Page 570 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
alone—and was intent on picking her up to drive her home but could not drive into Manhattan. (He met us in Scarsdale later that night.) The City was absolutely quiet. If you looked southward, toward the World Trade Center, you would see a black cloud looming in an otherwise very clear, blue sky.
We got onto the West Side Highway and inched our way north. The next horrible, indelible, image was that of the southbound lanes: They were free of automobiles, but they weren’t empty. Rather, they were filled by an endless line of large dump trucks, rumbling in single file, forming what I saw as the beginning of what would become a cortege, coming to remove what must have been an incalculable amount of debris, debris undoubtedly containing the remains of people who had come to work early on a normal day.
As we inched past the 96th Street exit, we learned from the radio that the George Washington Bridge was shut down in both directions until further notice. So too was the Henry Hudson Bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. What had been moving at a crawl on the West Side Highway was now at a near standstill. What to do? Hoping that we could find a route on city streets to one of the obscure bridges to the north, we decided to get off the highway. But there was only one way to do that, at least to do that soon: Once we got slightly past the 125th Street on-ramp, I noted that no car was entering; presumably the word was out that the bridges had been closed. So I backed down the on-ramp.
We were blocked at two small bridges as we went in search of some way to get out of town, but, finally, we found a policeman who, probably deciding that we were not all that dangerous-looking, showed us a way out. Somehow, we then wended our way, in stunned silence, through the Bronx and southern Westchester until we reached Church Lane South. We could not, however, immediately communicate with the children: Telephone circuits were overloaded on September 11; it was hours before we could speak with them. The only child of ours who was actu- ally very close to the attacks when the planes struck was Danny Y., who was apparently traveling by subway under the World Trade Center at the time of the attack, oblivious to what was happening above.
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