How — everyone marvels — did those firefighters climb the towers on 9/11?

Courage, yes. Stupendous amounts of it. But that's almost a given. Firefighters proved they were braver than the rest of us the day they became firefighters.

Something else clearly kicked in that day.

“Duty” is a hackneyed word. It smacks of Boy Scouts, and Victorian heroes who charge half a league, half a league, half a league onward. But in emergencies, it can be a blind, irresistible impulse. Even among non-heroes.

Which brings me to how I, a Record reporter, came to walk nearly 7 miles that day. From Newark to Jersey City.

For what? For a story. It's a bit ridiculous, looking back. I'm not quite sure why I did it. Except that, on 9/11, I felt I had to. It was my duty.

"Have you ever seen a dismembered body?" a more experienced reporter asked me on my way out the door. I hadn’t. “You’d better prepare yourself,” he said.

I was being sent to Liberty State Park, Jersey City. That's where — The Record had been informed— a triage center would be set up. Thousands of Twin Towers victims, rumor had it, were to be ferried across the Hudson. I was sent to cover that part of the story.

Ninety minutes later, I realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere near Jersey City. The turnpike was a chaos of dazed motorists, flashing patrol cars, blocked-off access roads. The Pulaski Skyway was closed. I phoned the editor to tell him the assignment was impossible.

“Get as close as you can, then walk if you have to.”

I had to.

I took the car down a ramp from the turnpike, parked in the lot of a Portuguese restaurant, and realized I was in the Ironbound section of Newark. It was 3:15 p.m. “Which direction is Jersey City?” I asked a bartender inside. He gestured. I thanked him, left the restaurant, and started walking.

And walking. And walking. Five hours of walking, as it turned out.

Directly in front of me, for the whole five hours, was the World Trade Center itself — a huge, smoking, biblical pillar of cloud.

I didn’t expect to actually reach Jersey City, but I wanted to be able to say I’d tried.

There's nothing heroic about this, to be clear. Or even very dramatic — compared with what some other people in North Jersey were experiencing that day. It was just odd. The impulse to do what you’re supposed to had simply taken over.

Would my boss have cared if I didn't file a story? Probably not. He already had a tsunami of news to deal with. I was the one who cared. Doing your duty, on a day when so many people were doing more awful duties, had suddenly become all-consuming.

Truck Routes 1 and 9 is an ancient piece of infrastructure, half elevated, that stretches over some of the most forlorn warehouses and gloomy waterways in New Jersey. It was not built for pedestrians. Probably no one had set foot on that crumbling asphalt in 50 years.

Today, though, there were people on the pavement.

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Stunned drivers were staring ahead at the New York skyline as I walked past. They were leaning against stopped cars, which stretched on and on in what had become a mad, miles-long parking lot. In the distance, the plume of smoke was slowly spreading over lower Manhattan. I thought of “War of the Worlds,” the famous 1938 radio broadcast that had panicked North Jersey: "A heavy black fog hanging close to the earth. … Enemy now turns east, crossing Passaic River into the Jersey marshes. Another straddles the Pulaski Skyway. Evident objective is New York City … ”

Cops were everywhere. I kept expecting to be stopped, turned back. But to them, the sight of one lone pedestrian walking amid a miles-long snarl of traffic must have been just another insane sight in a day of madness. They let me pass.

I continued walking, down the highway and under the grim girders of the lift bridges — first the Passaic River, then the Hackensack. I noticed people, leaning against their car doors, exchanging words. Young professionals were talking with truck drivers. White commuters were talking with black and Hispanic ones. Social rules had been suspended. It was the first moments of that famous 9/11 "unity" that — alas — seems to have completely vanished now.

By 7:15 p.m. I was walking down Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City, a neighborhood where — no offense to the many fine people who certainly live there — I wouldn't want to get a flat tire while driving through. That day, I couldn't have felt safer. The street was nearly deserted. I passed one knot of men on a corner and heard: “I bet you they find out the guys that did this were from Jersey City, just like last time." He meant the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993 — the worst thing anyone could have imagined, then.

Here's one thing I did not see in Jersey City on 9/11: People celebrating. Apologies to President Trump.

By dusk — 8:15 p.m. — I had reached Liberty State Park. I now had 45 minutes to get a story and phone it in. If there was a story. If I could find a pay phone. Cellphone service was out for the duration.

Ten years later, a 9/11 monument, the Empty Sky memorial, would be dedicated near this spot. For now, there was just a fleet of ambulances, lights blazing, motors idling. That was it — my goal. I steeled myself for pain, horror, mutilation.

Nothing.

Squads from 35 New Jersey towns, including White Horse, Camden, Runnemede and East Brunswick, had been waiting there since 4:30 p.m. All day long, there had been rumors: Victims would be coming soon, a ferry full of casualties couldn’t dock because of contrary tides.

Now, just as I had arrived, the truth was beginning to dawn. There would be no wounded.

“What does common sense tell you, when two buildings collapse?” said a volunteer with the Hamilton Township Fire Department.

At 10:30 p.m., exhausted and numb, I found a working phone, called in my story that wasn't a story, and then phoned a taxi to drive me back to the Portuguese restaurant where my car was parked.

While I was waiting, another taxi — one from a rival company — pulled up. “Get in,” the driver said.

I should have. There was no guarantee, on that day of chaos, that the cab I'd called would ever come. There was no guarantee that I could find another. If I didn't, I'd be facing a 7-mile walk back to my car. I had just been through a day that seemed like the end of the world. Surely, the sensible thing was to cut and run.

But I couldn't. I was still in shock — like everyone else I’d encountered that day — from the the tragedy of thousands killed, the sheer barbarity of the attack on America. Any decent gesture, however small, seemed like a last link to civilization. I simply could not double-cross the driver I’d phoned.

On that day, it was my duty not to.

I waved the taxi off. Minutes later, my cab — the one I had called — arrived.

“On my way here, I saw someone else waving for a taxi,” the driver told me as he drove me back to Newark.

“But, you know, I just couldn't screw anybody over today.”

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com