It Could Have Been Me: Healing After 9/11 at Wood Flooring School

Back in 2007 I attended a Train the Trainer course at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters International Training Center in Las Vegas to be a UBC/NWFA wood flooring instructor; these courses are held regularly to educate instructors who will be teaching and certifying our members in NWFA wood flooring skills. I expected outstanding training that week, but, as it turns out, I got much more than I bargained for, in ways I never expected.

My story about the school actually goes back to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I worked every day doing flooring in Manhattan or the surrounding boroughs of New York City, and on 9/11 I was supposed to go to work for Three Guys Flooring at the 57th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. At the last minute that morning, I got a phone call that switched us to working in the Citicorp building in Midtown, so that's where I was when we heard what happened on the radio and looked out to see the smoke coming out from the World Trade Center.

In all the commotion that happened right after the towers came down, I forgot that I had been scheduled to be there, but my family was freaking out. All they knew was that there was a note by our phone saying, "Sam, 57th floor, South Tower." Of course we couldn't get phone calls out, so it wasn't until early afternoon that I was able to call them and let them know I was OK.

Our local lost two members, Matt Diaz and Eric Sanchez, that day in the towers, and our entire council lost 18. A lot of our brothers died that day, and looking back, knowing that I was supposed to be there, it could have been me.

A little more than a week after 9/11, work started back up again. I was back downtown in the same area near Ground Zero, and the city was still reeling. The windowsills were 2 to 3 inches thick with dust and debris from the World Trade Center, and the smell was acrid and choking. People crowded the areas around the site to get a look at what had been done to us. It seemed so impossible that you had to see it to believe it.

The events of 9/11 affected me in ways I still don't understand. I do know I had always wanted to do something personally to somehow commemorate what happened, and for me, that chance came, of all places, at the wood flooring school in Vegas. As part of the installation portion of that class, you have to create a final panel with things like borders and inlays. I started toying with ideas for the inlay, and the first thing I came up with was to create the Twin Towers. The problem was that I didn't know how to do it-I had installed factory-made inlays before, but I'd never created my own. At the school, I had met my instructor, Kjell Nymark, for the first time, and he said, "We can do it, no problem!" He showed me what to do, and we created the towers in the floor.

It was a healing, closure sort of thing for me to do that floor. When we first conceived of the idea, it started choking me up, and it chokes me up even now thinking about it. I shed a few tears installing the floor and also when we went back to sand and finish it.

Technically speaking, the inlay we created was fairly simple, especially compared with the type of thing you see in the Wood Floor of the Year contest-what those guys do is astounding. But Kjell was able to teach me something I had never done before. The two of us have formed a deep bond ever since, and I'll always be grateful for his help creating what to me was not only my "Floor of the Year" but of a lifetime. I'm also grateful to Mike Peterson, who taught the sand-and-finish class a couple of months later.

I'm retired now, although I still teach, and my wife and I have a home in upstate New York where we'll soon be moving full-time. The note that was by our phone on 9/11 is framed and hanging in our home there. We're going to rehab a big barn on our property, and there's lots of square footage up there to let my imagination run wild. With the skills I learned from Kjell, and the example of the NWFA members' work I have seen, I hope to produce something people will enjoy.