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.”

James

The most prominent recollection James has about September 11, 2001 is the sky. “Turning the country into a no-fly zone was like being on another planet,” he says. “It would’ve been cool on any other day. On that day it was terrifying. I had never been in a city with no air traffic.”

And then, he says, the F-15s flew over Portland, either late that morning or early in the afternoon. James worked in a hair salon at the time. He left work after two hours or so, not just because people kept calling in to cancel their appointments but because he found himself unable to concentrate. “My reaction was a monumental wave of sadness,” he says. He believed that one of his cousins worked at the World Trade Center, but even after he found out that his cousin was employed elsewhere by that time, the sadness persisted. “There was this hopelessness that nothing could be done, this realization that everything had changed,” he says. “It was like seeing the curtain being ripped down and knowing that the illusion we’d had that we were somehow safe from the shit you see on television was no longer possible.”

James says he was fairly knowledgeable about the Middle East at the time, and it was that knowledge that informed his reaction to the events of that morning. “I did wonder how it was possible that we’d gotten that far without something like that happening,” he says. “And I thought, oh shit, this country is going to become like Palestine.”

Matthew

Matthew had just quit his job as a reporter for a newspaper in Salem, but the first day of classes in the graduate program to which he had been accepted was still a few weeks away. So on the morning of September 11, 2001 – a Tuesday – he was between one phase and the next. After getting up around 8:30 that morning, he turned on the Today show. “Katie Couric was on,” he says, “and listening to her voice while watching the towers fall was an interesting mix. She said something like, ‘America, this is your 9-1-1 call.’”

At the time, he was doing specific things for a 24-hour period and then writing about them. So that morning, after contemplating driving to Salem to report as a volunteer, he decided to instead spend the next 24 hours observing and writing. “I didn’t know how to respond other than to write,” he says.

He played with his cat, who was entertained by a scratching post and a strand of string. “It would have been a good day to be a cat,” he says. He went to the post office. He rode the MAX. In the afternoon he went to the zoo. “The zoo wasn’t any different than any other day,” he says. “My guess is that parents just said, ‘We’re going to the zoo.’” Driving along Northeast Broadway, approaching a store called Elmer’s that specializes in flags, he noticed the line was pouring out the front door and snaking around the block. “I understand patriotism,” Matthew says, “but what the hell does a flag do?” Big flags on big trucks in one of his recollections.

One thing that stands out for him is hearing, over and over, the people on television announcing that things had changed forever. “It was annoying,” he says. “Of course things change. Don’t tell me that before anyone knows how they have changed.”

He does recall crying over the events of the day and what they foretold. “We immediately went after quick, severe retaliation,” he says. “I knew we’d retaliate with force, and given who was in charge at the time I knew it wouldn’t be very well thought out.”

He rented a few videos. “Something light,” he says, not recalling specific titles. And he looked out the window of the apartment he and his wife lived in at the time and there, in the courtyard, was the couple from across the hall with their infant, having a picnic. “Watching them doing something as simple as having a picnic,” he says, “there was a sense of innocence that had not been lost.”

Kristin

As the publisher, it wasn’t unusual for Kristin to start the day by signing for the delivery of 10,000 copies of the current issue of the magazine. What was unusual was that her mother, father and one of her brothers were already up and gathered in the kitchen with her fiancé. They had driven out from Nebraska and Missouri for her wedding, which was to take place on September 15th. On the morning of the 11th, what woke her up was the noise of the delivery truck arriving. On the morning of the 11th, by the time she came downstairs her fiancé was entertaining her family with embarrassing stories.

“Outside the delivery guy said, ‘Wow, that’s pretty amazing what happened,’” she says. “He told me about the plane crashing into the Pentagon but not the World Trade Center.” As she recalls, the image in her mind was of a relatively small plane. “So I came inside and we turned the television on. Even though I’d come in to say that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, you could see that obviously the World Trade Center was a much bigger deal.”

In addition to watching television most of the day, she recalls three conversations in particular. One was with her sister, who had travelled to Kansas City to catch a flight to Oregon with her husband and three children, a flight that kept getting cancelled. Another was the woman doing her hair, who was being yelled at by a guy who had come into the salon. “He said that when we find out who did it we need to carpet bomb the country from one end to the other,” she says. “I knew the woman doing my hair was married to a man who is Lebanese, but she agreed with the guy who was shouting, and I knew that things were going to change for the worse.”

Then she talked to her brother. “I told him that this was going to be a big wake-up call for America,” she says. “I said we can’t keep mucking around in other countries. He said ‘Someone’s in for a wake-up call, but it’s not us.’”

Luci

For Luci, a public health administrator who was born and raised in Eastern Oregon, every September 11th is memorable. In 2001, she took the day off, as is custom if the date falls on a weekday, and planned to start the day by sleeping late even though she knew better. “Every year on my birthday my mother calls me early in the morning to sing Las Mañanitas, which means sweet little morning,” she says. “Mexicans do that – it’s a celebratory greeting, a blending of ‘morning’ and ‘tomorrow.’”

She recalls that she answered the phone and giggled as her mother sang the first verse – she estimates the song has between 30 and 40 – and then the bridge and then told her to go turn on the television. “She told me that planes had crashed into the tower and then at the Pentagon,” she says. “I asked her what was going on. She didn’t know. She told me to be careful.”

She says that even though she’d taken the day off she couldn’t resist calling a few people at work. And she was on e-mail, sending messages to people she knew in New York and receiving a few as well. A decade later one in particular stands out. “I received a ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ message from someone I would not have expected it from,” she says. “It would bug me if I received a message like that today because it’s so tired, but back then I felt compassion because it was written from a place of fear by someone who had lived in New York.” But moments later, a friend who had also received the message replied to all that she believed the sentiment behind the original message was ridiculous. “The reply came within moments,” Luci says, “and the main point of it was ‘Hold on, let’s not grab our torches just yet.’”

She remembers the evening being like most other birthday evenings in one sense. “I like to be with friends on my birthday, so I invited people to meet up at Produce Row,” she says. “A few friends came.” While the gathering may have been in keeping with Luci’s birthday tradition, the conversation was not. “We talked about our fears,” she recalls. “We talked about the hawks swooping down. We talked about W and the New American Century.”

Leslie

On the morning of September 11th, Leslie called in sick to work. Not because of what was going on a continent from her home in San Francisco, but because she was actually sick. At around 5 that morning she left a voicemail message for her supervisor at the social services agency where she worked. Her timing turned out to be critical, because the agency reacted negatively to people who called in due to the trauma because they were unavailable to help those the agency served.

After making her call, she started the morning in the way she starts many mornings – by making coffee and getting comfortable on the couch. And then she turned on the television to watch the news.

“I was watching when the news broke,” she says. “They did that breaking news thing. The first tower had been hit and then, while I was watching, the second tower got hit and it was surreal.”

Leslie, who has worked in various aspects of marketing and fundraising throughout her career and who now lives in Portland, doesn’t focus so much on the events of that morning as she does the presentation of them. “Really, the second you start watching television it’s surreal because there is an element of fictionalization even if it’s real,” she says. “Everyone forgets that there’s a lot of editing. There’s a point of view, which by definition means there’s editing. But that morning it was completely real in that they didn’t know what was going to happen next. I mean, I’m sitting there watching a plane fly into a building.”

She stayed on the couch. She called her children, who lived in different states at the time. And she called a few friends. And then she had what she recalls as a “profound” conversation with her husband. “We were both saying that America had just joined the rest of the world,” she says. “We hadn’t been attacked on our mainland since 1812. We had come to believe as a country that having big oceans at many of our borders would keep us safe.”

A big part of Leslie’s perspective on the event is informed by places she’s lived. Of living in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, she says “it got strange …” in reference to the period when it was believed that hiding under desks would protect people from nuclear blasts. And she spent a significant part of her childhood in South America, which trained her to look at the U.S. through an external lens. “In other places terrorism is a fact of life,” she says. “You cope with it. I didn’t think of September 11 as being any different, no more or less tragic. My husband and I talked about it that day as the beginning of a forced awareness.”

Kathleen

Kathleen, who is in her mid-sixties, paused initially when asked to recall Sept. 11, 2001. “I am wondering how it is that we had the television on?” she says. “I don’t remember physically turning it on.” A lifelong resident of Portland, Kathleen worked in management at a major healthcare organization at the time. She was also tending to her mother, who was dying. She was already watching the television “in horror” when the crash of the second plane was caught on camera. Then the Pentagon, and the plane in Pennsylvania.

The numbers announced on television stand out for her. “I believe they said that it was possible that 56,000 people might have been at work in those towers,” she says. “So when I learned later that 1,100 people had died all I could think was, it could’ve been much worse.”

She recalls vividly her drive to work. “As I was looking at other people in other cars, I realized that everyone else was listening to the radio, too,” she says. “It was a sense of connection that I’ve never experienced before.”

By the time she arrived at work a television had been turned on in the gym. As a manager Kathleen says she told people to do whatever they need to do. But as a human she did something else. “I reached out to a woman who was sitting on a bench and put my hand on her shoulder,” she says. “There was this sense of shock. You could see that the news people were horrified. None of us were sure if it was over or not.”