Smoke, debris and pedestrians covered with dust: An Inquirer reporter’s memories of Sept. 11 | Opinion

What do I remember about 9/11?

Everything.

Hearing KYW report the first strike as I drove to work.

Watching on TV in The Inquirer newsroom as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Grabbing my laptop and racing to 30th Street Station.

I still feel a heavy sadness when I think about that day and the days to follow. This may have been the biggest story I ever covered as a reporter, but the things I remember most are the details, small and quiet.

I’m on a northbound Amtrak, one of the last to leave Philadelphia. With each stop, passengers get off the train, afraid to go farther. By the time we pull out of Princeton Junction, only a handful of riders remain in my car. We wordlessly move to the windows and look to the east, toward Manhattan. We huddle around a man with a transistor radio, hearing that one tower has fallen, then the second.

Then we see it. Somewhere near New Brunswick, N.J., where the tracks bend and you usually can see the twin towers glimmering like Oz, we see a pulsating plume. There is silence. I turn away from the window and look at the passengers around me.

The men are weeping.

The train gets as far as Newark. All tunnels and bridges into Manhattan are closed. I hitch a ride to the Hudson River waterfront. A banker coated with dust as fine as talcum powder gets off a tugboat that is evacuating survivors to Jersey City. He had made it to the esplanade in Battery Park when the first tower collapsed, enveloping him in debris and smoke. At Frank Sinatra Park in Hoboken, I look over the shoulder of an artist as he sketches the hell across the river.

The owner of a small motor boat ferries me to a marina on the Upper West Side. Dusk is closing in by the time I reach downtown. Outside St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, nurses with wheelchairs stand by the curb, waiting to shuttle survivors into the emergency room.

I watch them wait. And wait. Standing still.

There are no ambulances because there are no survivors.

The next morning at dawn, I take the subway downtown. Just as I’m getting off, I notice a tired group of firefighters on the other side of the tracks, waiting for the uptown A train. I hurry up and down stairs over to their platform and hop on the train to talk to the 10 men of Ladder 34 on their way back to Washington Heights. They have spent the whole night digging through the rubble for bodies. A stranger walks by the commander, slumped in a seat, and touches his shoulder, whispering, “I just want to thank you.”

I head to a midtown firehouse, Ladder 24, the home base for one of the victims, Father Mychal Judge, the fire department’s chaplain. A fire engine that had been at ground zero is thickly coated with the dust of death. I am jotting down the messages people have traced with their fingertips on the mangled engine—small prayers for the fallen—when I notice a woman turning the corner on 31st Street and stumbling upon the scene. She stops short and covers her mouth, muffling her sobs.

In 2007, on the anniversary of 9/11, I asked MaryAnn Marrocolo Tierney, the former emergency manager for the City of Philadelphia, to tell me everything she remembered. Back in 2001, she had been working in a building adjacent to the towers. In a video I did for The Inquirer, she methodically walked me through the horror of that day, adding a distressing thought at the end: “People are starting to forget how horrible 9/11 was.”

I remember. I will always remember.

Jennifer Lin worked as a reporter for The Inquirer from 1983 to 2015. She served as a correspondent in Beijing, New York and Washington, D.C. Lin is author of a family memoir, Shanghai Faithful, and was co-director and a producer of Beethoven in Beijing, which appeared on PBS’s Great Performances. A book version of Beethoven in Beijing will be released in spring 2022.