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A Spirit Renewed, August 13, 2006
From a Dark Past, a Spirit Renewed
New York Times
by Lisa Belkin
August 13, 2006The first time Cholene Espinoza put her work aside was after 9/11. Then, as now, she was flying for United Airlines, a job she’d held since 1995, when she left the Air Force after serving nine years.
As it happened, Ms. Espinoza’s last night as a co-pilot was Friday, Sept. 7. She had flown into Manhattan, right past the twin towers, and she remembers “thinking about how fortunate those people were to be able to see their world as I did — from high in the sky.”
Her first flight as a full captain was supposed to be on Sept. 12. She was scheduled to fly out of San Francisco, which would have meant flying first as a passenger from New York to California on the morning of Sept. 11. But the flight she was to command was canceled over the weekend, which is the only reason she was not on United Flight 93 when it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
For months afterward Ms. Espinoza was haunted by the close call and by the fact that “those same people I had flown by (or with) that Friday night chose to jump to their death rather than be consumed by fire.” She felt helpless, as a former military officer, watching an attack on American soil. “This was my city, my country, my airline,” she says. “I wanted to do something, but what could I do?”
Eventually she took a three-month leave from the airline — which was more than happy to let her go, reeling as it was from the loss of business after 9/11 — and spent time in Iraq, as a military reporter for Talk Radio News Service, embedded with the Marine Corps.
She was just feeling some small sense of equilibrium, she says, when “Katrina blew in and blew me right off my feet.” Back at work by then, she flew in and out of Louis Armstrong Airport four days before Katrina hit on Aug. 29.
Even though it was not yet clear what path the storm would take, she writes in her book Through the Eye of the Storm (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006), with proceeds going to Katrina’s victims, “I looked down on New Orleans with a strange feeling of nostalgia — as though I was saying goodbye to an old friend that I would never see again.”
Again, she felt a need to do something. This time she took vacation leave and headed down to the gulf to help. Her partner, Ellen Ratner, happened to be sitting next to a family on a flight a few days after the hurricane. The father (who had stayed behind while the mother and two children left on this flight) was a principal of a high school near DeLisle, Miss., and an aunt (who had also stayed) was a minister at the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, which had been all but destroyed.
Within a week, Ms. Espinoza and Ms. Ratner took a U-Haul full of toilet paper, diapers, canned foods, soap, bleach and fresh fruit to DeLisle. It was the first of more than a dozen trips over the last year. They became close friends with the woman from the plane, a lawyer named Shantrell Nicks, and her husband, Myrick, and with the Rev. Rosemary Williams of Mount Zion Church. Together, the African-American family from Mississippi and the Latina-Jewish gay couple from the Upper West Side worked to restore what they could. “They say the first 20 days are the emergency, and 10 times that, the next 200 days, are the relief, and then 10 times that, the next 2,000 days, are the recovery,” Ms. Espinoza says. “We plan to stick around through it all.”
For months she and her new friends in Mississippi have been raising funds for the Pass Christian/DeLisle Community Center. Ms. Espinoza personally donated $130,000, used to purchase 5.2 acres of land, and the group has raised $500,000 toward its $1 million goal. (For more information see www.throughtheeyeofthestorm.com.)
The 6,000-square-foot structure planned for that land will not be a rebuilding of something destroyed, but rather a brand-new entity. It will provide adults with G.E.D. classes and computer training. In the afternoons, it will become an after-school center, the only one in the area. There is a junior Olympic-size swimming pool planned, too, so that more local residents will know how to swim.
Ms. Espinoza says she is determined to replace the helplessness she felt after 9/11 with a sense of purpose. “9/11 was a transformation for me, in a bad way,” she explains. “It was a loss of hope, a loss of spirit. Katrina was also a transformation, but it was a renewal of hope, a renewal of spirit.”