Since taking up duties in the I/Net group in the spring of 2001, I've had the opportunity to travel to New Jersey and New York City on occasion. My first trip to Pharmacia's Peapack N.J. corporate headquarters was to serve on a team chartered to identify collaboration goals and tools. Subsequent trips included participation in Career Path planning for IT workers and training for Vignette web content management.
Peapack is about 30 miles west of Newark Airport, well outside of the urban hustle and bustle of Manhattan and Newark. From the windows of the Headquarters buildings, one can see that the hillsides are dotted with farms and pastures. The spires of the chapels in the nearby town of Peapack are the only structures that break the horizon. The HQ buildings, acquired from an insurance agency, are laid out in an arrangement very much like a college campus.
My trips to Peapack were a flurry of activity last year. With the coming of Autumn, the air cleared, the leaves began to turn, and the countryside around Peapack became even more beautiful. I travelled to Peapack for Vignette training in the second week of September, while Carol was in Northern Italy for her second trip to Nerviano (Pharmacia's major R&D center near Milan). The kids were home with Grandma and Grandpa Schmidt, and there we were on September 11th, when everything changed.
Our visits went on pretty much as planned, though with a stunned sense of unreality.
We could see the plume of smoke from what had been the World Trade Center streaming to the south, sullying an otherwise crystalline sky.
The Corporate Travel folks at Pharmacia were absolutely wonderful, making sure that everyone stranded away from home was kept in contact with their loved ones. Starting mid-week, charter-buses began running from New Jersey to Michigan, Chicago, and St. Louis, making the round trip about every 24 hours. On Friday afternoon, after domestic air travel had been shut down for 4 days, Vignette training had completed. We were getting ready to board the bus to Kalamazoo when the corporate jet was freed up. The last of us got on the jet and got back to Kalamazoo, arriving an hour before our initial travel plans had called for! Carol also got the first commercial jet out of Europe, and was back home early the next morning.
We were all able to stay in touch via phone and e-mail, but it was nerve-wracking being separated, in three different locales, during this time of stress.
I returned to the area a month and a half later, to spend a day at our New Jersey facilities to do some presentations and the rest of the week in Manhattan for additional Vignette training. The morning after I arrived, the Jamaica-bound jet crashed in Queens, spooking us all once again. That day's Vignette presentations were another blur of unreality.
Driving into Manhattan that evening with a colleague, the atmosphere was palpable, with the absence of traffic and the heavy presence of police in the Holland Tunnel. We could hardly find our way to the SoHo Grand, with the blocked-off streets in the vicinity of the WTC. After checking in to the hotel, we left to walk to a nearby restaurant. Again, the sense of unreality - a beautiful evening, moderate temperatures, and an absence of people on the streets of SoHo. We got turned around while walking, and asked a passerby directions. He was extremely helpful (not my usual experience in Manhattan), and commiserated with the difficulty navigating in lower Manhattan without the familiar WTC on the skyline to provide an orientation landmark.
During the Vignette training, a large group of us walked to the boarded-up area around the WTC recovery. The autumn weather was spectacular, but the motes in the air from the WTC debris were very visible. As we got within a few blocks, the talking subsided, and a reverent silence fell over the walkers. A contradictory feeling of isolation and community hit me - here I was, standing with hundreds of strangers, looking at the ruins of the WTC, sharing a similar sense of horror, resolve, and shock. Conversation resumed as we left the area to return to class.
Last Updated February 17, 2007