They Left Their Bikes. I Hope They Made It Home.

 Twenty-two years ago today, some young men who believed they fighting for Allah hijacked three passenger airliners. Inside one plane, passengers fought the hijackers and diverted them from careening  it into the Pentagon. Instead, the plane crashed into a field, killing everyone on board.

No passengers, crew members or hijackers survived the other two flights, either. One hit the Pentagon. The other slammed into the World Trade Center—just a couple of miles upwind from where I lived at the time.

In previous posts, I commemorated 9/11 anniversaries by discussing the essential workers. Some rode bicycles to their jobs. Others—who delivered everything from contracts to quesadillas—rode bikes for their livings.

Some of their bikes were found weeks, months, even years, later.  Some of them, alas, were never heard from again.  We can only hope they made it out of the WTC area. If they did, I hope they made it home, wherever that may have been, wherever that is.

A Generation After The Ones Who Didn't Come Home

Today, I am not going to treat or subject (depending on your point of view) you to my "Sunday funnies" feature.

Rather, I am taking this opportunity to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the downing of a flight in Pennsylvania.

This anniversary is significant because at the age of 21, most people in most parts of the world have all or most of the rights and responsibilities of an adult.  So, some might argue, a whole generation has been born since that terrible day.

I also can't help, as a long-ago bike messenger, to think of all of those messengers and other workers--including firefighters and other first responders and office workers in the Towers--who never made it home that day. I am also thinking of those who were spared because they had the day off, were late or were on their way when their train or bus came to a halt.

And there are the bikes that were never retrieved.

  

Bike rack at the 9/11 Memorial

Twenty Years Later

If you don't remember where you were and what you were doing on this date twenty years ago, you either were in solitary confinement or of the generation after the children I would've had, had I been so inclined.

Perhaps the unluckiest people in the history of this city were the ones who went to work and didn't make it home.  In addition to firefighters, police officers and other first responders, and the folks who worked in and around the World Trade Center towers, they included messengers and others who made deliveries on bicycles. 

Photo by Jin Lee, from the 9/11 Memorial website

Their bikes were among those attached to a rack found mostly intact on Vesey Street.  The moment of the attack--8:46 am--would have been a busy time for them, as many office workers were arriving and those already at their desks were ready for, say, a bagel and a cup of coffee. The rack and bikes were largely shielded from debris by 5 World Trade Center, which remained partly intact after 1 WTC was struck.

A year after the attacks, only one bicycle had been retrieved.  The others, and the rack, are among the displays in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

During the past week, the remains of two people who perished that day were finally identified.  More than a thousand victims' remains have yet to be identified.  Among them may be the messengers and delivery workers who pedaled those bicycles through the canyons walled with glass, steel and concrete and floored with asphalt.  Sadly, those folks, who brought everything from documents to donuts, might never be identified, as some of them may well have been alone in this city, in this country, on one of its most terrifying days.