New York State of Mind

"Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III is being hailed across America after heroically landing his disabled US Airways jet in the Hudson River. All 155 passengers on board the “Miracle on the Hudson” survived."

www.foxnews.com, January 16, 2009

I had that sinking feeling again. Over a late lunch, my TV news had broken into discouraging "stimulus package" reports with a very early headline about a plane going down in Manhatten.

Since September 11, 2001, no American with an engaged brain can hear a headline like that and avoid the adrenaline rush attached to the possibility that something terror-related has happened there again. That's true for me. And, I was 3000 miles from 9/11, in the relative safety of suburban San Francisco.

We certainly altered our pattern of behavior that day, after Shannon begged her dad not to go downtown to his high-rise office building for work. He wasn't planning to do that anyway, since he was already scheduled to make the trip to Indianapolis to see his dying mother. That didn't happen. As the week unfolded, he couldn't even get a single plane ticket out of the Bay Area to attend his mother's funeral. We will always have a link in our broken hearts between our personal tragedy and our national tragedy. Her funeral was held on the same day as our National Day of Mourning.

But, nothing in me can ever match the panic and fear that inevitably sets into the hearts of New Yorkers when any accident involving a jetliner occurs in or near their area code. The interviews yesterday among the eyewitnesses near the corner of 48th and the Hudson River confirmed it. No matter what they do now, their first thought is to process whether what they are seeing or hearing could possibly involve a terrorist, a plane full of innocent people on their way to death, and a high-rise building.

We're having incredibly favorable weather in the Denver metro area this week, after the one day of pouring down snow. It works that way here, and I still haven't figured it out after six years. But, I knew that the people stranded in the Hudson River weren't so lucky on this day. Just like 9/11, when all I could think about was how many people must have been in that skyscraper that just disintegrated to the ground, I wondered how many minutes remained for people to escape this enormous, sinking bathtub of horror.

It was not lost on me that the final address to the Nation by President George W. Bush was scheduled for 6 p.m. Mountain. On a day when a lot of Americans still haven't figured out why they owe him their respect. On a day when New York City was once again in the news around the world. This time, for something amazing, with a happy ending. For something involving a man in the pilot's seat whose life is forever altered beyond his imagination. For good. A quiet man whose current family home resides in Danville, a town in the East Bay of California that I know exceedingly well. Who started his educational journey down the road from my current home, at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The New York pride in its first responders was once again expanded to include people on commute ferries and practically anyone on the Hudson with a boat. Rightfully so. In a strange way, New Yorkers and Americans needed this story.

Maybe the next time a story like this hits the breaking news desk, our first thought will consider what incredible, miraculous, calming set of facts will eventually emerge.

We can Hope.