Just about one-third of Blaine and Birch Bay residents were born after Sept. 11, 2001. They have no memory of the morning that, for most American adults, remains in sharp relief.
For the majority of children and young adults, 9/11 arrives as history. In a recent poll, Pew Research Center found that 60% learned about the attacks in school. Only 16% said they learned about them from family or friends.
Facts are easier to preserve than feeling. After all, they come with the benefit of hindsight. Facts can tell us what happened, how many people died, which buildings fell, what wars followed and how American politics changed.
For those old enough to remember, Sept. 11 is rarely recalled as a sequence of facts. It returns whole, without the clarity history later imposed on it — enshrouded in the panic, fear and unknowing of a morning 25 years ago that began while much of Blaine was still asleep.
The first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 5:46 a.m. PST, nearly an hour before sunrise here. The fourth and final plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 7:03 a.m., as Blaine was beginning to stir and children were getting ready for school.
Word spread quickly through panicked telephone calls and the same urgent plea: “Turn the TV on.”
Then came the confusion. More phone calls. Calls that would not go through to New York City. Fear arrived before anyone fully understood what, exactly, they were afraid of.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered U.S. airspace closed at 6:45 a.m. The last airborne commercial flight landed safely at 9:16 a.m. By then, the Peace Arch border crossing had been constricted to a single lane. PACE lanes were closed. Every vehicle was being searched.
It was an early glimpse of what was coming.
The Northern Light invited readers to share their memories with us on social media and more than 85 of you did. Every circumstance was different, each story carrying the particulars that memory keeps: Where they were, who they called, what they saw, what they did next.
But the feelings were strikingly similar.
Fear. Confusion. The need to reach someone you loved and hold your children close. The hunger for information and for someone to make sense of what was happening.
For some, an unmistakable call to serve.
On television sets in kitchens, classrooms, workrooms and big-box stores, we watched people jump from burning buildings and first responders run toward danger whose dimensions they did not yet understand.
A total of 2,977 victims died that terrible day and at least 9,000 more in the years following from toxic exposure and related cancers.
In the days that followed, Republicans and Democrats gave blood beside one another. People of many faiths prayed together in town squares and gathering places. For a brief moment, before conspiracy theories hardened, racism spread and wars began, Americans experienced the same terrible thing at the same time.
Polling captured some of it. Three days after the attacks, Pew reported that 92% of Americans said they were frightened and 70% reported feeling depressed. Support for the government and trust in the media rose sharply.
Those numbers are history now.
The feeling is not.
For those who remember that morning, it can return in an instant: fear, confusion, the desperate need to hear a loved one’s voice, and the sense that the world had changed before anyone understood what was happening — an aftershock of having been there.
Here is a selection of the memories of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, shared with us by our readers.
My 18th birthday. I remember listening to the radio getting ready for school and heard the breaking news. I went right to the TV and was in disbelief. I also remember watching coverage in first period at school. In second period, my teacher didn't turn it on and I got in an argument with her over it. That day felt so dark, but the unity that followed I will never forget. We are so far from that currently but for a time we were one.
Kassy Stuart of Blaine, who was a teenager in Utah in 2001
I was working at Intalco Aluminum near Ferndale on 9/11, in the Reline Department.
We were in the middle of working on a pot that morning. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing at the time, but I remember our lead man coming up and telling us to shut it down and close the pot up.
Of course, I kept asking why.
He really didn’t want to say at first. I kept after him until he finally told us that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.
I honestly thought he was joking.
I asked him what spy novel or action book he’d been reading. It just didn’t register as something that could actually be happening.
We shut everything down and went to the lunchroom to see what was going on. Television reception inside Intalco wasn’t exactly great, so we ended up stringing welding wire up as a makeshift antenna so we could pick up Canadian TV.
That’s how we watched it unfold.
I remember seeing the second plane hit. Then we watched both towers come down.
Surreal is really the only word I have for it. A bunch of us, standing in an aluminum smelter in Whatcom County, watching something happen on the other side of the country that looked more like a movie than real life.
I had been out of the Marine Corps for about nine years by then, and watching those towers fall stirred something in me immediately. For a while, I seriously thought about going back in.
I didn’t know what was coming next, but it was clear that the country had been attacked, and part of me felt like I should be wearing the uniform again.
I never did go back, but that feeling has stayed with me. Of everything I remember from that morning, that may be the strongest — standing in the Intalco lunchroom, watching the towers fall and feeling the pull to serve again.
Marc Norman of Blaine
The small-town experience I remember was going with my mom to the Blaine Senior Center that evening, all walks of life, all faiths, but one community gathering to be together and to pray. I remember a strong sense that we were all one in that moment.
Lisa Moeller of Blaine
I was a 23-year-old student teacher in Ferndale and heard about it when I turned the car radio on that morning. We spent all day trying to act normal in front of first graders, and then rushing to an empty room with a TV during any break we got to find out what was happening. I remember how quiet and heavy it felt on the drive home. You knew everyone was thinking about the same thing.
Michelle Vander Pol Sturtz of Custer
We saw it on Fox News that morning. I shut the (American Pole) factory down in Sedro- (Woolley) for the day; sent everyone home until we knew what was happening. I allowed employees who were legally allowed to carry a firearm to bring them to work the next day.
It was unknown times.
Dean Berkeley of Blaine
I was 17 in the living room with my stepdad Curtis who was a veteran and had terminal cancer watching the news while tears ran down his face.
Gina Lee Steinbach of Blaine
It was my last day as a seasonal park aide at Peace Arch State Park. I remember how quiet it was with the border shut down and no airplanes flying.
Curran Cosgrove of Blaine
It was gut-wrenching to watch everything unfold. I was at work when I got the news. I called my hubby and told him to turn the TV on ASAP. We followed it all day long at work. The silence of the skies with all aircraft grounded was deafening, eerie …
Sheila Honrud-Dalry of Blaine
My husband, Paul, and I were flying home from Peru with a group from the community college. We had just landed in Texas for a flight change when we heard the news and watched the second tower hit on an airport television. Thankfully, our group was able to hire a bus to get us back to Bellingham. It was a silent ride for several days.
Shortly after 9/11 I remember seeing a high school classmate standing on an overpass waving a huge American flag. Despite the anguish of 9/11, I remember feeling such pride in our country and my classmate.
Christy Schroeder-Lloyd of Blaine
