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It remains a day of infamy, one deserving of the “what-were-you-doing-when …” question.
My answer to the 9/11 question starts in Ottawa, where I was serving as the Free Press‘s national reporter on Parliament Hill. That fall day 25 years ago in our capital was blessed with clear skies and unseasonable warmth as I biked my way to the National Press Building.
I passed some workmen on a house renovation project who had the radio cranked up. The newscaster was breathless, talking about a heavy police presence downtown, which I assumed was a reference to Ottawa’s core a few blocks from my office.
It was only after I made it to my desk and turned on the TV that I realized what was happening in the heart of New York. My heart skipped a beat when images of the second strike on the World Trade Centre’s South Tower flashed across the screen.
In the flurry of phone calls that followed to my editor and my wife (“sorry dear, but I’m going to miss our son’s first day of kindergarten”), I threw together plans to head to New York, hitting the road in a rental car after insisting to the agent at the Budget desk that I was only going as far as Syracuse.
There is no way I will ever forget that race to get to Ground Zero, the billowing smoke over Manhattan or the anguished faces of firefighters and office workers who shared what had been lost when the Twin Towers fell.
An aerial view shows the twin memorial waterfall pools that sit in the footprints of the former North and South Towers at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan. (Stefan Jeremiah / The Associated Press files)
A quarter-century later, there’s no way I can square how this White House can so easily dismiss all Canada did to come to the aid of its longtime friend and ally after those terrorist attacks.
Take a deep breath. Give your head a shake. Onward.
As we reflect on 9/11, Melissa Martin is working on a piece that remembers Christine Egan, the only Manitoban to die in those devastating attacks.
“Now, as the world marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there will be many words devoted to remembering destruction,” Melissa writes. “In some ways, it’s an act of defiance to remember life just as intensely. But how to describe the vibrancy of a person? How to capture even a little bit of who Christine Egan was?”
Melissa will have the answer to that 9/11 question in her story, which we will post on our website on the eve of that day of infamy and in print the following day.
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