Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited

It was a CAVU sky: ceiling and visibility unlimited. I knew the phrase because my father owned a two-seat, single-engine Cessna airplane, and flying had given our family a vocabulary for weather. The sky over New York that morning was infinitely blue.

I flew into LaGuardia the night before on the last commercial flight into the airport. I had been in the Bahamas celebrating my friend Ellen’s fortieth birthday, and everyone else was staying until Wednesday, the day after her actual birthday. I left early because I had already taken my allotted time off from work and felt guilty taking more. I was president of the design division of my company, and wanted to set a good example for my staff. At the same time, I flew home while my friends were partying in the Bahamas. I felt guilty about that, too.

In 2001, I lived in Chelsea, close enough to walk to my office in on the 17^th floor of the Empire State Building. I loved working in that building; I considered it the castle of New York. Although I have always been a night owl, for some reason I woke up early that day, and left for work around 8:30.

As I was walking, I overheard someone say that a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I immediately imagined something the size of my father’s Cessna and assumed it had to be an accident. But the weather was so clear! I called my father from the street, and we tried to make sense of it together. He surmised the engine malfunctioned.

When I got close to the Empire State Building, I saw people streaming out of every entrance. I shook my head and thought it ironic that the one day I managed to get to work on time, we were having a fire drill. I found some of the people from my office, and we began gathering in front of the Starbucks across the street. I learned that this wasn’t a fire drill: we were being evacuated because of the plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center. Apparently it wasn’t a small plane. The possibility began to circulate that if what had happened was intentional, the Empire State Building might also be a target.

The idea that anyone had deliberately flown a plane into the World Trade Center was so inconceivable that morning that three designers from our office took the elevator up to the observatory to try and see what was happening downtown. Someone eventually reached them and learned that they had been refused entry and were coming back down. We found them, and when it became clear no one would be allowed back into the building, I suggested that everyone come to my apartment. It was, after all, only a short walk away.

About forty of us were walking back toward Chelsea when we heard that another plane flew into the other tower. Whatever explanations we had been trying to construct for the first plane no longer made sense. I tried calling my father again, but I couldn’t get through. By then, everyone was trying to reach someone.

When we got to my apartment, we turned on the televisions in my bedroom and living room and gathered wherever there was room. We sat on the floor, on the bed, on the sofa and on chairs, watching in disbelief, terrified, trying to comprehend what we were seeing.

We watched one tower fall and then the other. Some of us were wailing, some were shaking. Someone grabbed my hand. The billowing smoke took over the sky, paper fluttered to the ground, dust covered everything.

Stuart and Renee were among my colleagues who came to my apartment that morning. They were a young couple who lived in a high rise a few blocks from the World Trade Center and had gotten a late start that morning. They left their building after the second plane hit, and walked up the West Side Highway to my apartment with a backpack and their dog. Stuart had seen people jumping from the towers and could barely speak.

In the days that followed, New Yorkers searched for friends, coworkers and family members. Photographs of the missing appeared on walls, lampposts and storefronts. Much of lower Manhattan remained closed. Ellen and my friends in the Bahamas were stuck there for over a week. After several bomb threats, the Empire State Building shut down indefinitely. Stuart and Renee stayed with me until they were able to re-enter their apartment. Over time, we realized we became witnesses well before we knew what we were witnessing.

Twenty-five years later, I keep returning to the sky. It was so impossibly blue, ceiling and visibility unlimited. It was perfect flying weather.