Ottawa Citizen

REMEMBERIN­G 9/11

A world-changing day

- KELLY EGAN To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-291-6265 or email kegan@ postmedia.com twitter.com/ kellyeganc­olumn

In an upstairs office, on a lovely late-summer morning, Sam Dagg was talking about a monumental agricultur­al event in the little village of Navan, a highlight of his life as a volunteer there. It was near 10 a.m., the sky nothing but blue.

A country-born firefighte­r, his pride was evident. I barely heard a word.

In the next room, a television was barking in breaking-news cadence about plane crashes in New York City, and planes unaccounte­d for, and explosions, and wild speculatio­n about chaos in the skies.

It was Sept. 11, 2001; things were blowing up, burning, falling down.

Cutting the interview short, the car radio had CFRA's Steve Madely, in his deep thunder, narrating what sounded like the apocalypse. Every airport shut, fighter jets in the air, no one sure if it was over, or just starting, who was doing what. Official Ottawa in emergency meetings.

I pulled over on a gravel shoulder, called my wife.

I should pick up the boy from school. His Grade 1 teacher was not going to protect him from the Third World War, or whatever was unfolding out there, not with chalk and crayons. And where would I be when he needed to be held, rescued? Typing?

The irrational is terrorism's child. Make the usual scary, shatter the quiet fortress of the routine, have airplanes — the safest way to travel — come crashing down on their heads, wreck their towers of steel.

Of all the stories in 40-ish years, 9/11 most had me thinking my main job that day was to survive this news, not cover it. Dad first, the rest second. For a moment, and it sounds so stupid now, that morning felt like a version of the world ending.

My wife calmed me, steered me back to work. Is it not what reporters do, run toward the fire, when others flee?

Richard Drew, the renowned AP photograph­er, touched on this very idea when he was asked about his photograph­s of the so-called Falling Man (more than one, actually), who jumped to his death rather than face the collapsing inferno of the World Trade Center towers.

(I fear both heights and flying, so can barely take a glance.) The photograph­s are so powerful many papers wouldn't publish them. The eyes, if they could, would gasp; it is that awful to see the hurtling limbs, the white shirt wrapped like a shroud.

“You have to just pretend that it's not there,” he said in a television interview years later, “and do your thing.”

Pretend. Yes, that's close to it. Pretend it isn't real, in order to survive.

Well, my “thing” that day was to travel to Malone, in upper

New York, to measure the effect on Small Town America, get back to Ottawa, file a story on deadline, a 14-hour haul. And I say, with some pride, in my rattled state, it got done — the damn “thing” got done.

The encounter with the police chief, Gerald K. Moll, was memorable.

This was a police force used to dealing with maybe one murder a year. Now this.

“It got to the point,” he said, standing on the main street in uniform and shiny badge, “that, after watching the news for a while, I had to leave the station and go to a church. I felt so helpless.”

Pray, in a quiet space, for this unearthly thing befallen.

At the American Legion, the sense of revenge was palpable. “We need to find out who did this,” said a Navy veteran, “and level the place.”

And haven't we, in one way or another, tried to “level” some place, some idea, for 20 years, in terrible instalment­s, like losing 158 Canadian soldiers in Afghanista­n.

I think of the local leaders now departed. Rabbi Reuven Bulka, who did his best to build bridges to the Muslim community when such bridges were being burned, and Imam Gamal Solaiman, of Ottawa's Central Mosque, who stood up for his community, even while under siege.

And Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, the storming of Parliament — 13 years later, terrorism still metabolizi­ng. Even my Malone police friend, Chief Moll, gone in April, after 37 years in law enforcemen­t.

The story of 9/11 began, as a PBS documentar­y vividly showed this week, with the airplanes in Manhattan and ended, for now, with the airplanes in Kabul — desperatio­n given wings, 20 years apart.

A terrible history, a disgrace yet incomplete. If only to pretend it wasn't there.

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