The Half Moon on the Hudson last year. Photo by ennuipoet, via Flickr. Some rights reserved.
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, a group of 12 seventh-graders from cities in upstate New York was anchored in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty. Dick Brooks, a Greene County resident who was serving as the cook for that voyage, told the Daily Mail this week about his memories of that morning. It's a powerful story, worth reading in its entirety today. A snippet:
Brooks said he and the first mate were standing at the starboard railing, admiring the lower Manhattan skyline, when they noticed smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center’s North Tower and spotted flames ... Someone went down to the galley where there was an old radio and at 9:40 heard the Pentagon had just been hit. Then the radio died.
“Fighter jets started streaking through the skies above us, like huge angry hornets,” Brooks said. “There were at least six of them.
Nineteen minutes later, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed.
“One strange memory I have of that day is that as the tower fell, the air around it looked like someone had thrown buckets of fairy dust which twinkled and sparkled in the bright morning light. I realized, later, it must have been reflections from the thousands of windows which had exploded into tiny shards of glass,” Brooks said.
