9/11 memories

It was a quiet morning on my first Cycle Oregon. I woke up in my tent in Crane, Oregon, whose population had suddenly increased by several orders of magnitude the prior evening, as 2000 cyclists arrived for dinner.

We had a short run for that day - only 35 miles to Diamond - a piece of cake after the prior day's 74 miles (including a long gravel stretch). It was a normal Cycle Oregon breakfast, then off for a leisurely bike ride thru the vast emptiness of southeast Oregon.

As I approached the 2nd rest stop, I saw people congregating around one of the support vans. It took a couple of minutes to have it explained and comprehended - the Trade Center was gone. I remember looking out over a zillion miles of empty sagebrush desert and thinking that my immediate reality could not possibly be any more opposite from that of much of the rest of the world.

We continued biking on to Diamond. 'Did you hear the news?' people would say as they passed by. At Diamond, I quickly pitched my tent, grabbed my trusty shortwave radio, and headed to the staging area where they had buses to take a lucky few to the top of Steens Mountain, one of the scenic highpoints (literally) of the week's itinerary.

While waiting for the bus, I did find some stations that were delivering still-fragmentary news, and conveyed what I was hearing to others. We got on the bus, and made the bumpy ride to the crest of Steens, where we got out and marvelled at the astonishing vista, looking down over the east escarpment to the vast panorama. It was completely quiet, except for the sound of the wind.

This is my chief 9/11 memory. No planes, no balls of flame.

Eventually, we reboarded the buses for the ride back to Diamond. By then, we were hearing rumors that San Francisco and Los Angeles were also going to be targeted (not true), and that all air traffic was going to be shut down (true). There were a bunch of New Yorkers on CO, and they were talking about trying to get home (which, realistically, was a LONG way from the flanks of Steens).

That night, a trumpeter played taps and Jonathan Nicholas offered some good words. He said that, after considering shutting down the ride, the directors had decided that continuing on made the most sense. Some riders did leave (I wonder how they got back to Portland, and how many days they had to wait there before getting a flight home).

The rest of the ride continued somewhat normally, with news from the outside world largely filtered by what we could divine from the morning newspapers, and what I could find on my radio in the evenings.

We got home late the following Saturday night, and it was probably Monday before I had a chance to view the footage of the actual planes-hitting-buildings. Therefore, I had no participation in the prior week's obsessive media blitz, and, for me, 9/11 does not carry the shock and horror that the rest of you experienced.

I am able to look at it a bit more objectively. When I hear Bush constantly mentioning it, I am not filled with the traumatic associations that many still feel - I am filled with revulsion for a man who uses Fear to manipulate damaged people, and who, incredibly, misses no opportunity to remind folks of the tragedy, somehow failing to acknowledge that the greatest breach of national security in our Nation's history occurred 233 days into his watch.

'Scuse me, but I need to get some work done today.