I learned of the attacks as I was going to the airport in Spokane, Washington to fly home.
I sat in a hotel room for four days, watching planes fly into buildings in an endless loop. (They stopped showing the jumpers sometime the first night.) On the fourth day I realized that there would be no flight home anytime soon and I took a Greyhound journey through the sad American back roads of Idaho and Montana.
Blessed news blackout on the bus may have saved my sanity.
The enduring image for me is that every marquee in broken-down Butte whispered “God Bless America” from that shadowland between despair and hope.

Drink more Georgian wine.