Seventeen years ago, we were returning from the Toronto International Film Festival. After making it through passport control at Toronto Pearson International Airport, we were standing in line to buy sandwiches to eat on the plane. There was a TV monitor about 10 feet high on a column a few feet ahead of us; I remember looking up idly and not reacting at all when what looked like a little plane soundlessly crashed into a building.
It didn't register as real. I thought it was a trailer for a movie--I was in that mode. Or maybe not. I heard a man curse. We headed down a corridor to our gate and only when we got there did we discover our flight had been canceled. Something felt tilted as we swam against the current, through security the wrong way. Somehow I arrived back at the check-in counter, where a preoccupied Delta agent told us there was something wrong with our plane, that we'd have to be rebooked. All the while he was tapping away on a keyboard that wasn't giving him anything back.
"I don't understand," he said through an apologetic smile. "I've never seen this before. U.S. airspace has been closed." At that moment his supervisor appeared and whispered in his ear. I caught some of it--flight numbers. Commercial airliners.
Things were snapping into place. I told them what we'd seen on television three, maybe five minutes earlier. We all realized at the same time the seriousness of what had happened. It's the moment when our lives broke in half.
None of us knew what to do, so adrenalin took over.
Karen went to the pay phone--we left our mobile devices at home to avoid international roaming charges--to call our Toronto hotel to get our room back. The Delta agent provisionally booked us on a next-day flight. I went to the Thomas Cook counter and got some fresh Canadian cash.
A woman stood in the middle of the ticketing hall crying softly into her cell phone.
We got in a limo and rode back to Toronto, as our driver--a tidy middle-aged Sikh in a blue blazer and crisp white shirt--told us they'd hit the World Trade Center in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and that a car bomb had gone off in front of the State Department.
I held Karen's hand and told her it would never be the same again, that it was a different kind of war. I told her we'd need to somehow get to New York, that maybe we could rent a car, it was about an eight-hour drive away. But by the time we got back to the hotel and called the office, the border had been sealed and a security perimeter had been set for 50 miles around New York City. No rental cars were available anyway. The Hollywood Elite had snapped them up.
So we went back to the festival, to sit in the dark for a while. We went to a screening of Pinero, a film by Leon Ichaso about Miguel Pinero, the Puerto Rican poet and playwright who rose to prominence as a co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the mid-1970s. About 15 minutes into the film, which is set on New York's Lower East Side, a festival volunteer announced that the screening, along with all other screenings planned for that day, was canceled, as were all press conferences and social events.
So we wandered over to the film festival's press lounge in the Park Hyatt. For a while we sat on the floor with 100 other journalists from all over the world, watching what the CBC warned was raw unedited footage. They showed a thrashing figure leaping--or falling--from one of the towers. They showed people cheering in the West Bank. Someone cursed, someone giggled nervously, heads turned. The Toronto Star took our picture.
We left, to walk the streets. Bomb threats were being phoned in to Ottawa. There was a police and fire cordon around a block of Bay Street in front of the Royal Ontario Museum. Karen asked what it was about and the fireman told her "public safety."
We ate our airport sandwiches in a park filled with students and mild sunlight. There were hand-lettered signs in the shop windows: "Our Canadian hearts are with you." There was a little girl on the television saying it was sad because Canada and America were the same. Stores were closed, tall buildings emptied. Everywhere were tender looks and soft words; patience spread like a balm.
I remember the festival--it was a good one with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, Richard Linklater's Waking Life, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. I remember talking to Arliss Howard and Debra Winger about our mutual friend, the Mississippi writer Larry Brown, whose short stories had formed the basis of their movie Big Bad Love. I remember Joaquin Phoenix in Buffalo Soldiers, an enjoyably caustic story about military inequity.
It took two years for Buffalo Soldiers to make it into theaters; Miramax, which acquired distribution rights to the film on Sept. 10, 2001, didn't think the public would be receptive to a movie that portrayed American troops as cynical schemers and thieves. It wasn't the only festival movie affected by the attacks. A Tim Allen comedy called Big Trouble--a comedy about a plot to smuggle a nuclear device onto a plane--was delayed seven months.
Similarly, the New York-set Serendipity--a rather horrible romantic comedy--was delayed a similar length of time so that shots of the twin towers could be edited out. Even Ed Burns' modestly charming Sidewalks of New York was pushed back to allow a little judicious trimming.
We took a bus to Cleveland, rented a car, and drove straight through to Little Rock under empty skies. And got on with the second part of our lives.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/11/2018