Journal of a Visitor to
Tragedy
The following journal recounts the experiences of
Darlyne Reiter who was vacationing in New York with her
husband, Steve Romines, and a tour group from the West
Coast on September 11, 2001. News for a Change
felt that her chronicle captured the American
spirit—then and now.
Monday, September
10
We arrived in
Manhattan full of excitement. All 81 people in our New
York/New England theatre tour group with Tacoma
(Washington) Musical Playhouse were looking forward to
Broadway shows, great dinners, sightseeing, and making
new friends for the next nine days. Not in my wildest
dreams would I have predicted the experience it
became.
Tuesday, September
11
As I entered the
lobby of our hotel Tuesday morning to meet the others for
a harbor cruise and New York City sightseeing, the first
words I heard were “Did you hear that a plane hit
the World Trade Center?” My immediate thought was
nowhere near what had really happened. Thinking that
perhaps a small plane went haywire and bounced off one of
the huge towers, I wondered if I’d be able to see
anything when we went out in the harbor. Within minutes
we heard the other tower had been hit. How can that be?
Two planes. Both towers. It didn’t take long for
the dreaded word “terrorism” to surface. Our
laughs turned to anxiety. We were only a couple miles
from those towers.
We boarded our bus
and drove to the pier—only to be told the harbor
was secured. The port authorities were asking everyone to
clear the streets for emergency vehicle use. The city may
not be safe; nobody knew what to expect
next.
Was I dreaming? We
were in America. The thick, black smoke to our right
definitely told us there was a huge fire close by. As we
attempted to do as asked, we were swallowed by a surge of
people literally running north out of Manhattan. Subways
and trains were shut down. Vehicles inched along, only to
be deserted at the closed bridges and tunnels out of the
city. Our attempt at normalcy took us to Central Park. We
wandered through this beautiful setting—asking for
updates from Joe, who had a radio plugged to his
ear—and heard that a plane had hit the Pentagon;
another plane had crashed someplace in Pennsylvania.
Terrorist attacks on American soil. Can it
be?
As we continued
through the park, we called our families to let them know
we were safe; they knew we were scheduled to view the
city from the top of the World Trade Center. We listened
to a man playing a tune on his saxophone. We watched a
model in a fur coat being filmed in front of the
fountain; we wondered why the hot dog and pretzel vendors
were closing and hurrying away.
We stopped at a
church in Harlem and prayed. All these things we were
hearing: Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan. Islam.
Capitalistic America. Hijackers. The restaurant where we
had planned to have dinner was closed. Broadway had gone
dark. The show would not go on. Already we saw people in
long lines offering to give blood. Clean white sheets on
gurneys, stationed outside the hospitals, waved at us as
we drove by.
The streets were
quiet when we returned to Manhattan—nearly alone.
The normal sea of yellow cabs had ebbed completely. The
menacing smoke ahead replaced the twin towers that had
collapsed. We walked that night in a deserted Times
Square. Surreal. Eerie. Words don’t exist to
explain what I felt. We mingled with the homeless, other
visitors, and reporters in front of the Fox
network—starring at the large screens—to hear
what our president had to say. The graying sky mingled
with the black smoke.
Wednesday, September
12
We solemnly walked to
NBC studios for our scheduled morning tour, knowing it
would not happen. Instead, we watched security guards
removing receptacles from around Rockefeller
Center—anything that could hold a bomb. Our matinee
was cancelled. Our evening show was cancelled. Many of us
separated to go our own ways; crowds were not
encouraged.
Steve and I walked
south toward the Empire State Building. It was cordoned
off for blocks surrounding it. We walked north past
closed stores, closed museums, closed libraries, and
people staring in disbelief. My throat was scratchy; my
head pounded. My sinuses rebelled against the particles
and smoke in the air. Yet, I knew I had it better than
those who were working with the search and rescue dogs
and those who would never see their loved ones again. We
sat on steps outside Central Park and watched CBS
reporters interviewing vacationers and filming the
military convoy parading down 5th Avenue on their way to
assist with locating bodies in the rubble in lower
Manhattan.
Thursday, September
13
We left New York
City—rather than going to the top of the World
Trade Center as planned; we left happy to be alive.
Although we had long anticipated attending “The
Producers,” it was a minor disappointment in light
of what others had lost. I left with a huge respect for
New York’s emergency medical services system. We
headed for New Hope, PA, convinced the name was
symbolic.
We played in
Princeton. We cried with the people pleading on
television for any news of family and friends who were in
the Trade Center. We laughed with our new friends at
dinner. We applauded talented performers in New England.
We took photographs of our American flag waving at us
from bridges, buildings, and little kids’ hands. In
Niantic, CT, we attended a Gershwin show called
“They All Laughed.” It was hilarious and we
all laughed. When it ended, we all (performers and
audience) sang “God Bless America”—with
not a dry eye in the house. That evening was
representative of the ever-changing feelings throughout
our tour.
Tales of ghosts in
our hotel in Salem, MA, gave us something else to ponder.
We stared at the home of Osama bin Laden’s
respected brother from our boat on the Boston Harbor. We
were thrilled that it took us more than two hours to
check in at JFK airport—it meant security was
tight. We returned to Tacoma—thankful and happy to
be home.
Thursday, September
20
Today I went to the
library to read the local papers that were printed while
I was gone. Although I brought home a New York
Times, I needed to see how my home reacted to this
atrocity. I learned that while many here were gathered at
“The Puyallup” to pray, Steve and I joined a
crowd for the same reason at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York City. Although individually we have
been affected in different ways by this act of terrorism,
we react in similar ways. America prevails. The show will
go on.
DARLYNE REITER works for the Tacoma-Pierce
County Health Department in its communications/marketing
department. Her responsibilities involve design of
educational materials and Web site management. She has an
interdisciplinary degree in arts, media, and culture and
she hopes to write a novel some day. She told NFC,
“I am inspired by the British author, Mary Wesley,
who wrote her first novel at the age of
70.”
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