From 40th Floor, Running from a 'Wall of Smoke'

Around New York City, missing person posters make concrete what newspaper headlines exclaim: a sense of tragedy. Over six thousand people are missing following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers last Tuesday, among them firefighters, office workers, janitor, and executive vice presidents.

Countless died, and an even greater number survived, including Aaron Goldsmid, CC '02. But he rejects the "survivor" title.

"Even though I was there, I walked away unscathed," he said in an interview Tuesday night, clutching a cane he has used since aggravating a knee injury while running for his life last Tuesday. "I don't think I deserve the title. I don't think I went through enough. Survivors are the people that are postering around the city pictures of loved ones. Survivors are the people that were down there, that are injured, the people that were lucky to make it out."

He continued, "There was one of those big brown sheets of paper [allowing students to thank rescue workers] they had on campus walk. I got around to it when it kind of died down. I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but it was something to the effect of thanking the people heading up the stairs when, at best, I found the courage to run down them."

Aaron Goldsmid's story is probably not that different from the countless others that involve sprinting down the stairs of one of the World Trade Center towers last Tuesday morning, when two hijacked commercial airliners caused the towers to collapse in a cloud of twisted metal and broken concrete. But his story is, and will forever be, extraordinary.

He arrived at One World Trade Center around 7:30 for his part-time job at Lehman Brothers. A little before nine o'clock, he heard a drone.

"You normally don't hear anything from the outside--you're 40 floors up. At first, maybe the air conditioning, maybe it's something else," he said. "And then it got louder and louder and louder, people like, 'what the hell's going on,' and then the building just shook. Started swaying. Really, really scary." The lights dimmed "just like in the movies."

The plane hit, according to new reports, at 8:45 a.m. "I don't remember the sound. All I remember is the building swaying. It's really kind of interesting. Memories are totally piecemeal. Just very discreet images of certain things," Goldsmid said.

His reaction: "Moment of panic. 'Oh shit.' And then kind of like, what needed to happen kicked in."

Goldsmid paused often during the Tuesday interview, forming images in his mind of the events of a week prior. His freckled left hand would drum against his lips as he recounted, not for the first time, the morning's events.

"As it happened it was pretty much, 'this is what needs to happen [to escape],"' he said. "There are people panicking, there are people just standing paralyzed in fear. But luckily I reacted in that sort of way: 'You need to get down the stairs.' That type of thing."

"We headed down 40 flights of stairs. Halfway down about, I got a page--I have one of those little Blackberries [a wireless e-mail device]--from the guys that work in 101 Hudson, which is right across the river. Like perfect view of the Trade Center, just being like, 'Holy shit. A plane just flew into the tower."'

He described the scene in the stairwell. "It was kind of chaos. People were all on top of each other, pushing," he said. "Looked like a couple of the doors didn't open. They had to knock them down. It was pretty scary.

"A little more than halfway down, the second plane hit. We didn't know it at the time--we thought the building collapsed ... and was collapsing down on us, and that's when everything went crazy."

He and others in the tower exited the stairwell into the lobby. "It was just full of people. They shuttled us all out. It was firemen heading straight up as we were going down. Which just like is one of the hardest things for me to deal with, because--." At this point Goldsmid paused and, for the first time in the interview, tears welled up in his eyes. "These people were walking into the disaster."

Firefighters and police officers tried to shuttle the people coming out of the building in one direction but were largely unsuccessful.

"They were trying to get us all in the same direction, but there's nothing you can do. I saw the remnants of one of the little carts to clean the windows," Goldsmid said. "Half of it was melted away. Some of the more gruesome stuff--that was, you know, very much in the way. There was little bits of rock and stuff for a while."

"I saw some of what was left of the people on the upper floors, which is charred, half bodies, just fucked-up shit. It was hard."

He began running--sprinting--up the West Side Highway toward Stuyvesant, his high school.

He arrived at the school, about half a mile away, and started to help them set something up, "just because I needed something productive to do."

At 9:50 a.m., Two World Trade Center, the second tower that had been hit, collapsed. Everybody at Stuyvesant was told to evacuate.

"So we're walking along the West Side Highway, and right when I go, someone starts screaming. Just like, 'Run, holy shit.' [I] turn around, and the building--the second one--was collapsing then. I saw it go down. And it was this huge wall of just like smoke. It was just engulfing buildings on the way up, and you saw it engulfing people, and all of a sudden, just everyone started sprinting up the West Side Highway. Didn't stop until like somewhere between 10th and 14th."

He had run for about one and a half miles. He was "just barely keeping ahead of [the smoke] for a point." Someone who was running alongside him was hit by shrapnel from the wall of dust.

"It was amazing," Goldsmid said. "Just this exodus of thousands of people walking up the West Side Highway."

As he continued to relate his experience, his eyes darted around the room, from the wall to the table to the eyes of a reporter. He spoke calmly and informally, openly and frankly.

"I started crying on the way up [the West Side Highway]. It was just more than I could handle. We kept walking up for a while," he said. "You see these images on CNN of refugees walking from disaster, and it was exactly the same."

"Every once in a while you'd run past some guy in a bike with a little instant camera going the other direction." He stopped at this point, pondering his reaction to the image. "Little angry about that."

After he stopped running, Goldsmid stopped at St. Vincent's on 14th Street to give blood. "It just seemed like the right thing to do," he said.

The rest of his day was more of a blur. He remembers returning to his room and taking a shower. He remembers beginning to drink "the better part of a bottle" of expensive scotch that he had brought back from a summer trip to London.

"The only reason I started drinking [was that] I felt it hitting," he said. "My mind was starting to catch up with what happened. And I was like, not now. Too close."

He remembers going to campus that night, where administrators such as Eric Furda, David Charlow, and Sandra Johnson helped him.

He remembers going to the psychology ER at St. Luke's, where the staff gave him a dose of sleeping pills.

"I thought I was fine," he said of how he felt when he returned to campus, "but I tried to pick up a glass and just--shaking."

Goldsmid is no longer shaking, but he is reaching out to people who can help him, and people have reached out to him in turn.

"I just remember a friend of mine coming up who graduated last year," he said, "and just giving me a hug and wouldn't let go."

"You don't really tell anybody," he said in response to a question about more random people approaching him. "It's one of those things that's like, it's enough for me to know. Apparently word spread, and people would just come up and hug me. People I hardly even know, just like, 'I'm so sorry."'

And another: "I got an e-mail from a professor [on Tuesday], being like, 'You haven't asked for an extension yet. I'll save you the trouble. Take an extra week."'

Goldsmid is also seeing a therapist as "a precaution--if at some point I'm going to be a wreck."

Goldsmid does not know about the future, just as he does not know how the United States should appropriately respond to the attacks. ("Wednesday I was angry," he said. "The language of ending states … was ringing perfectly with me. But now I'm at a loss, having a little bit of perspective, a little bit of rational thought.")

But he knows that each day has helped him cope, at least so far. "Those horrible memories of the bodies and, you know, stuff like that, have been slowly replaced by things like, 'I'm here.' It's keeping me very humble, though. Primarily because it's like, I'm alive, but, knowing so many people lost so much. It was good to hear that evening that everyone [in my office] got out OK."

At one point in the interview, Goldsmid flipped through a newsmagazine filled with pictures of the attack. "Unfathomable," he said, pausing on a photograph showing the second plane crash. "It's so unreal. I still can't wrap my mind around it--too much for me to comprehend."

Perhaps one day? "I don't think so."

Last weekend Goldsmid traveled to Boston--on the train--to visit high school friends.

"I could not do anything and kind of take time off," he said, offering one possible response to his experience. But, he said, "It's the analogy of riding the bicycle: if you fall off, if you don't get back up again, it's a lot harder."

In Boston, his friends called him a "war hero."

"The idea of heroism was just--" Goldsmid paused at this point, searching for words. "I didn't do anything. I just ran."