I was making a delivery just the other side of New York City that morning.

I was on Intestate 78 heading for the Holland Tunnel, about 12 miles from the tunnel.

Traffic was stopped.

At first I thought just another traffic jam. Then I could see; people were getting out of their cars, walking in circles, looking at their phones, shaking their heads, some were sitting down in the roadway, one girl climbed over the barrier and kept saying she had to get to the city.

A short distance down the road, I spotted a dark purple truck cab; I knew that color belonged to New England Motor Freight based in Lehighton. I knocked on the window, but the truck was empty.

Even though it was only about three minutes since I stopped, it seemed like hours had passed. One guy said they dropped “the bomb” on New York then someone pointed toward the city. There was a single twisting column of black smoke rising into the sky.

I said to myself, that’s not a mushroom cloud, so they didn’t drop “the bomb.” Someone put his phone on speaker, and the news came over about the plane.

There was an emergency highway crossover a few hundred feet up ahead, I rode the shoulder up to the cross over and started heading south to Pa.

Looking at the people standing on the northbound lane, you could just see the despair in their actions.

I got off 78 at Bethlehem and headed for a bar just outside of I think Gate 5 at the steel plant. Every once and awhile, my late neighbor Glen Wagner and I would drive down there so he could meet guys he worked with at the steel.

The mood in that bar was way different than what I had seen earlier — those old steel workers were ready to take names and kick some butt. I drank two boilermakers and headed home.

By the time I got home, the second plane had crashed, the towers had fallen, the Pentagon was ablaze.

Bruce Markovich

Lansford