Reflections on the day the ‘innocent and the guilty’ perished in Somerset County on 9/11
I was driving to work struggling with the daily pang in my heart from leaving my toddler at daycare, just before 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
A voice on the radio from New York City said a plane had crashed into the north tower of the 110-storey World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
The world was hardly all peace and light 20 years ago, still, I wondered if the crash had been an accident, rather than an intentional stab into the heart of the psyche of America and beyond.
Seventeen minutes later, a second aircraft struck, this time the south tower, and then a third exploded into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
I was at my desk at the Spectator, when, just after 10 a.m., news broke of a fourth jet going down, incongruously in a field near a reclaimed strip mine in rural Pennsylvania.
An editor leaned over my desk divider and told me to go there.
I grabbed my lunch bag, staff laptop with no Wi-Fi, and brick of a cellphone. The Spec's librarian handed me a U.S. road map.
I headed for the border in one of our staff cars (no longer with us) without a passport, toothbrush or change of clothes.
Rumours spread that the border would close any moment. All aircraft in North America had been ordered to land, which would include 38 planes and 6,500 passengers alone at an airport in tiny Gander, N.L.
The border official at Fort Erie asked for my passport. I told her I didn't have it and presented my most helpless expression - not a stretch - and she paused, rolled her eyes, and waved me through.
The phenomenon of widespread anxiety and fear did not originate on 9/11, but it was perhaps the first example of it since the perceived threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
What made 9/11 unique was its immediacy: a switch had been flipped, and in this sense the WHO's declaration of a global pandemic 17 months ago offers parallels.
As with the pre-COVID world, humanity seemed to be cruising along reasonably well on that blue sky morning 20 years ago.
SARS was still a year away, although West Nile virus had generated concern. Domestic terrorism had struck rarely, if horrifically: Timothy McVeigh killed 168 in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; on a much smaller but more protracted scale, anti-abortion killer James Kopp's alleged trail of doctor victims included Hugh Short, who lived off Sulphur Springs Road in Ancaster, shot and wounded through his family room window in 1996.
(Kopp, like the 9/11 al-Qaida hijackers, attacked civilians with an ultimate goal of forcing change in political policy and culture, the very definition of terrorism.)
The World Trade Center had been targeted before: a 1993 truck bombing that killed six people.
But the scale of Sept. 11, 2001 - 2,996 dead, including 24 Canadians - and the apocalyptic images from ground zero in Manhattan, shocked and overwhelmed, and offered a reminder of the capacity for violence in the human beast.
I drove about six hours that day, arriving southeast of Pittsburgh in a rural area where reporters were kept well back from a charred and smoking crater left by the plane. It was taped-off like a massive crime scene.
With my evening deadline rapidly approaching, I wandered from the site and stood on the front porch of a man who wore a straw hat and red suspenders, who said it was simply unbelievable, all of it, and that he didn't know what else to say.
My cellphone had died and the laptop was as useful as jumper cables for sending a story in the field back to Hamilton.
I drove until I found a pay phone, and, having scrawled my story in a notepad, dictated to an editor on the news desk while he typed.
This picturesque place of rolling green hills is where the innocent - and the guilty - met their end on perhaps the darkest day in American history," the story began.
I still wasn't sure what name to call the place where it happened. It was in fact in Somerset County, near a town called Shanksville. That's where a 9/11 memorial is now located. I had seen a sign for a hamlet called Lambertsville, and chose that for my dateline.
The crash of United Airlines Flight 93 represented a moral victory, I wrote. Reports suggested passengers and aircrew had fought the terrorists, and prevented them from flying the plane into to a heavier-populated target, or the White House.
One of the pilots was LeRoy Homer, an American married to a Hamilton woman named Melodie Thorpe. Later, he would be memorialized in a church on the Mountain by family and former flying buddies: Fly with God; until we meet again ..."
After 9/11, the phrase new normal" seemed to enter the public vocabulary, the tragedy touching a chord with most everyone in a way that isolated episodes of terror or mass shootings could not.
In an instant, choosing to fly anywhere seemed risky behaviour, and for those who did, security lineups snaked through airports where travellers were ordered to remove belts and shoes.
In October that year, Canadian fighter jets were patrolling over southern Ontario, during what military officials called a heightened state of alert." Meanwhile, that same month, U.S.-led allied forces engaged in war in Afghanistan, a conflict that ultimately took the lives of Hamilton soldiers Sgt. Shawn Eades, Pte. Mark Graham, Major Raymond Ruckpaul, and Cpl. Justin Stark.
Twenty years later, the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan, to disastrous effect.
And 20 years later, the Canada-U. S. land border, that never did shut down completely on 9/11, is closed for a pandemic that continues to frighten, divide, and afflict.
On Sept. 12, 2001, the day after, I remained in Somerset County as reporters were given a tour of the crash site.
And then, driving back north through Pennsylvania, I stopped here and there to write a couple of stories, emailing them to the Spectator after hunting for a Kinko's (no longer with us) or internet cafe.
On Sept. 13, near a hamlet called Blue Knob, I noticed a line of cars at a cemetery. I stopped and walked over. Among the graves of veterans marked by tiny American flags, a pastor performed burial rites for an 11-year old boy who had died of a rare blood disorder.
Tears, heaving shoulders, and words from a man of God on the breeze: After Ryan's suffering, we hope he finds a place of peace and happiness with you, O Lord ... We commit this soul to the earth."
Random, cruel, and tragic death.
Yes, the world, and life, changed dramatically on 9/11.
And in the big picture hardly at all.
Jon Wells is a Hamilton-based reporter and feature writer for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jwells@thespec.com