All the coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has brought back many memories for me. On September 11, 2001 Karalee, Jocelyn, Kevin, Allen, and I were living in a farm house near Lanmerin, Brittany, France. We were travelling by car, visiting Northern Europe, home schooling our three kids, while getting ready to go sailing in the Mediterranean for two years.
We started the day home schooling the kids and after a full school day we drove twenty minutes to the beach. You can read about our day here. We were isolated in the farm house, none of us spoke much French, we never watched TV, and had no access to the Internet. It would be over 36 hours after the events of 9/11 that we even learned about it.
Even ten years after the event I am surprised at how unique our experience was. It was two weeks after 9/11 that I was talking to my Mother in Edmonton and she told me that she had watched live as the plane hit the second Trade Center Tower. Up to that point, I had no conception of how many people watched the second plane crash in New York live and how many times the footage was shown — over and over again. It was not until September 2004, a year after we returned from the Mediterranean, that any of the five of us saw the video footage from that day for the first time.
As I recall, English language print media coverage was not kind to the Americans. While deeply sympathetic to the people who were killed, Europeans attitude seemed to be “America has been smug about never being attacked by terrorists on their own soil. Now they know what it is like.”
We also had no knowledge of the shut down of US and Canadian air space. Or how depressed people became watching the never ending coverage of the disaster in the days and weeks afterwards. While we sporadically read newspaper and magazine coverage of 9/11, we did not follow the media day by day.
Ten years on, I am deeply grateful for being unplugged. While 9/11 is a defining moment in recent history, the five of us were spared the emotional upheaval and media barrage. Distance always gives new perspective. As Canadians living abroad and disconnected when 9/11 occurred, we had a different experience. As we all contemplate the effect of the events from that fateful day, we have different memories than those that we hear and read about. For us, that’s a good thing.
