Planned fishing vacation finds Las Cruces resident near ground zero

Las Cruces Sun-News

Mike Kling, pictured near his home in Las Cruces on Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021, was living in on the East Coast in 2001. He went on a fishing trip in the waters near New York City's ground zero in the days after 9/11.

LAS CRUCES – Las Cruces resident Mike Kling was managing a garden center in Warrenton, Virginia, on Sept. 11, 2001. He said the center was about 70 miles from the Pentagon.

“We had no TV, but we had a radio,” Kling recalls. “People started coming in and saying, ‘You’ve got to turn the radio on. Something’s happening.’ We turned on the local NPR station as information began to trickle in.”

Kling had scheduled a weeklong fishing trip to New Jersey, where he grew up in Edison. Kling said that from his childhood home, he watched the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — which spans New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island. However, his view of the Twin Towers was obscured by trees.

He was scheduled to leave Saturday, Sept. 15. The entire nation was in disarray. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, North American airspace was closed to civilian traffic for two days. When flights resumed, they’d never be the same again.

Nevertheless, Kling was determined that he was not canceling his trip.

“No terrorist is going to keep me from fishing,” he said. “I left bright and early Saturday morning. As I was driving up the interstate, I started to notice that every bridge had an American flag on it. Every single one. Many of them had sheets hanging, with messages like ‘God Bless America.’”

He recalls stopping to visit a friend in Baltimore, and every house in the working-class neighborhood had an American flag out front.

Eventually, he arrived at his brother’s house. The following morning, they were up before dawn to get on the water.

“When the sun came up, you could look right across the water and see the smoke rising from the (World Trade Center site),” he said. “There were columns of smoke, and you just knew. You couldn’t see the skyline, necessarily, from where we were on the water, but you could sure see the smoke.”

Mike Kling is pictured holding a false albacore, or little tunny, he caught on a fishing trip to Sandy Hook in New Jersey in the week following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. From the water, he witnessed the smoke rising from ground zero.

Kling said that he recalls being moved, however, by how 9/11 brought the country together.

Now retired, Kling moved from Virgina Beach to Las Cruces in early 2019 to be close to family.

Damien Willis is a Lead Reporter for the Las Cruces Sun-News. He can be reached at 575-541-5443, dwillis@lcsun-news.com or @DamienWillis on Twitter.

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