Attacks' Legacy: Simmering Fear

Nagging Feelings of Vulnerability and Unease About the Future Remain

Diane Rokos of Rosslyn still eyeballs inbound jetliners to make sure their landing gear are down. The hijacked airplanes, she seems to recall, were bound for destruction with their wheels up.

Scott Smit of Falls Church still has a two-week stash of food and water in his garage, an escape plan and a family rendezvous point in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Dawn Caskie of McLean still checks out every person boarding the airplane when she flies and keeps a road atlas in her car in case she has to flee an attack.

Four years and multiple catastrophes after Sept. 11, 2001, mental health experts and area residents say that although 9/11 might seem eclipsed by other events and forgotten by the public, its complex of fear remains just beneath the surface -- ready to trigger instantly.

Shoes still must come off in airport security lines, although booties often are available for those who don't want their feet to get dirty.

Metro riders who once abided by an unspoken code to keep their eyes straight ahead now scan one another warily, urged by disembodied announcements to watch, mostly in vain, for sinister activity and packages.

"I hate it," said Sandy Green of the District. "It is very un-Metro. Everybody [usually] sticks to themselves very, very carefully. And we have to be nosy now."

Signs along the interstates command: "Report Suspicious Activity." False alarms proliferate. Fighters are scrambled to pursue stray Cessnas. The Capitol is evacuated. The threat level is adjusted up, then down.

And real disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, seem to trigger the anxiety anew.

Forty-eight months after terrorists hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a field in rural Pennsylvania, the Washington area remains haunted by calamity, experts say -- reminded of its possibility and still struggling to find context for something that is unresolved.

Four years seems like a fitting span for a human event to run its course, to have a start, a middle and an end. It's the time it takes to get a degree, serve a term in public office. World War I and the Civil War lasted four years. Michelangelo painted the majestic ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in four years.

Indeed, so much else has happened in the past four years. Anthrax. The snipers. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The tsunami. The London and Madrid train bombings. The hurricane.