Thomas F. Flynn rode through hell and back on his bicycle and, four years later, wrote an epic poem about it. The author will present the resulting work, “Bikeman,” at the 2009 Millbrook Book Festival on May 16, as part of the Hudson Valley Poetry Panel.
In 2001, Flynn was living in New York and working as a producer for “CBS Evening News With Dan Rather.” One September morning, he was standing in the garden outside of his lower Manhattan home when he heard an odd-sounding plane overhead. “There was something wrong with that plane, it was revving up,” he recalled. “I told my wife ‘we’re under attack.’ That plane was intending to do what it did.”
Flynn’s journalistic instincts kicked in and he immediately mounted his bike, armed with pad and pen, and headed towards the towers. Experience had taught him not to ignore the call a scoop–In 1993 Flynn, who was working for CBS’s “48 Hours” at the time, dismissed a report of explosions at the towers as a gas main break and failed to follow the story. “That was the first attack on US soil,” he said. “I told a colleague of mine, ‘I’m not gonna let that happen again’.”
The audacious producer predicted the disaster, but did not forsee the danger that he would encounter. He was standing in front of police lines with a cameraman (an audio engineer working at Merrill Lynch whom he’d hired on the spot) and several rescue workers when the first tower began to collapse. “None of us standing there expected that building to come down,” he said
Flynn found himself scrambling for his life. He ended up trapped in a parking garage that was permeated by a thick cloud of dust and debris. “You couldn’t see anything. That dust was very hot and gritty,” he remembered. When he and a group of fellow escapees finally broke through a glass door and resurfaced, Flynn made his way to the CBS studio, where he delivered the first eyewitness report of the collapse.
At the studio, he also made notes about the episode, which he would not revisit until four years later. “I’d always intended to write up my experiences of that morning,” he said. According to Flynn, a re-reading of Dante’s “Inferno,” first cantica of the 700-year-old “Divine Comedy,” inspired him to begin writing. “Bikeman,” he said, “parallels one man’s visit to hell with another man’s visit to hell.”
The title of the poem reflects a name given him by fellow fugitives as they attempted to escape danger. Flynn held on to his bicycle throughout the entire ordeal, refusing to leave it behind. “One of the ambulance guys, when we’re running, he says in this chaos, calm as could be, he says, ‘I suggest you leave that behind’,” he remembered. The bike, however, had become Flynn’s Virgil, the character who guides Dante through the perils of hell in the “Inferno.” “I thought to myself then and I can hear it again in my head, ‘No way I’m gonna leave this behind, it’s gonna get me out of here’.” Thus, to the small group of people he fled with that day, Flynn became “Bikeman.”
The author is unsure why he chose not to write about the episode until several years later. “I was riding my bike around Cape Cod and I kind of started to write it in my head,” he remembered. “It came out as an epic poem.” The first draft of his poem (about 15,000 words) was completed in one summer. It took him another two years to rewrite. The final draft was not published until 2008.
“My daughter thinks that I was finally prepared to do it then—that I was afraid or didn’t want to revisit it, but that it was time for me to live through it again. She thinks it was a healing process. But I’ll leave that for her to say.”
Flynn admitted that working through the poem was an emotional struggle. “A lot of people tell me they won’t read it because they are still so traumatized by the event,” he revealed. “It’s closing in on nine years now—that’s a long time to be traumatized.”
Recently, Flynn was invited to be one of the guests at an English teachers conference. He is thrilled that teachers are interested in using his “Bikeman” as a tool to teach epic poetry. “Most (epic poems) are a thousand years old written in foreign languages with the names of people you don’t know and situations you’ve never heard of or cared about,” he said. “This is an event that was very much part of their lives. It includes language they’ll understand, references they’ll get. It’s a really smart way to introduce the form of narrative poetry.”
Flynn continues to write, mostly for television, though he is also working on a prose piece. However, he does not intend to produce anything comparable to the 73 page, 38 canto “Bikeman.”
“The epic poem form kind of demands an epic situation,” he said, “and I’m hoping that we don’t have anymore epic situations like 9-11.”
“Bikeman” is available for purchase locally at the Merritt Bookstore. The author is scheduled to appear on the Hudson Valley Poets panel, which will begin at 1:30 pm in the Lyall Church. For more information on Thomas Flynn and his book, go to www.bikeman1.com. To find out more about the festival visit www.millbrokbookfestival.org.