by HL Borden

Created on: September 08, 2009

I was awakened at 6-something in the morning by my shrilling telephone. Muttering curses under my breath at whoever would think it okay to call that early, I shoved my head under the pillow and tried to will the ringing away. The answering machine finally clicked on.

-click- "Oh my God. Are you seeing this? Jesus." -click-

That's how I found out.

I didn't get out of bed right away. A random phone message from my early-bird friend could usually be ignored; returned at a more reasonable hour. But what did he mean by "are you seeing this"? That was pretty cryptic, even for him. And the tinge of panic in his voice? I had never heard it there before. My curiosity got the better of me. I lazily rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and dragged myself to the living room television.

That's when I saw it.

The first tower had already fallen; the second, ablaze. Flipping through the channels, all networks were carrying the same breaking news. One station would be showing the Twin Towers in their varying stages of collapse; people preferring to jump to their deaths on live television than to be burned alive. Another had live aerial pictures from over the Pentagon; the building no longer a perfectly five-sided polygon. A third would be speculating on the cause of the Pennsylvania crash. Can we call the passengers and crew heroes? All were wondering when this nightmare would end.

That's when I knew I needed to leave.

Across the country and three times zones away from Ground Zero, I was working at a local television news station in a small Northern California town. On this day, the relative calm of the station was replaced by a din of exhilaration mixed with a large helping of horror. We stayed with the network's wall-to-wall coverage while running a crawl at the bottom of the screen dispersing and highlighting local information and connections. Our sole focus and mindset was to disseminate the information we had, and to collect ever more.

That's when I headed to the mall.

My directive was to get local reaction to the tragedy. On what would have normally been a busy Tuesday, the mall was completely deserted. With the wind-blown trash rolling across the barren parking lot, it looked like something out of an old western. Safe in the hustle and bustle of the newsroom, I hadn't had a chance to comprehend or process what was happening. All alone at the locked-up and empty mall, I had too much time.

That's when it finally hit home.

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