SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001
…dawns clear and seasonably cool, an entirely regular, routine and boring Tuesday. The morning ritual completes itself as the sun breaks the horizon and we pull into the Price Chopper parking lot. My mind is already on my Tuesday workload, or lack thereof--three orders due in and one to write, far and away the lightest day of my week. Al’s off; Larry’s due in around ten and Mike about noon. The truck order is done well before eight: I’m getting good at it. Greg’s in early with the milk, pulling out about half past eight. Part of me is thinking about my father undergoing hip replacement surgery in Toronto today.
Just before nine, the phone rings, and Crystal pages me to pick up line one. It’s Eva, with news: a plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Centre towers in New York.
Ugh. What a horrid image that makes: a plane completely out of control, spiralling into a 110-storey building. My ‘guess the picture on tomorrow’s Sun front page’ mental game just got waaaay too easy. Ah, well, nobody I knew was likely to be on that plane, or in that building. Jay’s safe in San Diego, so far as I know. Better call him tonight, on the exceeding off chance. Meantime… I’ll just go ahead and put this out of my mind, shall I?
Shortly after nine, the phone rings again. It would ring and ring all day long now…the only thing that would stop it from ringing would be both outgoing lines being in use. There was a lot of that as well.
Another plane. The other tower. What started off as a horrific accident suddenly turns ominous.
Not for the first time, I curse the fact that work has no radio access. The need to turn in to 680 News is almost overpowering.
I’m starting to get a little nervous as the Erb truck pulls in with my Danone order. A fairly large one. That’s hauled out to the floor, all of us waiting for the phone to ring again…and sure enough, it does: this time for Mark, who informs us the Pentagon has been hit.
Nervousness is gone. Now it’s something quite a bit closer to terror.
I mean, come on, the Pentagon? My mind is just starting to come to terms with the idea that somebody somewhere hates the United States enough to fly two civilian jetliners into the symbol of America’s financial might. Nobody but nobody should have been allowed to get a plane anywhere near the fucking Pentagon.
The store is almost magically empty. A good thing, too: I’m jogging back and forth from my dairy aisle, to the deli, to receiving, to produce, waiting and waiting for one of the phone lines to be free. Visions are flashing through my head at light speed. Eva’s been unconsciously preparing for a day like this for most of her life.
We have a tacit agreement: I do all the paying attention to the news, on the grounds that it doesn’t bother me, and she will outfit us for the getaway and assume a leadership role should an emergency requiring quick flight arise. It seems to have arisen.
No solid plans have been made as to our destination. One set of parents or the other to begin with, I suppose--I’d prefer my father’s only because I think we’d best be somewhere near Port Severn on James Bay before too long, and Dad’s sort of en route. But then, we kind of have to gather everybody, don’t we? How do you justify leaving your parents--your friends, too--to face this?
Half a second--what IS this, exactly? Nobody knows where this is coming from or when it will stop. There was absolutely no warning of any imminent attack in the media--I would have seen it, heard it, something. Christ, the headlines lately have been full of Gary Condit/Chandra Levy--just the kind of O.J. Simpson story I assiduously ignore.
The news keeps filtering in. All airplanes have been grounded for the first time in history. The Canada-U.S. border has been closed. (Karen Tiffin, our deli/bakery manager, is in Florida on holidays, trapped there at this point.)
A plane that didn’t immediately identify itself was shot down over Pennsylvania. This is reported with as much authority as anything else today, although later the story is changed significantly: it was in fact hijacked, but passengers--great heroism here--battled the hijackers to a draw. Although there’s plenty of evidence this second telling is the true one, part of me remains convinced that flight 93 was shot down.
So where the hell is the enemy? Who is it, and what will the White House do?
I got home, turned on CNN, and at last saw the dreadful pictures--surely by now some of the most infamous footage in history. Nausea, never far away today, threatens to boil over. The world has changed. Not, I suspect, for the better.
Tomorrow’s Toronto Star will strike all the right sympathetic chords on the surface—you’ll have to look inside the paper to see how this horrible sneak attack was America’s fault. Every other paper will be full of righteous (and rightful) anger. If any papers publish tomorrow at all.
Who knows? They might be dusting off the warheads even as I write this.
Dad's fine. What must it be like to Ichabod Crane your way through the most world-shattering event in recent history? I wonder, does he feel a disconnect somewhere?
Those of us left to face this cowardly new world...I can't decide if we're lucky or not. Time will tell.
---------------------Something truly evil birthed itself that day. In the manner of births since time immemorial, most of us have forgotten the pain of its coming. We say we remember, but unless the holes ripped in the fabric of normality swallowed loved ones, the pulse-pounding immediacy has long faded. Probably a good thing, because that level of fear kept up for any length of time cannot but have disastrous effects on a society. Deliberately trying to sustain the terror of 9/11--something that has been done occasionally by al-Qaeda but more often by the government of the United States itself--should, in my opinion, be a capital offense.
The evil's still in its toddlerhood as I write this on January 19, 2006...taking baby steps here and there (Bali, Madrid, London) and falling flat on its face at least as often. God forbid it should survive to reach puberty.
The voice of that evil popped up today on an audio tape sent to al-Jazeera. This isn't the first time it's spoken, merely the most recent, and arguably the most unexpected. We thought we had shut it up for good more than once.
Of course, we have only the CIA's word that the voice on the tape does in fact belong to Osama bin Laden. I've long suspected the United States, having killed bin Laden long ago, is keeping him 'alive' for its own purposes. This is one of those situations where I can't decide if I fear I'm right or hope I'm wrong.
Regardless, somebody purporting to be bin Laden is threatening fresh attacks on United States soil. Supposedly bombings. I'd let down my guard quite a lot since the last set--in fact, on more than one occasion I've sneered at the terrorists. They had (and still have) most of a great nation scampering around in fear, and what have they done lately? This voice turned my complacence on its ear: attacks, it said, take time to plan. I wonder what takes fifty-some-odd months to whomp up? I don't think I want to learn.
We Canadians, smug as bugs in a rug, think we're above attack, despite having been named on a hit list. This is, of course, nonsense. We take great pride in staying out of an 'unjust war' in Iraq, and chiding our neighbours at every turn for their own actions. It's one giant glass igloo up here, though, and I'm terribly afraid that some day a whopping great stone called Afghanistan is going to come smashing through it. We are UNDER FIRE in the war on terror, folks. We have taken casualties. Most American citizens may be completely unaware of the great job our troops are doing in Kandahar at present, but you can bet the terrorists know...and care. Given that our country's borders are a joke, we shouldn't be sleeping so easy at night.
After the disclosure of this tape, I'm not sure anyone should be.
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