I had an incredible sense of dread turning it over to see what had happened to make that the bottom of page one.
Sept. 11 was a very strange day for me as I'm sure it was for everyone. I was working in Annapolis, Maryland for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And on that particular day, I was out on a boat in the middle of Chesapeake Bay with two colleagues. And we were doing surveys of underwater grasses around an island in the middle of the bay called Poplar Island. So we spent the day just happily doing fieldwork. I think we all had cell phones, but I know mine was a flip phone with a very weak battery. And I had it turned off. And my wife was trying frantically to call me and didn't reach me. We finally got back to our office at about 5 p.m. It was closed, of course, everybody gone home. And we found the daily afternoon paper folded up on the doorstep. And I picked it up, of course, and I looked at it and it said Pentagon also hit - this was the bottom of the front page. And I had an incredible sense of dread turning it over to see what had happened to make that the bottom of page one. That whole day still seems very unreal and scary to me. Two years later, our daughter and her husband decided to move to Vermont to Saxtons River. They had two kids here, our grandkids, and we started making plans to move here after I could retire. We've always loved Vermont and the D.C. area just really seemed like a scary place. We were also starting to see more and more of the high tide flooding where the high tides in Annapolis were coming up out of the storm drains and flooding the streets. I retired and we moved here in 2013. And it's been just a wonderful respite from the congestion and life just seemed to be going too fast in the D.C. area. So we're really, really happy to be here.
Peter Bergstrom
