train reached a bridge, a crew would get out and check it manually to make sure it wasn’t rigged with explosives. “There were no announcements made on the train,” William says. “It was just people passing stories back and forth. We had no idea if this was just the beginning or not.”

William recalls feeling astonished. “People were saying that Arab terrorists were responsible for it, but I remember hearing the same thing right after the bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s,” he says. “Montana was a really odd place to be. It was alienating to be on a train crossing the Montana prairie because it all seemed like a world away. It felt very disconnected.”