Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Jessica Merritt was living in New York City and had a job as a teacher when the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occured last year. Sine the attack she has decided that the most important thing in her life is her family and friends that live in Bakersfield.

IT WASN'T THE SMELL that did it, though that was certainly a big part. It wasn't the noise, the dust or the street-corner toughs, either, though they'd all begun wearing on her. Jessica Merritt's decision to move from New York City back home to Bakersfield came down to this:

"I had to ask myself, 'If today is the last day of my life, where do I want to spend it?' I had to answer: 'Here, surrounded by my family and friends.'"

Death isn't normally a big concern for 23-year-old women. It certainly wasn't for Merritt, a pretty, outgoing New York University graduate known to many local fans of community theater for her Christmas-break performances at Oildale's Melodrama theater.

All that changed Sept. 11. Merritt was dealing with a classroom full of seventh-graders at Manhattan's Sun Yat Sen Middle School when the World Trade Center, four blocks away, was hit.

Several teachers were gathered at a window at the end of a hallway when the first tower crumbled.

"I can't get the image of it coming down out of my head," Merritt said. "There was just this guttural scream that came out of everyone. We could see people jumping (out of windows). You could feel the heat. It was a weird sensation, like a war zone. I just couldn't live like that anymore."

She was trapped in Manhattan for days. Planes weren't flying, subways weren't running, street traffic was impossible. She began to feel claustrophobic.

Then there was that smell.

"Burning flesh - you don't think you'd know the smell of burning flesh," she said. "You know it."

On Sept. 30, Merritt took her Shih Tzu, Gatsby, and moved back to California.

"Manhattan is such a target," she said. "Bakersfield is not. That's why I came back. I couldn't even stay in L.A., where I went first. Every time I went by the federal building, this shudder would go through me. To me, it resembles the World Trade Center a little bit. It freaked me out."

She got a job at Fruitvale Junior High, her alma mater, working for John Hefner, her old principal. She's teaching eighth-grade language arts - literature and a taste of her specialty, drama.

"I'm here, with my support group and my mentors," Merritt said. "Everything is turning out to be comfortable."

She intends to talk to her classes about Manhattan and her experiences last September.

"You see things on the news and it seems distant. By talking about it, you help them feel the weight of what happened. That's important," she said.

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