A Reflective Essay for the 25th Anniversary of September 11

By Vickie Wysokinski

I am not a person who believes in organized religion, and I’m not even sure what I believe about God.

But I do believe in angels.

I know because on September 11, 2001, I was surrounded by them.

They were the people of Yountville, California, a town I had loved for years and a community that embraced two stranded strangers from Baltimore and helped carry us through a week of unimaginable grief.

I had arrived in Napa Valley to host a business conference for about 100 clients and colleagues. Most were flying from the East Coast — Boston, Newark, LaGuardia, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The conference was supposed to be business during the day and my introduction to Napa Valley at night. Many of my guests had never been there, and I couldn’t wait to show them a place I loved.

On the morning of September 11, I was staying at the Vintage Inn in Yountville, where I had been staying regularly since 1986. I was lying in bed on a conference call. Most of the people on the call were gathered in a hotel near the Pentagon.

Suddenly, cell phones started ringing in the meeting room.

My first thought was ridiculously ordinary: They are all going to be in trouble. The man running the meeting was a stickler about silenced phones.

Then someone said they were evacuating. Something terrible had happened. Planes had hit the World Trade Center.

The call ended.

I turned on the television.

I watched Peter Jennings as the incomprehensible became real. At 6:59 that morning California time, I watched the South Tower collapse live.

I was inconsolable.

For hours I sat in front of that television watching images that would become permanently burned into my mind. Even today, the mere mention of September 11 can bring me to tears.

Eventually, sometime around 11 that morning, another thought broke through.

My people.

I had nearly 100 people flying across the country to me that day.

I had a manifest with everyone’s travel arrangements. I asked my assistant to start matching names with flight numbers.

Three people on my manifest were booked on United Flight 93.

For hours, I didn’t know.

My best friend was one of them. It was her first day back at work after maternity leave, and she had planned to sneak away a little early so we could have some girl time before the conference began. She was driving to the airport when she noticed that her new baby had spit up on her dress. Already feeling guilty about leaving him, she turned around, went home to change and decided to take a different flight.

Two other men had changed their plans as well. One had recently adopted an 8-year-old boy and discovered there was a Cub Scout meeting he didn’t want to miss. They switched to another flight.

Three people who were supposed to be on United 93 weren’t.

It wasn’t until early afternoon that I heard from my friend. Confirmation that the other two were safe came much later.

Meanwhile, my phone began ringing with reports from conference attendees scattered across America. Their planes had been ordered down wherever they happened to be. Oklahoma. Denver. Somewhere in the Midwest. Over the next few days they would scramble for rental cars, wait for flights or improvise other ways home. One colleague ended up driving a Ryder truck back east, his business briefcase bungee-corded in the back.

For a moment, even in that terrible week, that image made me smile.

My conference was gone.

The Embassy Suites in Napa, where we were supposed to move that morning, called and asked whether I would release my room block so they could accommodate people stranded in the San Francisco area. I hesitated. Some irrational part of me kept thinking my guests might still arrive.

Eventually I released the rooms.

Then I asked the Vintage Inn whether my husband, John, and I could stay.

Stay as long as you need, they told us.

That was one of the first angels.

There were others.

John had arranged a private visit to Opus One that day. Around noon, when I couldn’t imagine doing anything except watching television, he insisted we go.

“What are we going to do, sit in front of the TV?” he asked me.

I was furious with him.

We went.

I remember being unbearably cold. Wineries are cool, of course, but this was something else. My entire body seemed to be shaking.

Our young guide hadn’t even heard what had happened in New York. We told him. I expected shock, questions, something. He wasn’t unkind, but his reaction seemed strangely muted, as though this terrible thing belonged to a place very far away.

To me, there was no far away anymore.

That evening John pulled me away from the television again. We walked down Washington Street, one of my favorite streets anywhere.

On our way back we passed The French Laundry. There were people sitting at tables outside on the grass, something I had never seen during my previous meals there. John walked in and asked whether we could sit outside too.

They gave us a table.

We stayed for much of the evening, talking with guests and staff. For the first time all day, I wasn’t staring at a television replaying the towers falling.

We were alive.

Somehow, on that particular night, it seemed important to acknowledge that.

We ordered a bottle from Stags’ Leap Winery called Ne Cede Malis. The waiter explained the Latin: yield not to misfortune; do not give in to adversity.

The wine called to me.

Of all the wines we could have chosen on September 11, that was the one.

We bought more bottles and shared them with staff and the people around us. I saved one afterward because I could never separate that wine from that night.

Ironically, I have no memory of the meal the chefs prepared for us. I have no doubt it was amazing as always. I had eaten nothing all day. That night, their meal nourished both my body and my soul.

Two years later, a catastrophic flood destroyed our home and most of the memorabilia I had saved from September 11, including that bottle and my World Trade Center – Windows on the World Club membership card.

The bottle disappeared.

The memory didn’t.

The next morning, September 12, John and I attended a community vigil in the courtyard at Vintage 1870. People read poems, sang and tried to find words for something for which there were no words.

What I remember most was something young children had drawn that morning.

It was an American flag.

Instead of stars, it had teardrops.

That evening we attended another gathering at Domaine Chandon. Napa Valley hospitality workers—chefs, servers, bartenders and others—had gathered to mourn the hospitality workers who had died at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center.

It was gut-wrenching.

I had been inside the World Trade Center only days earlier. On my way out I had stopped at August West, a clothing store I visited whenever I was in town. The same saleswoman was usually there. She knew my taste and that day had put aside a dress she thought I would like.

I was in a hurry. I could tell she was disappointed that I didn’t have time.

Twenty-five years later, I can still see her face.

I don’t know what happened to her.

For the next couple of days, I kept believing people would be found alive in the rubble. I needed to believe it. I didn’t know those people, but the thought that so many human beings could simply go to work one morning and vanish from the lives of everyone who loved them was more than I could comprehend.

John kept getting me out.

On Thursday, September 13, he convinced me to drive with him to Mendocino. We wound through Anderson Valley and the redwoods and stopped at the Heritage House, where one of my favorite movies, “Same Time, Next Year,” was filmed.

Somewhere on the drive back, I realized something.

I wasn’t shaking anymore.

For the first time since Tuesday morning, breathing seemed a little easier.

Long before September 11, I had sought refuge in Yountville.

Down Washington Street near the Vintage Inn was a small vineyard. Napa Valley plants grapes almost anywhere grapes can possibly grow, and I always thought of this one as something of a “show” vineyard. Roses grew at the ends of the rows, and there were park benches around the vines.

I had sat on those benches many times over the years.

I called them the pews in my “church.”

I spent a lot of time in that “church” during the days after September 11.

Friday morning, after another night of very little sleep, I walked onto the patio at the Vintage Inn and looked towards the Domaine Chandon vineyards.

I had sat on that patio many times before. On clear mornings, hot-air balloons were a familiar sight floating above the valley.

That morning, they were there.

For one fleeting moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt all week.

Life was going on.

That afternoon we left Yountville for a hotel near the San Francisco airport because we had an early flight the next morning.

As we drove down Route 29 past the vineyards, I began to cry.

Then I began to weep.

I wondered whether the world would ever be the same. And I wondered whether I would ever come back to this place I loved.

At the Marriott in Burlingame, we sat looking across the water toward SFO. The airport seemed impossibly quiet. The absence of airplanes itself was something you could see.

Our Saturday flight had been our original reservation, which helped us escape the scramble for seats once aviation began moving again. We changed our connection so we could fly to Hartford rather than go directly home.

John’s father had undergone open-heart surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital on September 10. John had originally planned to help me start the conference and then fly to Connecticut to be with him. September 11 made that impossible.

Now we were finally going to him.

As our flight crossed the country and passed Manhattan, we looked down.

Smoke was still rising from the World Trade Center site.

I have never found closure from September 11.

Years later, not long after the 9/11 Memorial opened, I went there hoping that perhaps standing in that place would give me some small piece of it.

It didn’t.

I thought the memorial was beautiful. I thought especially of families who had no remains to bury, and how those names surrounding the footprints of the towers could become their cemetery.

But I left still carrying what I had brought with me.

Perhaps closure was never what I needed.

Because alongside the terrible things I have carried for 25 years, I carry something else.

I remember a hotel that told us we could stay as long as we needed.

I remember businesses that canceled every event I had planned for my conference without penalties or lost deposits.

I remember strangers sharing wine.

I remember children drawing teardrops where stars should have been.

I remember hospitality workers mourning hospitality workers three thousand miles away.

I remember redwoods.

I remember roses.

I remember balloons floating above the vineyards on a Friday morning, behaving as though the world still knew how to turn.

And I remember my “church.”

I do return to Yountville.

Again and again.

In 2003, when I was facing one of the most difficult business decisions of my life, I deliberately returned to my “church.” I sat on those vineyard pews until I could make my decision and find peace with whatever came from it.

Twenty-five years after September 11, I still cannot talk about that day without tears.

Yountville didn’t heal me. Nothing could.

But when something happened that could not be fixed, the people of this little town did what human beings can do for one another.

They gave me a room.

They gave me a table.

They gave me their company.

They gave me places to grieve and places to breathe.

They carried me until I could stop shaking.

I began by saying that I don’t believe in organized religion and that I’m still not certain what I believe about God.

But I know what I believe about angels.

I met mine in Yountville.

My will contains one very specific request. Someday, when I no longer need those vineyard pews, I want my ashes scattered over that little vineyard on Washington Street—my “church,” the place that gives me peace when I need it most.

Is this heaven?

No.

It’s Yountville.