Twenty years on
20 years have passed but it seems like yesterday. I was working from home in NJ and I saw a message flash across the screen that there was a plane crash in NY. So I turned on the TV. The plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought OMG what a terrible thing - I knew people who worked there. I had been there myself just the week before for a lunch meeting. Then the second plane hit. I called Alex at work and told him to come home -- that we were under attack and had to prepare to escape. I was convinced this was just the beginning. You could see the smoke on the NY skyline from just about everywhere in NJ. I started packing our backpacks and camping gear and devised a plan to walk out of NJ to our boat in Rye and sail off across the ocean. Then the towers collapsed. Soon everything stopped. No planes in the sky, no trains, trucks, buses or cars. Silence. I'd never heard true silence before. People walked across the GW bridge, like zombies covered in white dust. That ...