It was a beautiful morning, sunny, mid 70s, pretty puffy clouds hanging in the sky

The Last Time I Saw The World Trade Center

By Rob Errera

It was a beautiful morning, sunny with puffy white clouds hanging in a bright blue sky. The bus was passing Giant’s Stadium when the woman sitting next to me stood up and shouted.

"Oh, my God! A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!"

A gasp went through the bus and everybody craned his or her neck. It was true — the top of one of the towers was billowing black smoke. It was a strange sight — a scary sight.

The bus turned onto Route 495 and our view of the Trade Center was obscured by a billboard. But cell phones started coming out and people tuned their Walkmans to news stations. A couple of minutes later a man spoke up.

"They just reported another plane struck Tower Two. Somebody hijacked a commercial jet and kamikazed it. Both buildings are burning."

And as the bus rounded the bend toward the Lincoln Tunnel we saw it. The twin towers looked like smoldering candles, some kid’s eleventh birthday cake left unattended and burning out of control. From our vantage point the thick smoke didn’t even appear to be moving–the whole scene looked like a demented oil painting. There were more gasps and groans. Many people dialed family and friends, but only a handful of the calls got through. The rest watched in stunned silence.

The bus radio crackled to life. "Due to the World Trade Center being stuck by aircraft, all exits in and out of NYC have been closed. Bus operators should turn around and drop customers off at their original destinations."

We sat in traffic a few more minutes as the buses in front of us began to turn around. Another news report came in.

"Terrorists just crashed another plane into the Pentagon."

As we headed back west everybody in the bus turned and looked at the burning buildings across the river, forty faces bathed in the glow of a sunny September morning. I don’t think any of us suspected it would be the last time we would ever see the World Trade Center again.

The ride home was quick and quiet and by 10:30 a.m. I was back home, where my pregnant wife greeted me at the door in tears. "You have to call your Mom and tell her you’re okay," she said. I called my mother in Florida. She was crying, too. But I assured her I was okay.

"I got really lucky," I told her. "If I had taken an earlier bus I would have been trapped in the city. If I had drove in, I would have been stuck in traffic all day. But I caught the right bus at the right time. I got really, really lucky."

But it wasn’t until I sat down and watched the news footage that I realized how lucky I was. Thousands dead in the rumble and flames, thousands more injured, perhaps a million people forced to flee the city on foot. A slight change in circumstance and it could have been me walking across the 59^th Street Bridge, or covered in soot and grime, or waving frantically from the upper floors of a burning skyscraper. Or worse, much worse. Instead I got to watch it all from the safety of my living room, surrounded by the people I love. This might have been the luckiest day of my life, I realized. That’s when the tears started for me.