Five years ago today

I was in court when the first plane hit the towers. I can’t remember what case it was - a family law matter, most likely. No one mentioned anything about a plane crash or terror attack while I was in court, and I didn’t hear anything about it on the radio as I drove back to the office. I doubt many people remember exactly what they were doing about twenty minutes before they found out Kennedy was shot, and my memories of the last few minutes before everything changed are fuzzy at best.

I hadn’t even heard of “blogs” back then, but I was as addicted to the internet then as I am now. As usual, when I got back to the office, I checked my e-mail and looked at a few news sites. And it was then that I found out something unusual was going on.

None of the news websites I normally read seemed to be working. The Drudge Report wasn’t coming up at all. Neither were the websites for CBC, CNN, the BBC or Sky News. Finally, after a longer-than-normal wait, I got into the Toronto Sun-affiliated canoe.ca, and didn’t really know what to make of the top headline:

Second Plane Hits World Trade Center Towers

Sorry to disappoint anyone who thinks I’m a radical right-wing warmonger who started screaming and looking for Ay-rabs to beat up, but the first thing I thought of was a 1945 incident in which a B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building in heavy fog. (Little did I know that incident would later be used by conspiracy maniacs to “prove” the World Trade Center was brought down by a “controlled demolition.”) Surely it was some kind of accident, I thought. But on earth did they mean, “second” plane?

It all became pretty clear when I read the story. Obviously, it wasn’t an accident. Horrifyingly, it didn’t involve light aircraft, as I first assumed, but hijacked commercial airliners. I couldn’t find any video that worked, but the photos were terrifying enough.

No one else in the office seemed to know about it. I mentioned it to a couple of other lawyers and support staff, and everyone was shocked. (Thankfully, no one’s immediate reaction was, “the Americans deserved it.”) The receptionist, who seemed to think I was joking, said, “good thing they didn’t hit the Pentagon or something.”

You all know what came shortly thereafter.

I stuck around the office for a while longer, frantically going from website to website for updates. Just before I left, I found out a fourth plane had been hijacked. There were rumours of a car bomb outside the State Department building in Washington. Dozens of commercial airliners were diverted to St. John’s, Gander and Stephenville.

Finally, I figured I wouldn’t get much else done that morning, so I went home around 11:30. By that time, I had heard that one of the World Trade Center towers - buildings I had seen countless times in the movies and on television - had completely collapsed, and that the second one was likely to do the same. When I got back to the basement apartment in which I was living at the time, I turned on CTV NewsNet just in time to watch the second World Trade Center building crumble to earth. I yelped in terror and disbelief.

I didn’t know anyone in New York at the time, and needless to say, no one struck St. John’s, Newfoundland. But I called my parents to make sure they were okay. I called my brother, some friends, and even the ex-girlfriend with whom I’d broken up a couple of months earlier. I wondered who was responsible for what I had just watched on television - a Palestinian terror group, I assumed at first. I wondered if Toronto or Montreal would be struck, or if any more planes had been hijacked. I even wondered if anyone famous - especially Bob Dylan, whose album Love and Theft dropped that very day - had been caught in these buildings or on one of these transatlantic flights.

Amazingly, a couple of hours later, I actually went back to work. Maybe I thought it would get my mind off things. But aside from answering a few calls, I hardly got anything done. This was before I had a website to which I could post commentary on current events, so I wrote a brief letter about the attacks to the Western Star, and sent some friends an e-mail message explaining what I thought the United States - and Canada - had to do next.

On September 11, 2001, I had never heard of Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair, Charles Johnson, Kathy Shaidle, or any of the other people posting to this site. I had heard of Andrew Sullivan, though I didn’t know he had a website. I knew about Mark Steyn, but he had no website at all. I was reading James Taranto’s daily Best of the Web column, which is where I first discovered InstaPundit and several other top blogs.

I still had dial-up internet, and I didn’t have a DVD or MP3 player. Here in Corner Brook, a long-closed cement factory still stood where we now have Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire. Jean Chretien was still Prime Minister of Canada, and we still had two political parties battling it out on the right. The word “podcast” hadn’t been invented.

Since that day, I’ve launched my own site, which has been more popular than I ever expected, and through which I’ve made dozens of close friends, a few of whom I’ve even met in person. I’ve purchased and moved into my own house, bought and traded in a couple of nearly-new cars, found a steady girlfriend, visited Ground Zero (where I took the photo shown above) and traveled to England. Of the five partners in my law firm on 9/11, three have been appointed to the bench and one is now the provincial Minister of Justice. In a few weeks, I’ll be an uncle.

A lot has changed in five years, but the sorrow and anger I felt five years ago is still with me today. Heaven knows where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing on this date in 2011, but I don’t think I’ll “get over it” by then, either.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at September 11, 2006 07:18 AM