The Ones Who Went Up the Stairs
Twenty-five years on, a short remembrance of September 11th. The firefighters who climbed, the passengers of Flight 93, and what the Bible actually means by the word hero.
Twenty-five years ago this morning the sky over lower Manhattan was blue and empty and clear. Then it wasn’t. Two towers burned. A third building took a hit in Washington. A field in Pennsylvania opened up and swallowed a plane. By ten o’clock the towers were gone, and so were the men and women who’d gone to work inside them that morning like any other morning.
People ran. Most ran away. Some ran in. Firefighters climbed the stairs while office workers came down past them going the other way, and they kept climbing, and the stairwells kept going up, and 343 of them never came back down. Cops did the same. So did paramedics, and Port Authority officers, and men in suits who stopped on a landing to carry a stranger’s wheelchair down sixty flights because that was the only way she’d get out alive.
The country stopped that day. Every plane in American airspace got grounded, out of the sky by noon, and for the first time in history the sky over the whole country went quiet. Neighbors who’d never once spoken stood out on their stoops and watched the same footage on the same channel, because that week there was only one channel worth watching. Flags went up on porches that hadn’t flown one in years.
On Flight 93, four men stood up from their seats and walked to the front of the plane. They’d heard about the towers on an airphone in the back. They knew where their own flight was headed next. So they went forward anyway, and one of them said “let’s roll,” and the plane went down in a field in Shanksville instead of a building in Washington. Forty people died so a fifth building would still be standing tonight.
We use the word hero too easy now. We hang it on athletes and actors and men who write a good tweet. On September 11th the word meant something plain and specific: a person who had a door out and didn’t take it. Jesus said it best, and said it first: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down his life for his friends.” The firefighters on those stairs hadn’t stopped to read the verse. They just kept climbing.
Every year on this day, in a plaza built where the towers stood, someone reads the names. All of them. It takes hours. Firefighters read the names of firefighters. Children read the names of parents they don’t remember, because they were babies in 2001 and are grown now. The reading goes on past lunch and into the afternoon, and nobody rushes it, because a name read out loud is a small thing to give someone and it’s still more than most of the dead get.
Ecclesiastes says there’s a time to mourn. It doesn’t say the mourning ends on schedule. Twenty-five years is a long time to a calendar and no time at all to a widow, or a son who was seven that September and is thirty-two now and still keeps his father’s badge in a drawer. The Bible doesn’t tell grief to hurry up. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, not that He fixes the schedule so the brokenhearted stop hurting on a deadline. Near is the word. Near is what the psalm promises, and it’s what the country tried to be for itself in the weeks after, before it went back to being a country with an argument on every channel.
What’s worth keeping from that day isn’t the smoke or the footage everyone’s seen a hundred times. It’s smaller than that. It’s a stranger carrying a stranger down sixty flights of stairs. It’s four men who chose the front of the plane. It’s 343 firefighters who went up because going up was the job, and the job doesn’t stop being the job just because the building is on fire.
If you want a place to sit with it today, Psalm 34 is a short chapter and it won’t take you five minutes to read the whole thing. Read it for the ones who climbed.