The Falling Man

I was a sophomore at UNC on September 11, 2001. I was asleep in my dorm room (class didn't start until 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays) when the phone started ringing.

I was so disoriented when I answered.

Sleepily, "Hello?"

My friend Rebecca was on the other end. She asked me if I was watching the news. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous question. Why would I be watching the news at 9:00 in the morning?

I remember stammering (with a slightly annoyed tone...to let her know she had just woken me up) "Ummmmmm, no...why?"

"Holy shit. Just get up and turn the TV on" she said.

"What?" I asked, still very confused, but sensing that something big was going on.

She was adamant. "Get up and turn your TV on."

I remember watching the news for hours. My heart pounded and everything else in the world ceased to exist. I didn't go to class. I couldn't move. I felt so powerless as I sat on the concrete floor of my room repeating over and over again, "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God"

I remember when my suite-mate (a Carolina lacrosse player from NYC) was escorted into her room by three people I had never seen before. She was hysterical...screaming and crying in a complete state of panic because her dad worked in the Twin Towers and she was unable to get anyone on the phone who could confirm his whereabouts. She thought her dad was dead. Later I would learn that the three people were psychologists who spent the whole day trying (unsuccessfully) to console her until she finally got the call that her dad had been out of town on business at the time of the attacks. He was fine.

I'll never forget the sound of her uncontrollable sobbing while the news reports came in with pieces of information about what had happened. And I still get chills when I think about being in NYC with my friend Graham on August 25th...about two and a half weeks before September 11th. We were on our way home from a summer camp we had worked at for 10 weeks in upstate NY. We had stopped to visit a friend who lived in Brooklyn (a Pratt student) who had also been one of the counselors. He had promised that if we stopped to visit him on our way back to NC that he'd take us to this huge block party like the ones I had seen on the TV show Brooklyn Bridge...a show my dad used to LOVE that came on in the early '90's. Sure enough, the block party was exactly like I had imagined. Parents and grandparents sat in lawn chairs along the street, kids rode their bikes, there was food and music and it definitely had the "old NY" feel to it.

Now that it's been 8 years, I realize that as much as I thought I knew about the events that took place on September 11th, there's still so much I've yet to learn.

Before today I had never heard of "The Falling Man." When one of my partners mentioned a documentary that has been made about him this morning I decided to do a little research. I Googled him. What I read about The Falling Man is, perhaps the most powerful thing I've learned about 9/11 since it happened. For those of you, like myself, who don't know (or didn't know) his story...check this out:

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

By: Tom Junod

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN#ixzz0QoRBP3RU