Travel Reference
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the south tower, which I discovered when I got back upstairs and turned on the televi-
sion again. Shortly thereafter, I went back down to the street.
This is how it went for the next couple of hours. In and out, in and out. Outside to
bear witness, inside to find out what was going on. Outside, shock and disbelief reigned.
Inside, sober reality took hold. It was genuinely weird; I couldn't seem to believe my
eyes. Only television was able to verify the horror as real.
For my father, the opposite was true. He stubbornly refused to acknowledge—or
couldn't—that what was happening in miniature on his screen in Scarsdale was happen-
ing with larger-than-life-sized certainty in lower Manhattan, and he called me to com-
plain.
“There are no trains running into the city,” he said. “I'm going to miss my appoint-
ment with the Realtor. Dammit.”
I resisted chiding him for taking a terrorist attack as a personal inconvenience. My
father was always someone whose perspective narrowed when he was tense or stressed
out, and his decision to start out alone in an intimidating city at age seventy-five had his
anxiety dial turned up to max. Now his chosen new home was suddenly under violent
assault.
“Easy does it, Dad,” I said.
I assured him that the Realtor would understand, that she'd be happy to see him
whenever the trains were running again, and that his future apartment was going to be
there for him even if he didn't find it today.
“I know,” he said, “I know,” and I could tell he felt foolish.
“What about you?” he said, after a moment and a breath. “Are you safe?”
Today, ten years later, far from the somber memorial ceremonies at Ground Zero, I started
out from Saint Louis Park, following some of the same bike paths I'd ridden with Rick
until I crossed the Fort Snelling-Mendota Bridge over the Minnesota River, just above
its confluence with the Mississippi. I pedaled south through a tangle of suburbs in the
morning and an undistinguished checkerboard of fields and rural communities in the af-
ternoon, at one point ending up on an unpaved road that looked to be a shortcut but
wore me out over several miles with camel-hump hills of dust and gravel that made trac-
tion going up and balance going down precarious. I could have done a lot better. I'd made
one route mistake after another, and I had the feeling, rare on this trip, that I'd wasted
a day; with a little more care, a little more planning, some better decisions, I could have
had a pleasant, scenic ride. Instead, I had a trying one that I was especially glad was
