Monday, September 10, 2001.
It was one of those lingering late summer days. Being after Labor Day, children were back in school, but that did not mean the summer was over.
At the time, I lived in the Rose City Park neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. On that day, TriMet opened its second light rail line, the Red Line, which would take people between downtown Portland and Portland International Airport. To mark that day, members of the media and a lot of other people rode the new MAX trains between Gateway Transit Center and the airport.
I went to Blue Lake in Fairview, Oregon. It was one of several places I liked to go swimming. I got there in the early afternoon and it was peaceful. Kids were already in school, so the place was mostly deserted. The only noises were the occasional sounds of motorboats in the distance. It was sunny and there was no cloud in the sky.
I wore a green-and-blue plaid one-piece swimsuit, a kind of swimsuit girls wear for competitive swimming. I had a very long hair that I hadn't cut since 1997 (and until 2002), which I kept in a French braid.
The water was cold, and waves hit the shore every time a boat passed by on the other side of the lake.
After a few minutes I felt cold, so I got out of the water and sat on the grass.
There were a couple of Latinas maybe in their 20s a few feet away from me. They were having fun and joking in Spanish. It seemed like they were playing a game. One of the girls lost and she was pretending to prostrate at the other girl, shouting, "Allah! Allah!"
A few minutes later there was a big passenger aircraft that flew right above us. It wasn't anything unusual. The lake was located a few miles due east of Portland International Airport, and about a mile west of Portland-Troutdale Airport.
Maybe a couple of hours later I made my way home. I stopped by at a payphone booth next to the already-closed concession stand in the park to check messages. Although I bought my first cell phone in June of that year, I rarely used it as it would cost me 50 cents a minute, making it cheaper to use the payphone if the phone call is even a second longer than 59.
I was tired by the time I was home. I went to bed.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
I woke up late, maybe around 10 a.m. I hit the shower. I went into the living room and the TV was on, and my roommate was fixated on the TV. It took me a while to make sense of what was happening. Then I wondered if there were more airplanes heading toward San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles?
I guess I wasn't alone. By noon, most local government offices, businesses, malls, theatres, etc., have decided to close for the day. On a local AM talk radio station, a pundit said this was a failure of human intelligence, a result of overreliance on computers. Then I recalled that a few days earlier, the U.S. government issued a terrorist alert for the U.S. military installations in Japan and Korea. Maybe the U.S. intelligence misread the signs.
TriMet quickly cancelled the planned Red Line opening event as Portland International Airport went into lockdown. The previous day, the light rail trains and the airport were packed with people. Now the airport was deserted.
Every single TV station was on the repeat replays of World Trade Center being destroyed by the hijacked airplanes. The only exception was Trinity Broadcasting Network, an Evangelical Christian TV station, which in its great wisdom decided to put on children's programming all day.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
President Bush was suddenly popular, or it seemed. There were chatters of "World War III," "martial law," and even "New World Order." Yet, Bush went on TV with a kind of motivational speech trying to unite the nation, discourage anti-Muslim hate crimes, and more importantly, "go shopping."
I was both shocked and disoriented by the previous day's events. I decided to take a walk all the way to downtown, approximately six miles each way. I walked through the Lloyd Center mall. About a third of stores were still closed. I continued on to Broadway Bridge and then past the Post Office building. Across the Post Office, there used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Typically a quiet historic building (now owned by Willamette University's Pacific Northwest College of Art) with little activities outside, I saw a large "INS Deportation and Detention" bus parked in front of it that day.
Thursday, September 13, 2001.
I do not remember much from this day. I think everything was blurry.
Friday, September 14, 2001.
At the Pioneer Courthouse Square in the middle of downtown, there was a makeshift memorial altar. The Medical Teams International brought in one of their mobile clinic vans to provide grief counseling. I saw a pickup truck with a Confederate flag drive past the square.
A surreal scene took place. There were apparently two competing thoughts on how to respond to 9/11. Some believed that it was important to carry on as usual, since (as they argued) disruption of the American Way of Life was the point of terrorism. So a local LGBTQ community group decided to go ahead with the previously scheduled memorial rally for Loni Kai Okaruru, who was believed to be a victim of anti-transgender hate crime a few weeks earlier. Several notable public figures showed up to support the rally, including then Portland police chief Mark Kroeker. But most people seemed to mistake this rally for a 9/11 memorial event, and as soon as they figured out that it wasn't, they left, some of them apparently upset.
Edit: In the previous version I wrote that the TriMet MAX Red Line opening festivities were on Sept. 10 and 11, 2001 and the second day was cancelled due to the terrorist attack. A reader with a better memory pointed out (and provided me with a proof) that while the trains began running on Sept. 10 at noon, the actual celebrations were scheduled for the following weekend, Sept. 15 and 16, and were then cancelled. TriMet did not offer free rides systemwide for this occasion (I mixed it up with when the Westside MAX Blue Line opened between Hillsboro and Civic Stadium, Sept. 12-13, 1998), but it did plan to give out "ride free home" tickets at the Portland International Airport station.
This article may be freely used under the terms of the Cooperative Nonviolent Public License, version 7 (CNPLv7). All other uses require express permission of the author.
First published date: Sept. 10, 2021, last revised on Sept. 11, 2021.