As I drove to work the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was oblivious to the tragedy unfolding south of the border.
I had been a staff writer with The Reminder for five months at the time. When I arrived at the office at about 9:30 am, my focus was on obtaining answers to questions I had faxed to Bob Clarke for a feature on the Flin Flon-born hockey legend.
Somehow I made it from my house and up to my second-storey office at the now-demolished Reminder office at 10 North Avenue without hearing the news.
I shared an office with Tim Babcock, our sports reporter. I had begun work on some minor article when, in conversation with Tim, he realized I was in the dark about the day’s big news.
“Didn’t you hear what happened today?” he asked before describing how one and then two planes had flown into the World Trade Centre.
I thought it was all a terrible accident. It never occurred to me that something like that would or could be done intentionally. I was 20 and in many ways naïve.
Always under tight deadlines, I picked up the phone and called Bob Clarke’s secretary to check on the status of the answers he was to fax to me.
“I don’t know if you heard what happened here today,” the secretary said, a flatness in her voice. She told me the answers would likely not be forthcoming that day.
In hindsight, my phone call may have seemed insensitive. Yet I simply did not grasp the significance of 9/11, as that day would come to be known. And I certainly did not comprehend the impact this tragedy would have on the US and, indeed, the entire world.
The Reminder was still a daily newspaper back then, and we would on very rare occasions publish articles of global significance on the front page. And so a once-newsworthy local piece, an article of mine headlined “New hospital sought for Flin Flon,” was pushed to page 3.
The Reminder’s front-page article on Sept. 12, 2001 was headlined “Canada saddened by U.S. loss.” It was a news release issued by the office of then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, who said he was “stricken” by this “cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people.”
Sharing the front page was an article I wrote on flights being temporarily cancelled across the US and Canada, including at the Flin Flon Municipal Airport. Transport Canada had notified the airport of the move at about 9:30 am the day of the attacks.
Rounding out the page was an article about MTS restricting calls to New York, neighbouring New Jersey and Washington, DC, given the understandably high call volumes to those regions.
As with many people of my generation, Sept. 11, 2001 marked my first real exposure to terrorism – I scarcely knew what the word meant prior to that day – and all of its ugly consequences.
More broadly, 9/11 was the first time I really contemplated the darkness that exists in the world. My initial reaction to the attacks was less sadness and more confusion and shock.
Fifteen years later, I can make no more sense of 9/11 than I could the day it happened.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
