Harger: For a year, my balcony faced the twin towers. We moved home to Seattle 41 days before they fell

August 1, 2001.

I awaken. I open my eyes. And I’m thinking: today I’m moving home. Back to Seattle.

I step out onto the balcony of our 19th-floor Jersey City apartment one last time. To my right, the Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Straight ahead, a mile across the Hudson, the twin towers. Massive, in a way no camera ever captured. Every photo we took from that balcony made them look like buildings. Standing there, they were the whole horizon. To my left, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building. The whole American skyline, arranged like it was posing for us.

That apartment held our whole life then. My fiancée and me, and Rocky, the miniature pinscher we’d adopted from the Brooklyn animal shelter, a 10-pound dog who thought he was a Doberman.

This was the view we’d had every day for a year. Two towers standing solid and bright against a blue sky. Powerful. Beautiful. Permanent.

I worked in Manhattan. The PATH train dropped me inside the Trade Center. Every morning I rode the escalators up, through the lobby, out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan.

One of those mornings, I was late. I cut through the line for the escalator, a dumb 26-year-old in a hurry. A man grabbed my backpack, told me I was rude. He was right. I’ve never forgotten him.

On August 1, we packed up and drove west. Forty-one days later, those towers were gone.

41 days later

By September, we were in a little rental house in North Seattle. Bedroom upstairs, phone downstairs. Before 6 a.m., the phone kept ringing. I finally answered. A friend told me, “Turn on the TV. Something’s happened at the World Trade Center.”

My wife and I sat frozen, staring at our old view. Only now it was burning. And we watched, trembling, as both towers fell.

I thought about the commuters I saw every morning. The people who lined up beside me on those escalators. And I wondered if they made it out.

That day taught me how fragile life is. How nothing is guaranteed. Just six weeks earlier, I’d stood on that balcony assuming I’d come back someday and walk through those towers again. Instead, they were reduced to smoking craters in the ground.

Twenty-five years have passed. I don’t know how. The dumb kid in a hurry is in his fifties. The fiancée is my wife of nearly a quarter century. Rocky lived a long, loud, happy, yappy life. Time feels so solid while you’re in it, and then you turn around, and it’s gone like it was never there at all.

Where the twin towers stood

A couple of years ago, I went back for the first time.

I stood in the plaza where the escalators used to carry me up into the morning, and it took my breath away in a way I hadn’t prepared for. Where the towers stood, there are two reflecting pools now. Two square voids, exactly the towers’ footprints, water falling into them and falling and falling, never filling them up.

The names of the dead run around the edges in bronze.

I stood there thinking about how those buildings looked from my balcony. Solid. Bright. Permanent. The most immovable things I’d ever seen, and they had 41 days left when I said goodbye. The most fragile things are the ones we’re sure of.

We live on a thin veil

For a moment after 9/11, we came together. America, the world, united in grief, in compassion. Strangers comforted strangers.

And I wish we could hold on to that spirit, instead of letting it slip away.

Because we live on a veil. A thin veil between life and death. Between what we expect and what can vanish in an instant.

And I still think about that man, and my backpack. And my God, how I hope he made it.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this commentary was published last year. It has been revised to reflect the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Never forget.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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