I Was a Reporter in Oregon on 9/11. My Newsroom Was Never the Same

Whenever I think of September 11, 2001, my mind travels to a singular place and a singular person: A chain link fence-ringed field outside Portland, Oregon, and the wide open heart of the late great essayist, novelist, and poet Brian James Patrick Doyle.

I was on the West Coast, almost 3,000 miles away from Lower Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Center. It was 8:46 a.m. there, and only 5:46 a.m. here. I was stepping into the shower when the nose of the first hijacked plane crashed into the north tower, gallons of exploding jet fuel setting it ablaze.

I must have been towel-drying my hair, applying makeup, or choosing an outfit for a regular Tuesday on the job as a community newspaper reporter when the second plane plowed into the south tower seventeen minutes later. I had no idea, yet, what had transpired, how the world would change that day. How we would all become less trusting and more afraid. How it would take decades to get our balance back, if we ever could or would.

I drove to the field for my interview. I parked near the bus barn and waited in my ancient Volkswagen Bug for the school district administrator to show up. The weather had turned an early corner into fall—it was chilly outside. I kept the car idling so I could use the heat. I turned on the radio and heard the unfathomable news, listened as it began to unfold. I put down my breakfast bagel, my appetite gone, the acid in my stomach churning.

After the administrator arrived in his big black SUV, I did my journalistic duty. I talked with him about the cost of retrofitting the entire school bus fleet with some new gadget that would keep them from spewing dark clouds of diesel-y poison into the air. I asked what he probably considered a few “gotcha” questions, wondering aloud how the district could afford the project, and whether it was worth laying off a few dozen teachers. Balance sheet stuff. I got mealy-mouthed half-answers back. I did the best I could.

I was largely unaware of what was happening in New York while I conducted my hour-long interview. The disintegrating planes. The twisting metal. The smoke and fire. The blood, the stench. The firefighters running up steps and back down, bodies on their backs. The workers jumping from the buildings because they were burning and choking to death.

In the following weeks, a kind of somber reflection overtook the newsroom. We talked about the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, but in reverent, hushed tones. If someone brought up a lighter topic, things felt awkward, like we couldn’t be happy because so many Americans were mourning. We all were suffering from a kind of collective angst.

One of my colleagues had a cousin who died in the south rower. I remember she wrote an op-ed for her community newspaper about how events took place on the other side of the nation but reverberated from the East Coast to the West Coast.

After 9/11, my work environment became more serious-minded. Before September 11, reporters often joked around and danced in the newsroom on deadline days. After the terrorist attacks, we mostly kept our heads down, filed our stories, and went home. There was less frivolity, and more of a sense of deep, dogged purpose than before. The events of 9/11 took away an element of innocence.

Twenty-three years later, the rear-view reality of 9/11 still hits like a punch to the gut and a blunt-force trauma to the psyche, an event so horrific only words and sighs can begin to untangle it. As Doyle—a Pushcart Prize-winning author who died of a brain tumor in 2017—wrote in his extraordinary poem “Leap”:

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

The sudden dead. The harrowed families. The murderers’ screaming souls. Doyle did not discriminate between the innocent and the wicked. Nor did he separate victim from perpetrator. His verse was, rather, a lament for the human condition, a searing elegy to all we lost that day.

Some news events stop time. Every person who lives through them remembers where they were at that specific moment. In my lifetime those have been the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, the siege on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and yes, 9/11.

I wrote about that dark day in a novel that will be published next May. Not nearly as beautifully as Brian Doyle did, but it’s in there. Where I was and how I felt when I realized that a small group of people using airplanes as weapons had carried out a deadly suicide attack on America.

Today Ground Zero is a sacred space amid the bustle of shoppers, the mania of day traders, and the constant creative energy of street buskers. Languid twin pools reflect back to visitors their own faces, shadowy visages of the lost, and, by inference, tintypes of the whole fragile imperfect human family, images that remind and recenter.

I’ll never forget that day, it’s almost 3,000 dead. None of us will.

Nancy Townsley lives in a floating home along the Multnomah Channel near Portland, Oregon. Her debut novel, Sunshine Girl, inspired by her long career as a newspaper journalist, is forthcoming from Heliotrope Books in 2025. “Leaving Tulum,” an excerpt from that book, can be found at unleashcreatives.com.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

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