Evacuation
A few weeks ago around noon on a Wednesday, you may remember, the Capitol and the White House were evacuated. I did not write about it at the time. For one thing, it seemed pretty insignificant after it was all over. We have evacuations all the time, on a monthly basis it seems, usually because of a “suspicious package.” We had a “suspicious package” evac just this past Monday. The only different thing about the evacuation on Wednesday a few weeks ago is that after we had sullenly walked down five flights of stairs and out of the building, a female Capitol Police officer came jogging up the street, shouting for us to move south as fast as we could below Pennsylvania Avenue SE.
I found myself walking calmly, not running, with a colleague, henceforth known as D. We walked down 3rd street SE as far as a church on the corner of 3rd and E. There we sat on the steps and looked back in the direction of the Capitol and watched and waited. D. told me about what it had been like on 9/11. He said they had heard the boom from the plane striking the Pentagon.
M. “You heard that all the way here on the hill?”
D. “Oh yes, it was like a small earthquake, rattled the windows. We were all preoccupied watching the TV for news about New York. Then when they evacuated us, no one knew what was happening or had happened. The Capitol police told us to run, and we ran. I walked all the way home.”
M. “Was Metro not operating?”
D. “Some trains were running, some weren’t.”
M. “So how far did you walk?”
D. “Oh, all the way to the Key bridge. And I’ll never forget, there were soldiers guarding the bridge and they wouldn’t let anyone across. One of them screamed at me, ‘Where do you think you’re going!’ I’m just trying to go home, I said. Well, they let me across, but they watched me the whole way. And there were soldiers on the other side too. And no traffic. No cars. Just floods of pedestrians. Everyone had to walk home, some people all the way out to Silver Spring and Bethesda and who knows where.”
After awhile, D. and I decided to go for a walk and find a place to eat lunch. The evacuation came at almost noon exactly, so most people had been ready for lunch anyhow. We walked down either E or F street all the way to eighth. The Marine Corps barracks that supplies the ceremonial guard for the President is located at Eighth and I, and D. pointed out the barracks to me. He also showed me the tiny, undistinguished house where John Phillip Sousa lived; it’s still a private residence. A small brass plaque beside the door tells passersby that Sousa lived there.
D. wanted to eat in an Indian restaurant he knows well on Eighth street, near the barracks, and so that is where we found ourselves. I was glad to see it was a buffett, and I tried a bit of everything in order to find about three dishes I liked. I don’t know the names of anything I ate. All I know is, Mexican food is not hot. Indian food is hot. I sweated and my eyes watered so much, I had to keep my handkerchief on the table beside me to wipe my face occasionally. I personally must have drank a gallon of water. I enjoyed the food and the conversation, though. D. said next time, we would go to Eastern Market for lunch.
Around 1:30, we were still eating, and I looked at my watch.
M. Aw shit, I had a 1:30 meeting.
D. It’s probably cancelled or postponed. Maybe everyone has been told to go home.
I took out my cell and phoned the emergency line where the PAO leaves recorded messages informing us if work is cancelled or if there is some other emergency.
“There are no emergencies at this time.”
M. No emergencies, so no one was sent home.
D. Or maybe they just forgot to change the message. That would be typical.
1:30 came and went. After ten more minutes, we walked back to work. As it turned out, everyone had been allowed back in the building by 12:30. The meeting had went ahead as scheduled. So I had blown off a meeting for an excellent lunch on a beautiful spring day. The one person I mentioned my absence to said he thought he had seen me at the meeting. I said maybe I have a doppelganger attending these meetings in my place.
Oh well. Not like I missed anything that wasn’t discussed in the previous day’s meeting. Sometimes I think managers have meetings just to practice the skills they learned in their “Facilitating Meetings” course.
Back at my desk, I read the belated email from the PAO, the envelope coded red for urgent: “A small plane entered restricted air space…”
Situation normal. My main regret was that I had forgotten my iPod when I left the building. I leave everything else at my desk on these occasions, but I never forget my iPod. That one day when the evacuation was possibly for real, I forgot my iPod.
Now in the nightmare I’ve been having, when the alarm blares, the building goes dark. We stumble down the stairs in the half-dark of the emergency lights. Outside, people break like cattle loosed from a holding pen. The sky is smoky and dark; I can hear gun shots, and what I take to be the boom of tank shells or mortars.
“They’re attacking us!” Someone says.
“Who?”
“Terrorists, they’ve staged an assault.”
There is nowhere to run to. The gun shots are close. I feel helpless and confused. Where the hell can I go that is safe? Where can I run to?
It sounds like the fighting is west of the capitol, but it’s hard to tell. I’ve never heard gunshots in a city. I could be misjudging. I decide to head North towards Union Station and towards home. My decision is irrational: I choose north because I know that east will take me into some bad neighborhoods. If my dream self had been thinking, I might have decided that the bad parts of town were exactly where I ought to go, since the citizenry were likely to be armed.
But I choose north, and this is the wrong choice. I go one block and am pressed east by a crowd of people who are apparently being chased by the militants. Shooting, screams, people fall around me.
Usually at this point, I wake up, my heart pounding, my lungs aching as if I really had been running. The feeling of having no control is what I remember, what makes this a true nightmare. I’m going to die and there is nothing I can do about it.
One thing that struck me on the day of our evacuation is that there was no communication, aside from the police officer telling us to move south as fast as we could. D. said this is what it was like on 9/11. No one knew anything. Standing outside, the workday cancelled, normalcy cancelled, life on hiatus, D. said it was like a death and a birth all at once. He said it was the worst feeling in the world. Some people had persistant problems with Tuesdays for months afterwards.
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“Tuesdays. I never could get the hang of Tuesdays.” So says Arthur Dent, or something very much like it. That said, 9-11’s reality is a bit more traumatic than the Vogons fictionally blowing up planet Earth.
Your scared, terrorized dream self contrasts with your controlled walk-not-run self of the actual evacuation, though I’m assuming the trigger for these dreams was more your conversation with D. than the actual evacuation. It seems it would be most frightening not to know anything, to just be herded along dumbly, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what.
“All I know is, Mexican food is not hot. Indian food is hot.” Wadulisi, if you are keeping track of good brood lines, this one has to be added. Made me laugh, and it’s SO true. That’s why I order mild when I eat Indian!
Comment by Dawn — Wednesday, 25 May 2005 @ 9:07 am
Yes, it was the conversation with D. that had the greater impact on me. Even when we realized that this was a for-real evac, and not just another “someone left their bag unattended” drill, we weren’t too concerned. After all, nothing had blown up (yet), so it couldn’t be too serious. I interviewed for my job here in early spring 2002, and I came to work here in August 2002, thus I missed the excitement of 9/11 and the anthrax scare. People who were here have some good stories to tell, though. All of the people I’ve talked to recall the fear that settled in not because of what they knew had happened (they didn’t know much), but the fear of what they did not know.
Comment by Matthew — Wednesday, 25 May 2005 @ 9:14 am
Part of what I find interesting is that for people in your city, terror is a bit more real and closer to home. After the initial shock of 9/11, I had a hard time connecting to an abstract thought of terrorists. And I still have hard time giving credence to some of the measures being taken against liberty in the name of protecting us from terrorism.
But 9/11 had a profound effect on all of us, I’m sure, regardless of where we lived. I had a plane crash dream about a month after, and I don’t consider myself susceptible to that. But then, someone pointed out that I had a tsunami dream…
It’s also hard, too, to take evacuations seriously, when there are so many. Or the infamous color alert system…
The way I see it… the terrorists won, even as we’ve spent close to the last four years hunting them down, imprisoning them, and tightening security.
Because we’re all scared on some level, either consciously, crafting new security measures or holding evacuations for forgotten pacakages, or even subconsciously, in our dreams.
Terrorism is about terror. And that’s been pretty effective.
Comment by Mel B. — Thursday, 26 May 2005 @ 9:56 pm
While I’m sickened by any kind of violence, such as happening day-in-and-out in Palestine and Iraq (not to mention in US communities), what “terrorists” show is how imperialists–even the Superpower U.S.A.–cannot achieve “complete” domination, or control the outcome of the imperial endeavor. What has effectively brought “terror” to the US public is the aftermath of its imperialist policies.
Certainly, though, the BushAdmin has done an effective job of using 9/11 to heighten the profile of the terrorist genre and to manipulate the public with fear by using this genre.
Mel B., I hope that an abstract notion of terrorist doesn’t get fixed in any of our minds, though we are saturated daily with such stereotypes; then the terrorist becomes the boogeyman and scapegoat. This, of course, is nothing new. After the OK bombing, the assumption promoted by gov’t officials and the media were ‘those terrorists’–a generic type of the ’swarthy’ male (adjective compliments of Ann Coulter in recent years). How horrifying for the US public to find ‘an enemy within!’ (As if the US is an unified public–contemporarily or historically!)
Maybe one day school e-textbooks will account for the post-9/11 wave of terror as stemming from the terror that the US has wreaked on the world. I expect, though, that in parts of the world, this lesson is already being taught.
Comment by wadulisi — Friday, 27 May 2005 @ 5:03 am
It must be so strange to have such evacuations be a normalcy around you. It obviously affects you somewhat…hence, your terrorist attack dream.
Sometimes I think of 9/11 as our generation’s tragedy. We all remember that day so well. Our parents’ generation’s prime question was “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Ours is “Where were you when the first plane hit?”
I don’t know about you, but I remember perfectly.
Comment by shel — Sunday, 29 May 2005 @ 9:13 pm
It’s no longer strange to experience an evacuation. It’s like the fire drills we used to have in school. And since I taught in public school for three years after college, I kept on experiencing drills like this beyond the point most people settled into ordinary jobs without evacuations. What was strange for me was receiving the “escape hood respirator” shortly after beginning work here. The “escape hood”is basically a baggie you put over your head to keep you safe during a biological or chemical attack (nevermind that some chemicals affect exposed skin and don’t need to be breathed; never mind that!). We also recieved a small satchel of emergency supplies–a few foil packages of water, dehydrated fod, basic medical supplies–which we are supposed to keep at our desk. These items are more unnerving to contemplate than the evacuations. As much as I try to convince myself that it’s all pointless, that the government has overreacted to the threat, there is the inescapable fact that there are people out there who would like to detonate a nuclear weapon in Washington, D.C. I don’t care if we did bring this threat on ourselves with our actions around the world; it seems pretty pointless to assign blame to ourselves right now. What I care about is whether my government is doing everything possible to prevent another 9/11, or to save my life in the event of another 9/11. I don’t feel that is true. In the end, maybe there is nothing we can do to prevent another 9/11. Total withdrawal from the Middle East would nt satisfy these fanatics (hence my comment that blaming ourselves is pointless). In its more honest moments (which are rare), the Bush administration seems to admit that it cannot truly protect us. But the Bush Administration is really all we’ve got right now. I still don’t trust them, but the Democrats aren’t exactly giving us any alternative in terms of national security.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 30 May 2005 @ 10:54 am