I remember my elementary school very vividly. What I remember most are the mornings before school began. Whether it was winter, spring, or fall, I recall the patience with which I waited in the gravel school yard for the bell to ring. When the rusty looking bell over the iron and glass door did ring, I remember the pleasure I felt as I went inside, the excitement that came from knowing this was another day to read, experiment, play with my friends. I traveled the warm halls that smelled of fresh ammonia, content that I was safe within a building ruled by a reasonable power and run by those who cared for me.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that these memories came back to me in the weeks following September 11, 2001. I’m certain it was a nearly universal experience for us to take measurement of our lives that day and to realize that all of a sudden we had come up short. Something was missing—for those of us most unlucky, a family member, a coworker, a friend —but for the rest of us, what we suddenly missed were the pleasures of innocence, the warmth of knowing we were safe, looked after, and sheltered from the cruelties of the world.

In the years since the Kennedy assassinations, it has become almost cliché in times of tragedy, celebration, or even spectacle, to talk about how we will always remember where we were, and what we were doing, when the news came. We tell our stories over and over, how we were in the supermarket when we overheard that a war had begun with Iraq, how we were driving across town when the news came that President Reagan was shot, how we were fixing dinner when the radio told us we’d lost the Berlin Wall, John Lennon. Absurdly enough, I recall quite clearly the bar in Livermore, California where I first saw footage of OJ’s attempted escape along an empty L.A. freeway.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 will outweigh and outlast the memories of any of these events, both for me and for most of us. The horror of that day has burnt itself into our thoughts, tattooed our minds with images of fire, hatred, death, and fear. And I, like everyone I know, have my story, the where’s and why’s of my life at that exact moment of knowing, when I first heard the news. I will not forget the friendly, guttural voices of the people around me, the look of alpine sunlight streaming through the dining room window, the smell of baked goods and beer in the German guesthouse where I was staying.

It was the fourth day of my European vacation. My friends Thom and Laura and I had traveled by rental car from Munich to the tiny town of Hintersee in the German Alps. When we arrived, we spent several awed moments gazing up at the vertical world of granite and snow, the verdant pastureland beneath, and proceeded to check into the Hotel Alpenhof where we’d booked rooms for the next four nights. We took our luggage upstairs, flopped on our beds, and marveled at the views from our rooms. Four days in a resplendent mountain paradise, we all were thinking, even as the rain fell and our breath fogged in the air. An hour later, after a meal of fried pea soup and sausage, our patron asked my friend Thom, the only one among us who spoke German, to come to the television in the kitchen. While he was gone, I made a joke to Laura, his wife: “Maybe some great catastrophe has happened in America.”

I don’t like to think about the hour that followed, the effort I put myself to to erase the image of the World Trade towers collapsing. I didn’t want to see it; I didn’t want to realize what it meant. After all, I was on vacation. I was supposed to lose America, forget the world of bad jobs and bills and problems with my family. America was supposed to go on without me, living through its dull routines as a faraway place in the back of my mind. I took those images of fire and death and stuck them in a locked box, determined not to have my holiday destroyed. I was determined to discount tragedy, and I don’t like to think of it.

But those pictures were far too slippery to keep them shut away, and on my first walk in that mountain paradise, they tapped, then hammered, at my consciousness. I think that probably just as strong as my memory of first hearing of the attacks is my memory of standing on a wooden bridge over a swift and wild alpine stream. The scenery was spectacular. The mountains rose on three sides in gray stone, the woods were deep and mossy, and the melody of cowbells clanked beneath the river’s noise. I stood looking into the water, my friends on either side of me, and I believe in one collective moment we all came to one heartbreaking revelation: the world as we knew it was gone.

The town of Hintersee consists of maybe two-dozen homes and guesthouses and one larger hotel on the shore of a crystalline, stream-fed lake. It lies in a narrow valley in southeastern Germany, only 15 kilometers from the Austrian border. The road that leads to Hintersee from the outer world of Ramsau, Berchtesgaden, and Munich dead-ends not a half mile from where we stayed in the Hotel Alpenhof. There the Nationalpark Berchtesgaden begins, a pristine world of sweet pine, towering stone, yellow cows, and the incredible, mystical blue of the alpine gentian. It was a strange place from which to contemplate terror.

In the United States, the reality of what had happened was hard to comprehend, I’m sure. When I returned, many of the people I talked to still had not been able to wrap their minds around the fact that, for the first time in decades, we were not safe on our home soil, that blood had been shed by a foreign power who was ready and willing to shed much more. In the Alps, though, that realty was refuted by almost everything I saw and heard.

That place, Hintersee and the Nationalpark Berchtesgaden, seems to exist in another world. There, women and men of seventy, and children of four and five, hike side by side over steep stone and through rough forest, chugging past the three of us as if we were standing still, and we often were. There, after a three-hour climb into the immaculate wild, you come upon a wooden hut perched above a thousand feet of air, and for a few coins purchase a ceramic mug of fresh buttermilk or a tall glass of beer. There, refreshed, you make the last leg of your climb, up beyond the trees, into a lunar world of stone and snow, just the hushed sound of wind and an avalanche falling over a distant slope. It’s another world entirely, completely apart.

And even in the valley below, where I never saw a newspaper, and television was rare, America in its uproar was so far away. The people, perhaps to spare us the pain, or them the discomfort, did not talk to us of the tragedy or even give it much mention besides a sad shake of the head. It was a quiet place, a sheltered place, and more than once, I will confess, I considered never leaving, never going home. It seemed a place where a refugee could live out a terrible war in silence and safety, taking walks through the mountains during the day, easing into evening with a round of beers. Why go back to hate and uncertainty, I asked myself, when here was peace and unbounded calm?

It was the nights in Hintersee, though, that were the hardest, after the restaurants had closed and the tired hikers went to bed. By nine o’clock the town was dark, the paneled hallways of the guesthouse empty. I said goodnight to my friends in their room and went to my own. It was so still outside of me, the valley so quiet, but so riotous inside. I saw smoke and dust and ruin, airplanes and fire and rubble, like pictures in a slide show on the screen inside my head. Perhaps it was vain, cosmically conceited, but I wanted to ask God, in whom I don’t really believe, to be satisfied with me, to take it all back in exchange for my existence. I hated the thought of millions living forever with these pictures inside their heads, children going to bed, clinging to their parents and not letting them go. I wanted our world to be simple again, for us to feel safe and at home and happily naïve like before.

It wasn’t until we left Hintersee a few days later for the wider world of Berchtesgaden that the news caught up with us. There, for the first time, we saw the headlines in thick, black type, “Amerika Im Krieg!” America at War! We bought a British newspaper from the newsstand and sat on the wooden bench inside the train station. For the first time, we read the stories that were already well-known in the United States. We read the news of President Bush and his mad scramble across the country in Air Force One, heard the story of the Palestinians dancing in the streets, saw the picture of someone falling 80 stories through the sunlit New York sky. Strangely enough, it was reassuring to read these things, to give actual shape, as horrible as those shapes were, to the imaginings in our heads. After a few exiled days, we became part of the story, even if we were 4,000 miles from home.

And it was reassuring to see the world at work. Berchtesgaden was alive with shops and restaurants and tourists, buses and trains. The old cobblestone square was packed with people, even Americans, whom we hadn’t been in contact with at all since the 11th. They were here and walking around with their families, and some were even smiling. They had money to buy cake and chocolate in the cafés, just as we did. The economy hadn’t crumbled into ruin; haggard men and women weren’t buying loaves of bread with shopping carts full of dollars, like in those old pictures of prewar Germany.

And with this discovery, came a realization: America had lost some buildings, four jets, and several thousand lives, a truly horrible thing, but here we stood in a country that fifty-some years earlier had lost exponentially more. How many of these people around us remembered the daily falling of bombs, the firestorms, the reports of dead soldiers, civilians, family members? Yes, Germany had been the aggressor, had committed acts of disgusting evilness, but many of the people we saw sweeping the sidewalks, serving spaetzle and beer, had been children at the time, ordinary citizens in a state gone insane. Fear must have gripped at their hearts with every passing day, squeezing them bloodless as the world around them burned.

In the rain that day, we walked through a cemetery of iron crucifixes and weathered stones. There were so many names, Gunter and Christian and even Elsie, with final dates reading 1917, 1943. From one side of the cemetery, you could look up to a mountain ridge looming over the town and see the infamous Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s bunker-like retreat, squatting in the mist.

And it seemed ridiculous, such a pitiful waste of time and effort and blood. My fingers clenched, and I felt the heat rise to my face. I wanted to confront the American tourists who made the Eagle’s Nest such a popular holiday destination and ask them what the Hell was wrong with them. I wanted to find the Germans who had drank their tea and planned their war in the Eagle’s Nest and spit in their faces. I wanted to back the terrorists against a stone wall, see the fear their eyes as I took a knife in my hand. I hungered for self-righteous revenge, for some kind of action, but all I could do was stand in the rain with a huge lump of grief in my throat.

I’ve always been a bit leery of overt signs of patriotism; I’ve never flown an American flag. I can understand that my neighbors back in the States flew their flags as an act of courage, an act of solidarity with their neighbors and comfort to themselves. It’s when patriotism takes on its more abstract form, when it’s no longer the people of America that are being celebrated but simply the idea of it that I begin to worry. I hated to see the members of a silent protest against war in Afghanistan verbally brutalized by a crowd of students at the university I attended; it scared me to watch the young men on freeway overpasses with flags clenched in their fists, looks of hatred or fear screwed over their faces.

Still, I was touched and heartened to witness how the Germans shared in America’s grief. When Thom, Laura, and I returned to Munich, the US flag seemed to have sprouted up all over the city. Outside the grand, gothic cathedral in Munich’s Altstadt, the “old town,” hundreds of Germans had placed candles in the square before the church, dozens of small American flags lit in the wet red glow. The American flag was on utility poles and in storefront windows, while overhead the German’s flew their own at half mast. The candlelight vigils through the streets of the city were meant to mourn for both the thousands of Americans, and the hundreds of Germans, killed in New York. Just down the street from our hotel, in a narrow, cobblestone alley, the patron of a bar had bound together a German and an American flag with a black ribbon. I did not feel so alone.

Back in Munich, Thom, Laura, and I tried to resume our holiday, get some pleasure out of our last remaining days in Europe. We went to the beer halls and the art museums and slogged through what we were told were the uncommonly cold and rainy streets of September Munich. Octoberfest was only a few weeks away, and we tried to find cheer in the preparations, joined the families strolling the festival grounds to look at the rides going up, the rollercoaster and the Teufelspiel, the Devil’s game. The anxiety of going home, of getting on an airplane bound for Washington DC, competed with the worry over whether we’d be going home at all. The US hadn’t yet opened the airports to international traffic, and who knew what kind of delays there’d be once they had. How strange, to be at the beginning of the twenty-first century and have our entire country shut up like a city under siege.

In the end, we made it back on time, rushed through the weird and makeshift security checkpoints in Munich and Copenhagen, our dirty clothing pawed through by apologetic, yet earnest, security people. We spent an anxious seven hours in flight, and when we landed, we went about looking at things with newly suspicious eyes. Who was that guy who seemed to be slipping out of the airport bathroom just as I was coming in? What was in the trailer of that truck sitting without a driver by the side of the freeway? Were all the people in downtown Baltimore as subdued and confused as we were, or did the world only look so strange to us?

I started the process of catching up with the new mood. At home and at work, people were still telling their stories of how and when and where with energy and emotion, though they’d probably already told them a hundred times. I saw tears pooling in the eyes of people I’d never seen more than a bland smile from in the past. One man told me that when the planes were coming down and the freeways were full of accidents as people rushed home, that his fear was that it would never stop, that the planes would keep endlessly falling out of the skies one after another. He wanted the news to just stop, the radio to go silent, though that thought scared him even more.

In the weeks and months following September 11, there has been a lot of talk about how to get back to “normal.” How do we get the economy back up and running? How do we make sure the airlines and tourist industry get back on their feet? How do we get the ghosts out of our heads so we can feel safe again and go about our usual lives? We keep talking to our friends and family, mulling it all over, reassuring ourselves by day and worrying at night.

My thoughts keep going back to that valley in the German Alps when my friends and I stood over a wild stream and wondered if the world could ever be the same. Someone e-mailed me the address to a web site full of pictures of the world’s reaction to September 11. In those pictures, I saw people all over the world mourning for what had happened: the banks of flowers before American embassies in Holland, Japan, and Colombia; the candlelight vigils in Berlin and Toronto; the stunned expression on the face the French Prime Minister; the young Palestinian woman weeping so deeply her friend has to hold her to keep her from falling to the ground.

Looking at those pictures, I wondered for a little while if the ways the world will be different won’t all be bad. I wondered if maybe through this horrible event the separate countries of the world could come together a bit more, discover ways to avoid this kind of bloodshed. Nobility shone through those pictures, and there was hope as well as sadness in looking at them.

Of course, the memories of nations are short. Self-preservation and interest soon overcome sorrow, and politics resume when emotion subsides. But if national memory is short, then personal memory is very long. Sharing sadness and confusion can create a bond between people that won’t so easily wear away.

When Thom, Laura, and I got off the plane from Europe in Washington and drove the 60 miles to my house, it was a lovely day. After 10 days of almost nonstop rain in Germany, the feel of sun on our bare arms and the warm wind blowing through the windows was a tonic. We were mostly quiet, tired after the long flight and even longer trip, trying to get used to the new, post-terror landscape around us.

When it was time for Thom and Laura to go on home, I gave them each a good hug. We’d been together through a lot over that week and a half, and I was uneasy letting them go. We were separating to try to go back to our regular lives, and that was a task I didn’t particularly relish. But I did feel like I was carrying something extra from them that would help, a kind of circle of protection that comes out of deep friendship. I’m not at all certain, but maybe we can take a little comfort in the thought that sometimes the unintended result of terror is a small net increase in love.