Remembering September 11

In the days and months after 9/11, the one phrase I kept hearing over and over was that the American intelligence services suffered from a “failure of imagination.” But I look at the above photo, which I took in 1997, and think, “Of course they did! We all did!”

It’s mind-blowing that 25 years have passed already. I’ve heard lots of stories over the past few days, and many more today, of people’s memories from that fateful day. Of where they were, of who they lost, of what they remember.

I was in Vancouver, still half asleep in bed, listening to the radio when I heard something in the morning host’s voice that made me get up and turn on my TV. I have no memory of what he said; it was the tone of his voice that woke me fully. Something awful is happening, I remember thinking.

Being three hours behind New York, the South Tower had already fallen by the time I turned on my TV. I stared in disbelief as I watched the North Tower collapse.

I live in one of Canada’s most densely populated neighbourhoods. As I walked to work that morning, I remember looking up at a bright blue sky and the sea of condo and apartment buildings, thinking, “You don’t need a nuclear bomb to kill thousands of people. You only have to hijack a jet.” (Bear in mind that I grew up during the height of the Cold War, convinced, as were my peers, that the world would end one day under a spat of mushroom clouds.)

I spent most of my workday online, reading everything I could on the various news websites, which had all stripped out photos to ensure their servers didn’t go down from the heavy web traffic. I have no memory of anyone turning on a TV; I doubt there were any in the office.

My sister reached out by phone sometime in the afternoon, which was comforting. She said it felt like a day where you should talk to your loved ones.

By sheer coincidence, my dad and stepmother were in town. We had lunch together the next day and they relayed how the friends they were staying with had woken them up the previous morning to tell them what was happening. The one friend said the attacks brought him right back to his childhood and still-vivid memories of the invasion of Holland by the Germans on May 10, 1940. That the trauma of that morning was resurrected 60 years later did not surprise me.

My dad and stepmother then drove out to YVR airport to watch all the jets coming in to land. Vancouver received 34 of the 224 flights diverted to Canadian airspace that morning.

I had plans to fly to San Francisco on the 14th to visit a friend; by midday on the 11th, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere. The trip was rescheduled to January.

In October, I flew to Belfast to visit another friend and we went to Barcelona for a weekend — a mere five days after the Americans began bombing Afghanistan.

Looking back now, it seems crazy how much flying I did in the months after 9/11. But the flights had been booked and paid for; I wasn’t keen to lose the money.

And, truth be told, I wasn’t keen to stop travelling. Air travel would never be the same, I knew that. But if I stopped flying altogether, well, then 9/11 would have taken more from me than just my innocence.