9/11 - Five years on...

When I was in the bush, cutting down trees, I found that certain thoughts, or memories, or simply images would get stuck in my head as I worked. The images floated about and I replayed them on a circular basis. One of these images was of the intial 9/11 terrorist attacks five years ago.

I was living in Parkdale with my buddy Pat when the attacks occurred. I had just gotten off a huge shift of working security at a building that was, interestingly enough, called the Residences of the World Trade Centre. Early in the morning I heard Pat yelling for me to get up. I was dog tired and kept sleeping. Finally he rushed to my room and said that terrorists had attacked the world trade centre. I thought it was some sort of joke or ploy to get me downstairs for something (given the name of my workplace). I came into the living room in time to see a replay of the second plane hitting one of the towers. Holy Shit, was the first thing I said and I repeated it several times.

Pat and I must have gone through several packs of cigarettes that day just sitting and watching the events unfold. Outside there was little movement, all radios were tuned to the news and it seemed that all of Toronto had stopped to watch the cataclysmic events churn out.

The aesthetic of that attack. The unimaginable magnitude and sheer absurdity of being able to watch a passenger liner slam into a building and their subsequent collapse, the could of dust chasing New Yorkers through the streets was burned into my consciousness. It was just too big and world-changing an event and aesthetic to lose over time.

I thought about that morning many times over the next few years.

One of the creepiest facts I learned of concerned the fate of the junk metal from the site. Many of the victims were reduced to dust in the attacks. Dust that coated the city and became ingrained in the junk metal. The metal was quickly carted off in the days after the attacks and sold to junk yards to be melted down. The melted metal was then used for all manner of consumable objects. Manily cans; cans for soup, catfood, spaghetti sauce and what have you. The dust, however, remained and the atoms that were once office workers were alloyed with an array of consumer items that, I'm sure, have passed through department stores over the years.

It seemed to me unfitting and wrong that the remains of the victims should meet such a fate, to be absorbed and canibalized back into the consumer society from which they were wrenched. The economy lurched on, people were commanded by the President in the early days to go out and buy. And these atoms, this dust came to rest on shelves and in cupboards across the US.