9/11 Led to Writer's Move to Rye

Everyone has their stories about 9/11, but as a globe-trotting writer mine goes further than most. Writing assignment stays around that date in Bermuda, Alaska and Indonesia, all led up to my moving from Scarsdale to Rye with my wife.

I was just back from Bermuda, sailing back on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship on Sunday, September 9, 2001. Coming out on deck early to glimpse the New York skyline rising out of New York Harbor, the Twin Towers dominated the world-class silhouette.

I had attended the national convention of the Society of American Travel Writers in Bermuda and made it out just before a hurricane hit.

I was heading for an assignment the next day that took me from JFK Airport on a midnight flight to Jakarta, Indonesia– the Muslim capital of the world– to cover an international travel convention called TIMEX.

I was barely asleep on the plane when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom:

“There has just been a terrible event taking place in New York City –a plane has crashed into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center,” he says. “The news coverage is on BBC if you want to see the latest in what is happening.”

So I turned on the BBC. It was Tuesday, shortly before 9 a.m. and the grim terrorist-hijacked planes story was unfolding on the screen as though in slow motion between 8:46 a.m. when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower and 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower.

I don’t remember how many times those shots were shown. The reruns seemingly never stopped, but I do remember the pilot’s voice trying to remain professionally calm when he said:

“All planes have been ordered out of the sky. We are going to be landing in Alaska.”

So we were one of I don’t know how many planes that touched down in Juneau. There were so many that we had to be bussed an hour away to Girdwood for hotel accommodations.

As fate would have it, I had been to Girdwood several months earlier off another cruise ship and stayed at the same Alyeska resort. We stayed there for several more days, with little to do but hike, swim, and watch the seemingly endless reruns of those planes crashing into the Twin Towers, a sequence that never changed no matter how many prayers we said.

As a precaution, I had checked all my valuables into the safe deposit box at Alyeska, passport, credit cards, money and the like. So all I had to do was empty it when we got the word to be ready to leave around 48 hours later.

I was the only American to make it to TIMEX to cover that conference in Jakarta. But I had a sinking feeling when I checked my wallet just before going through Customs there.

Somewhere between Alyeska and the ongoing flight to Jakarta, someone had taken all but a $20 bill from my wallet, considerately leaving me with my credit cards and passport.

When I arrived at my hotel, I told the general manager what happened. He told me not to worry, I would be the guest of the Indonesian Tourism Authority for however long it took me to get back to the United States.

That took longer than anticipated, I could not get a flight out until the end of the month. I had arrived just in time to cover the final day of the tourism conference and file my TIMEX story for Travel World News. I spent the rest of the time touring the country, from the erotic temples leading to Nirvana in Borobodur carved by unknown Michelangelos in the jungles of Java thousands of years ago to the tropical paradise that is Bali.

Incredibly, I had been to both those destinations off a Lindblad cruise ship within the past year. So I kidded with my wife Stephanie about being on an extended sightseeing trip during my daily phone calls home, reassuring her there was nothing to worry about.

But I wasn’t so sure. There weren’t too many Americans in Jakarta, and the tourism types wanted to move me to a hotel opposite the American Embassy. Before that happened, my flight came through and I was back in Scarsdale almost as though nothing had ever happened.

Except it had.

My wife and I had a heart-to-heart talk about those life-altering events and decided that life was too short to remain in land-locked Scarsdale when we had always wanted to live by the water.

So we put the five-bedroom house we had built there around a quarter-century ago on the market that October 15, our wedding anniversary because I wanted to make sure I would always remember the date, and arranged to move out on June 21, another pivotal date in our life because that was the day of the summer solstice when I had been hit by a falling tree while white water rafting in Alaska during the final half hour of a ten-day adventure travel writing trip that gave me more than I’d signed on for.

Steph and I looked up and down Westchester searching for a place to move to by the water, from the Sound Shore region to the Hudson River Towns. We even placed a successful bid on a Dobbs Ferry house overlooking the Palisades and the Hudson.

But just before we were scheduled to close on that house, a faith-healing friend of ours told us that the new home was part of a development built on a former Indian burying ground. Bad karma, we thought. So we backed out and continued our search. Our comings and goings took us to Rye and Water’s Edge and what I think of as my F. Scott Fitzgerald/Great Gatsby moment…

Steph and I walked down to the Rye waterfront and I looked out over Long Island Sound to what I think was City Island, that idyllic bit of "Cape Cod in the Bronx" where I had summered as a boy with all my cousins at my grandfather’s waterfront house.

I took in the Rye waterfront flanking Water’s Edge, from the rock strewn boulders looming like Moore statues scattered by God with the New York City skyline looming in the background to the ferris wheel of Rye Playland way off in the distance like some eternal playground of the mind.

I looked at Stephanie. She looked at me. “We’re home,” I said. And then –this has never happened again –a doe, a deer, whatever it was, came bounding across the rocks as though it was lost and was trying to find its way home to either the nearby Marshlands, Rye Nature Center or the Read Wildlife Sanctuary.

It just seemed right. So right.

So we sold the 5-bedroom empty nest that was our Scarsdale home, and moved into a three-bedroom town house 1,000 feet from the water in the Water’s Edge condo complex, virtually across the street from the pavilions of Oakland Beach and Rye Town Park.

It wasn’t the excellent schools, picturesque town or the vibrant community or the easy commute to NYC that brought us to Rye.

It was 9/11 and its aftermath. With the world to choose from, we chose Rye. We moved in on June 21, 2002, June 21 being the anniversary of the day I “died” in the clinical sense on an operating table in Juneau. Triage surgeons at Bartlett Memorial Hospital re-started my heart and saved my left leg after I had been hit by that falling tree on June 21, 1982.

That’s how 9/11 prompted our decision to move to Rye and begin our new life here almost a decade ago. It all somehow seems fated. And we’ve never regretted that decision.