On September 11, 2001 I was working in a bakery at a grocery store the morning the terrorists made their move. Every half hour some of the workers from the next department would gather around the radio at the other end of the bakery and listen to something on the local rock station (the only station we could get with all our equipment around..). They looked very grim as they listened. I was working some equipment getting bread ready for the day and could go over to see what they were listening to. Finally, after a couple hours I was able to go over at one of these half hour intervals.

“What are you guys listening to?”

“Someone has blown up the Twin Towers in New York City!”

“What!? I’ve been there.. there are over 50,000 people in those buildings!”

While the rest of the world was watching things live on TV, I was stuck in a bakery with only a radio and a stupid rock station where the jockeys read the news like they were introducing a band at a concert. “Wow.. Big news huh? And now back to your favorite hits of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s!” I ate my lunch in my car so I could at least listen to live coverage on CBC radio. It wasn’t until that night that I finally saw video of what had happened.

I’d actually been there twice. On two separate occasions some friends and I had taken road trips that eventually led us to New York. Both times we had gone to the top of the south tower. The first time was sometime in the early ’90s, and the second time was the summer of 1999.

On our second trip, we had noticed many changes… the biggest being that there was now lots of security that hadn’t been there before. That was now in place thanks to another terrorist attempt to destroy the towers in ’93. The line ups were longer too, probably because of delays from the extra security.

It wasn’t until the next summer that my interest in photography was rekindled, so I didn’t even have a cheap disposable camera to take pictures of the incredible view from the top (panorama 1, panorama 2). We do have one picture from that trip.. some enterprising person decided to get money from the poor people waiting and waiting and waiting in line to get up to the top by having them pose in front of a large mural. Once at the top of tower you had a chance to purchase a picture for something like $15. Crazy price, but I’m glad we bought it.

Us in 1999 – The small town tourists in the big city.

The view was incredible.. You could look down on all the famous sites and buildings that had been featured in countless movies and shows I had watched. You could look out and see this tiny Statue of Liberty in the distance. It was so amazingly tall, nothing else you saw in this vast city came close. The brochure you get when visiting claims that this was the highest observation deck in the world.

“Take in the most exciting city in the wolrd – from a quarter mile high in the sky!”

On a typical day in the late morning to the afternoon, there could have been anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people in the towers. Considering I come from a town of 6000 (and that is when someone is having a family reunion), that was a mind boggling number to me. In fact, those buildings usually had more people than any city in my home provice. Thankfully, there weren’t that many people in the towers on September 11, 2001.

These are the things that went through my mind as I stood in a bakery in Alberta that morning. I suddenly remembered the faces of some of the people I had seen working in that tower. The lady who rode the express elevator up and down all day. That other lady in a booth on the top floor who charged us too much for a bad photo. Security guards. I wondered if they were there three years later.

I also wondered if people were up on that same observation platform looking down as a plane did the unbelievable.

What were you doing that day?