The ripple effects were and are ongoing.
I was sitting at a car dealership in Ellsworth, Maine, waiting for a trailer hitch to be installed on my car. I walked into the waiting area where the TV was on, and one of the towers had smoke pouring out of it. As I was trying to grapple with what I was seeing, the second plane hit right in front of me in real time. I was working as a chef at a seasonal summer property, and the shock was immediate. Everything stopped. We were collectively freaked out to learn that one of the hijackers had entered the U.S. via the Bar Harbor ferry, basically in our backyard. My mom was caring for my dying father at home in Northwestern New Jersey and I couldn't imagine how it must have been for her. My brother-in-law working in central New Jersey could see the smoke across the river. My brother was on the west coast and somehow got on the last plane headed back east to get home; everyone just wanted to be with their families. I found out 10 days afterward that my cousin had just started a job at Cantor Fitzgerald two weeks earlier. They never found any piece of him; I take some comfort in believing he never knew what hit him. The ripple effects were and are ongoing. My uncle's family was badly damaged (my cousin's widow wanted nothing to do with them afterward). My father was in end stage Alzheimers and had no ability to comprehend, so my mother was even more isolated in the midst of the national trauma. I always felt the war footing afterward created the atmosphere that enabled the Iraq war, which was an obvious mistake to me from the start (a bunch of oil guys "rescuing" an Islamic country they didn't understand and expecting to be lauded for it by Iraqis while they handed the U.S. their oil; not happening). I've always felt that Vermont was, in some of the best ways, 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the country; the ability to talk to each other across political affiliations is one of the things I value most about living here. We're not perfect; the divisions around same-sex marriage were hard to watch, but the way we've handled Covid is an example of what we do well. The social contract still exists here in a tangible way.
Susan Reid
