6.5 Frames Per Second

I woke to the sound of the CBC news that morning as my TV is my alarm clock. I’m a news junkie so the day starts and ends with it. A usual story of rural importance was interrupted by the announcement that a small plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. I changed the channel to CNN and started a pot of coffee. I had never seen the WTC towers with any kind of scale so the hole with smoke pouring out wasn’t as dramatic as what happened about ten minutes later. I was standing in the middle of my living room drinking my coffee when I saw a plane come from the left side of the screen and disappear into the second tower.

It was confusing to me that they had film of the plane hitting the tower but the first tower was on fire. The news anchor was mid sentence when he broke the cadence and announced a second plane had flown into the second tower. The next four or five hours were a blur of shock and mourning for the people of New York and the U.S. I don’t remember moving for the first hour just staring at the screen as CNN replayed the second aircraft over and over again. Every time feeling a deep sense of dread and sorrow for the passengers and workers in the Trade Center towers. I remember looking out the window and seeing no one on the streets. From the 20th floor I can see two major arteries for traffic entering and leaving the city and the streets were empty. I saw no people walking through the park across the street or anywhere on the sidewalks for almost the entire day.

When I thought I’d seen the most horrific images of human desperation the first Tower fell. i was stunned once again, and again the event played out a second time. More horror and a gut wrenching knot of sorrow for the next victims came over me like a tidal wave. I don’t know how many times I saw the impact or the falling workers or the street level cameras covering that day in history.

I broke away from the CNN coverage around 6:00pm and went for a walk to try and clear my head. I needed a break from the horrer that was looping in my mind, I needed them to stop for a while.

When I got to the street what i saw will stay with me forever. It looked as though half population of the downtown core stayed in that evening. The people like me who needed a distraction or to pick up groceries were out but with a dramatic difference. The silence was almost frightening. The normal chatter of friends walking together was gone, replaced by heads lowered and lost in thought. That day everyone in Vancouver had watched as thousands of people were brutally murdered and no one was unaffected.

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