By Mary Jane Francis
Streaming, screaming, careening thru the streets…
It was unimaginable. Truly, un-imaginable! Nothing in my imagination even came close to what I would see later on a large screen TV in the middle of the night.
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With the popular play, Come from Away, having been in Seattle and now on Broadway, and friends saying I must see it, the memories of 9/11 came flooding back…my response to friends was “I don’t need to see it. I lived it.”
The day had begun with preparations to go to Paris’ Orly airport to catch our return flight to Seattle. We ran into Seattle friends who were also on their way home and shortly we were winging our way over the Atlantic.
At some point I checked the TV screen in front of my seat to see our location–we were in the middle of the Atlantic. It suddenly felt as if we had dropped in altitude. I was sitting across the aisle from my husband and next to a man who had worked for NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command]. I asked him, “Did we just lose altitude?” He acknowledged that we had.
Soon the pilot came on the air and announced that US air space was closed and we would land in St. Johns, Newfoundland. I asked my neighbor, “What does it mean that US air space is closed?” He replied, ”Not good.” And so, with those words, a simple return flight turned into an incredible journey that lasted six more days.
Some of the cabin staff got on their cell phones to learn what was going on. Bits and pieces of info floated around, but once we were on the ground in St. John’s, the pilot connected us to the BBC channel and we heard about planes flying into buildings in NYC and Washington, DC., and one that crashed in PA.
We sat on the tarmac for 10 hours. Our plane finally ran out of food and beverages. We sat, waited and listened—it felt like forever. Sometime after midnight we were allowed off the plane but could take only our purses and backpacks. We disembarked into a hockey arena. There were free phones so we could let our families know we were safe, along with all kinds of food for our empty, tired bodies. Eventually we were taken to places to be taken care of. The people of St. John’s opened their homes, their churches, their schools, their convention center and their university to the hundreds of people whose planes had been diverted to their city.
My husband and I, and some others who had been on the U of Chicago’s trip to Normandy, were sent to Memorial University. It had recently built a new student center and the old one was stocked with emergency supplies and used to house us.
Ultimately we ended up in a large room with beds that looked like gurneys packed in rows. There was a “briefing room” with several huge TVs tuned to the news. By now, around 2am, I could actually watch videos of the attacks on the twin towers in NYC. I was stunned. I’d listened to BBC reporting about this for 10 hrs, but what I saw on the TVs was way beyond anything I had imagined from the radio. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and it was sheer horror to watch, but I couldn’t stop watching it because it felt so beyond my ken.
And yet, for the next 4-5 days the people of Memorial University and the town took very good care of us. Their grace and hospitality were beyond anything I could have imagined. Free phones, dining with students in the cafeteria, and an evening when faculty offered us a choice of three lectures to attend. An evening with free drinks and a Celtic band at their Faculty Club. Underwear, socks, shirts and free meds. They just opened themselves, their hearts and what they had and shared it all with us…wherever we were staying. Some in our Chicago group stayed in churches and told us that families took them home, fed them and did their laundry.
Not all passengers were happy, needless to say, and very angry that they were stuck there. In the briefing room all announcements were in at least three different languages, and the anger and frustration came back in multiple languages as well. Our hosts tried hard to get people back on flights as soon as possible, but it was very slow and we often were told we would be leaving and then it didn’t happen.
Some five days later, we boarded a flight to Chicago around midnight. Interestingly, the friends we’d seen in the Paris airport were taken to Calgary and reached home after only two days. Lucky them. But we were lucky, too, to have been taken in and cared for with such grace and hospitality by our Canadian sisters and brothers. To them and for them, I will be eternally grateful.