I was at Ground Zero on 9/11. I returned, 20 years later, to the same frightening blue sky

NEW YORK — The sky crashes down on One World Trade Center with frightening intensity. It is gorgeous and clear and I can feel it dropping on me like a cerulean anvil. All of that blue soaked in all of that misery of all of that day.

Sept. 11, 2001, made me afraid of beautiful days. And standing here, near the footprints of the Twin Towers 20 years later, I can’t help but think, this is how it was. Before the planes, the fires, the falling debris and the falling people. Before the collapse, the vertical mushroom clouds, the screams, the blood and chaos.

Anglen: In New York on 9/11, all I wanted was to get out of my shoes

This is my first time back at Ground Zero since I ran out out of the midtown daylight and into the soot-choked air of lower Manhattan as the first tower fell.

Then, like now, I was on vacation. But this time, I am with my family: My wife, who traversed the city from hospital to hospital on 9/11, volunteering her services as a critical care nurse; and our three teenagers, triplets, who grew up on our New York City stories.

We’re here because we have to be. They understand it as our obligation.

NYC streets are a split reality, 20 years later

But we’ve barely left the subway station and emerged in the cavernous void of the Oculus shopping center and the kids are already getting agitated with me. Exiting onto the plaza, I’ve stepped into a kind of trauma time slip and am trying to orient myself with 20-year-old memories.

Is this the street I ran down when the second building fell? Is this where I saw the human limbs sticking up from the ground like obscene shrubbery? Where a toppled building forced me to go back? Where I was standing when I cursed God?

It’s as if I am standing in the same place at two different times. In frustration, I break out my phone and scroll to the 9/11 album that I keep stored there. I hold up images against buildings towering around me. Some are recognizable, most not.

It’s a split reality. I know I am standing in the here and now, but I’m feeling the same knife-edge panic of then and there. The same wire-in-the blood response that sent me into this hell with a notebook and camera day after day. Because I wanted to bear witness, because that is what reporters do.

Let’s just agree I’m a bit of a mess. There’s no emergency today. There’s just this gorgeous day, and we’re here to pay our respects and maybe reconcile the past.

We needed this moment for what was next

I’ve said before that I refuse to remove myself from that day. I listened to people, their bloody, terrible stories of survival. I turned off my feelings, let their emotions pass through me onto the notebook. Thought how lucky I was to be here, doing my job, while America huddled impotently around television screens. But there’s a price to pay for that kind of intimacy.

We head to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The escalator ride into the below-ground exhibits is hard. I’m afraid to talk for fear of blubbering. At the bottom I’m greeted with a breathtaking sight: The sky.

And there’s nothing fear inducing about it. Thousands of water color drawings, each a different shade of blue, represent 2,983 people who died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. 

Running through the expanse of this massive composition is a quote from Virgil: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” The exhibit by artist Spencer Finch is profound. It feels oddly personal, as if my fear has been turned inside out and put on display as a shared remembrance. 

We needed that moment for what comes next. The museum is broken into rooms, one of which takes you almost hour-by-hour through the collapse of the World Trade Center and the days that followed. Here, my memories collide with other stories of sacrifice, horror, pain and suffering. 

There are memories I can't let go

I remember the police officer screaming in shock and grief on a street corner; another officer slumped in the basement of 100 Center Street describing how pieces of airplanes fell onto her partners.

I remember two maintenance workers in Tower One telling me about elevators, cables severed, dropping from upper floors and spilling out burning bodies. One of the men reached for a victim and the skin of his arms sloughed off in the worker’s hands.

I remember the Federal Express worker who begged me to help him find his wife and how I could only offer limp platitudes. She’ll be OK. She wasn’t. She died in the towers.

I remember the bodies tumbling through the sky; the concussive thumps that I told myself were gas explosions. I remember the face of a firefighter emerging from the debris with a decapitated head; cadaver dogs exhausted on the smell of death.

A broken fire truck, and a breakdown

And then there is the fire truck from Ladder Company 3 in the East Village. It sits as a memorial to the 11 firefighters who rode it to the burning Twin Towers. All of them died there.

The front of the truck was torn off when the building collapsed, its ladder bent and mangled into a claw where the cab used to be. I’m staring at the truck, stunned back in time. This truck I’ve seen before. I pull up my phone and there is the photo.

In it, the wrecked ladder curves above two dusty and bone-weary firefighters sitting, heads bowed, on the crushed front end. I don’t know any other way to describe it other than surreal.

I show the picture to my son, who wants to pursue a career in emergency medicine and mountain rescue. We walk around the truck once, twice, checking the angles. He mutters, “wow.” 

My wife at some point can no longer hold in her grief. She has to leave. It’s hard enough for us to watch documentaries about 9/11 (we can’t). But here there’s no power switch to separate you from memories. My daughters go with her. They are protective.

Their tears are a kind of permission for me to let go, too.

There's the building, and the sky, and it's beautiful

We walk out of the museum together, once again into the daylight. I’m not sure it has the same power over me that it did before. But we are not finished.

Part of our personal 9/11 story is how we were supposed to eat breakfast on Sept. 11 at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the North Tower. But we celebrated too much the night before. At Bobby Flay’s now defunct Mesa Grill. Our first night out on our first ever visit to New York City. 

Instead of breakfast, we overslept. And lived.

So, now, we are determined to get to the top of the new tower. Are we taking something back from that day? It feels like it. But I’m still uneasy about going up, into the sky.

The elevator is like being in a digital time machine, of the Disney-ride variety, not the psychological kind. As the elevator ascends, time-lapse images of the New York City skyline are projected onto its walls.

The doors open to the real thing, a 360-degree observation deck on the 100th floor. The views on this picture-perfect clear day go forever.

It is beautiful.

Robert Anglen investigates consumer issues for The Arizona Republic. He was working for the Cincinnati Enquirer on Sept. 11, 2001. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. On Twitter: @robertanglen.