On the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the air was crisp and clean. It was an ideal day for a long bike ride on the back roads of Duchess County, N.Y., like those I had been taking before work in the summer and over the weekends to deal with the stress of my job and the loneliness and grief that accompanied the loss of my wife to cancer four months earlier. But instead of loading my bike into my hatchback, I drove to my office at the Wappingers Central School District, located on the eastern side of the Hudson River just north of Interstate-84, where I was Superintendent of Schools. I needed to get to work for an early meeting to confer with our attorney about a grievance hearing scheduled that morning at 9 a.m.
As I emerged from my office after the meeting, my administrative assistant told me she had heard an astonishing news report: an airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City. As she shared this news, one of her colleagues interrupted to give an update: it was a jet plane with passengers on board. Seconds later, the Director of AV and Technology came to report that a second jet plane had struck the other Twin Tower. He invited me to join him in his office with the business manager and the assistant superintendent to watch a television broadcast of the ongoing events and make some decisions about what kind of action we would need to take.
The first thing that came into my mind as I watched the blazing towers on the screen was the whereabouts of my two adult daughters, both of whom lived and worked in the city. I quickly recalled that my older daughter, who lived in Brooklyn, was scheduled to return to New York the next day from a vacation trip to Spain. My younger daughter, who lived on Roosevelt Island, though, was on the second day of her job at the Parks Department, and I was uncertain where its office was located. I tried to contact her to no avail. Both the internet and phone lines were down due to overloaded traffic.
As we watched the chaotic scenes unfold on the TV screen, the administrative team and I were concerned for two reasons. First, we knew that many of the 11,000 students attending school in our district had family members who worked in or close to the Twin Towers. Second, news accounts reported that some school districts to our south were considering closures because of reports that multiple planes were being hijacked and flown into other “strategic sites,” one of which was rumored to be the Indian Point nuclear plant, roughly 30 miles south of our district.
We had several decisions to make, such as: How do we notify staff members and students of this series of events? When should we do so? Should we close schools? If so, when? Should we take steps to prevent students from watching the news for fear they might be triggered? How should schools deal with parents who, hearing the same rumors we heard, might want to take their children from school?
We quickly determined we would keep school open and notify the local media of that decision. We issued an announcement that was shared over school intercoms about the attack in the city and developed protocols for dealing with staff members and students who might be directly impacted. Like schools across the region, we were improvising on the fly.
In the days that followed, the 9/11 attacks dominated news coverage for weeks afterward, especially in the greater New York area. We learned of students and staff members whose immediate and extended family members perished or were unaccounted for and chased down the rumors that emerged in the days that followed, including rumored contamination of mail and packaging that contained anthrax particles.
My personal response to 9/11 and its aftermath was significant and life-changing. As I watched the events that day and read accounts of the thousands who were killed, it struck me that none of the victims — the office workers, firefighters, or police — nor any members of their families believed Sept. 11 would be their last day on earth.
This realization, coming on the heels of losing my wife four months earlier, reinforced my sense that every day, hour, and minute was precious. It reminded me of how much I missed my wife. We had been married for 32 years and during those years we leaned on each other when we faced crises. I missed sharing our experiences, commiserating our challenges, and offering each other empathy and compassion. I missed having her remind me there was more to the world than my job. At the same time, I began to question my career trajectory. I missed the more intimate small-scale workplaces I experienced earlier in my career when I worked in Maine and New Hampshire. I decided it was time for reset.
Three years later, after an online connection with a high school classmate that became a long and loving marriage, a short-lived retirement in Vermont, and some work as an adjunct college teacher, I landed a job leading schools in the Upper Valley and found a home where I could bike to work and ride on a country road right out my door.
I am far from the only person from the New York metropolitan area drawn to the Upper Valley after 9/11. Census figures show that there was an unusual pattern of in-migration to the Lebanon, New Hampshire/Vermont micropolitan area between 2000 and 2004. In a 2020 article, then-Valley News reporter John Lippman characterized this bump in population as “a wave of homebuyers seeking the perceived safety of a rural place to live following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” My hunch is that many who sought refuge here were not only resettling, but they were also resetting and, like me, are happy with their decision.
Wayne Gersen is a retired public school administrator. He lives in Etna.