My Personal Remembrance of September 11th

Although it was morning in New York, it was already the end of our tour day in France. I was sitting on the top step of the motor coach, talking to the driver, with 20 or so passengers relaxing – mostly snoozing - after a day of walking up and down the stone streets of Mont St Michel. We were over an hour away from our farmhouse hotel in the Normandy countryside, when my French mobile phone rang.

It was my Parisian friend Jean-Christophe, who said to me in French,

"A plane was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center."

"What?" He repeated the sentence. I thought he was making a joke and I said "what?" about three times, because I was not getting the punchline of the joke. On the other end, Jean-Christophe held his phone up to the television, so that I could hear the French news report for myself. None of it made sense to me, although I speak completely fluent French and understood each individual word that was being said. My mind was not comprehending and I suddenly doubted my ability to speak French. I hung up the phone and turned to the coach driver and said,

"Détourner, what does it mean in English?”

"Hijacked”. I had understood correctly. I then repeated what I’d heard on the telephone to the driver, in French. I didn’t want to turn around and face the group, who by now were all awake and curious about what was happening at the front of the bus, twenty pairs of eyes focused on the back of my head.

I stood up, turned around and I told them what I’d heard. Making that announcement was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do on a tour. We all sat in stunned silence for the remaining drive to the hotel. There was nothing else we could do. We had no other information. In 2001, it was not typical to have mobile phones that worked internationally. Wi-Fi was not yet ubiquitous. We had to wait until we got back to the hotel, where everyone could call home via landline telephones and access news in English on CNN.

September 11th fell at the mid-point of a two week tour. There were no flights, so even if people had wanted to leave, we had no choice but to continue the tour and make the best of it. At the end of each day, everyone disappeared into their hotel rooms to turn on CNN.

The day that tour finished and everyone departed to the U.S. happened to coincide with the first day that international flight operations returned to normal. But I wasn’t leaving France. I had another group arriving in a few days to start the same tour over again. All but six people in that next group cancelled, so it became the smallest tour group that I’d ever led. Every year on this day, I remember the people in these two groups and I wonder if they remember me, too.

Paris, Toulouse, Sarlat, Bordeaux. Everywhere we went, the French people we met reached out to us with compassion and expressed solidarity with America. There were photographs, postcards and figurines of the Statue of Liberty that people dug out of their souvenirs from their own trips to New York, attaching them to signs saying “I Love America”, “J’aime New York” and displayed in every window, at the entrance to every place we went. New York held a place in the heart of every person who had ever visited, regardless of their nationality and they mourned with us. We felt safe and surrounded by support and the love of the French people.

It was extraordinary, the outpouring of solidarity from the French people to Americans, reminiscent of the end of World War II. The heightened security was immediate, efficient and well-organized. France already had plenty of experience with terrorist attacks and had plans in place that could be turned on in a Parisian minute. There was a pervasive sorrow that America was not, in fact, invulnerable and had now joined ranks with the other cities of the world that experienced terrorism first-hand.

When I finally finished the tours and returned to Boston, America was a different country.