Not Entirely Unscathed

We made a few trips to Manitoulin while our finances recovered. Bev and I are both savers, for the most part, so it wasn’t long before we were out from under what we thought was financial destitution. The mine did not close, despite the endless predictions of doom and gloom. I was making more money, I was climbing the ranks, I was looking forward to what the future brought.

It brought Hunter.

We returned to Manitoulin a couple more times, driving round and round, discovering back roads and short cuts, checking out souvenir shops and craft stores, and checking out the Island’s natural beauty. Bridal Veil Falls, Providence Bay, the North Shore. We enjoyed ice cream in Little Current. We ate fish and chips while watching the Chi-Cheemaun come in at South Baymouth. I say we, but I mean me. Bev had already experienced these things from years of her own circle tours and nosing around.

Hunter loved it there. We taught her to swim (that sounds silly, but she had to learn in stages). She could be free and run with abandon. She ran and swam so much that she fell asleep sitting up, her eyes inching closed, her head stiffly upright.

One day a bat made its way into the camp bedroom. It flew round and round, banking inches from my face. Hunter lay on the floor next to me, her nose tracking the bat’s circuits. I thought about what my chances of knocking the bat down were, then decided that they weren’t good, so I slipped of bed, crawling on all fours to the back door. I felt the bat’s draft waft across my scalp while I did. The bat must have done ten more circuits before I got there. I opened it, hoping that other bats wouldn’t join him while it gapped open. He finally found his way out, Hunter still watching him, having never moved once during the whole affair.

“A lot of help you were,” I told her when I slid back in bed.

She wagged her tail and flopped her head back onto the floor.

The next day we heard more bats in the walls, so we hunted down and closed as many holes in the walls as possible.

And in time, the future brought a car accident. Yes, another one.

I hadn’t slept well in years. Shiftwork can do that to people. I’d have a hard time falling asleep and then I had a hard time staying asleep. Lawnmowers and snowblowers blared at all hours during the day. Sun found its way into my bedroom despite the room darkening blinds. Birds chirped and cawed. Dogs barked. Neighbours called out to one another over distances. And there were errands to do. I’d get up early to do them. And when they were done, I’d be awake for the duration whether I tried to nap or not. I’m not a napper. Whatever the reasons, I was averaging five hours a “night.” Transitions from Days to Nights and then Nights to Days were worse, with my being awake for twenty-four or even thirty-six hours at a time.

So it comes as no surprise that I fell asleep at the wheel driving home after my final Night shift, only five blocks from home, drifting into the snowbank at speed. What speed? I don’t know; I was asleep. But it was fast enough because when I woke it was to a loud and hollow rumble and a dark rush of white cascading over my windshield. The snowbank slowed my speed, thank god. It almost kicked me back out onto the road, but sadly, it did not. The telephone pole did. I saw a dark shape resolve in the rushing snow, and then when I crashed into it, I saw it flung and spun as it whirled into the sky. The passenger headlight shattered, the chrome bumper collapsed and the Jimmy’s rear end swung wide, back out into the street. It continued that arc, sliding wide and around, the rear bumper plunging back into the snowbank again, far forward of where I’d cleaved off the pole.

I remained in the vehicle for a moment, a little stunned, yet remarkably unhurt. I looked around, saw the gouge that I’d left in the snowbank far to the left of me, back where I’d come from.

What I did next was stupid. I opened the door and got out. I had no idea if there were powerlines over my vehicle. I could have been electrocuted. Once I was out, I saw them scattered and overlapping one another across the street, but until that time, I was oblivious to their existence, let alone their potential danger.

A car approached. The driver asked if I wanted him to call the police. I thought it a stupid question, but what he was really asking was if I’d already called them. Cell phones were everywhere by then.
The cop arrived, asked me what happened and I stupidly admitted to falling asleep at the wheel. That automatically landed me a Careless Driving charge. He did not cut me a break. He wanted to charge me with speeding too, but he probably thought that he couldn’t make it stick.

When he asked me how fast I was going? I said, “How do I know? I was asleep.”

“How fast were you going before you went asleep?”

“I don’t know. I was falling asleep.”

Long story short, I was fined, I had to buy a new car, I had to pay for the Hydro pole, and my insurance went through the roof for years to come.

That was an expensive snooze.

The Falling Man

Where were you on 9/11? That’s my generation’s “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

We were preparing to go to Manitoulin. We were excited. We were packing. We were hauling coolers and bags to the Jimmy (my SUV). This would be our first trip after having just bought our house. We had no money, all of it sunk into what was truly a money pit of new needs. If you’ve never bought a house, you have no idea how much crap you need to make a home. We needed to get away for a little while. But it couldn’t cost anything, either. So, we were going to Manitoulin. All we needed was food, and we would have had to buy that, anyways.

We did not want to return to a fridge full of rot, so I made a quick trip with the perishables to my parents’ while Bev took stock checked off the packing list. My mother met me at the door.
“Have you heard what happened?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been packing.”

“The World Trade Center is on fire,” she said. “It was hit by a plane.”

My mind was on the six-hour trip ahead of us. “That’s horrible,” I said. Then I said, “Well, it’s happened before,” latching onto a bit of trivia buried deep in the detritus scattered throughout my memory. “A B-29 crashed into the Empire State Building during the War.” (It was actually a B-25.)
I went home, thinking that I had to stop for gas on the way out of town.

We jammed everything into the Jimmy and were almost out the door when my father called. “A plane hit the other World trade Center.”

“Mom told me,” I said.

“No,” he said, “another one!”

That was weird, I thought. You’d think it was impossible that two buildings could possibly be hit in the span of 24 hours. Besides, how could anyone hit one, let alone two? They were huge. They were in plain sight. Hundreds of movies and television shows told me so.

“They’re saying it’s a terrorist strike.”

Wow, I thought. But we had to get on our way if we were going to make it to Manitoulin by supper.
We jumped in the Jimmy and were on our way. We thought we ought to listen to the radio for a while instead of CDs, at least until we heard the news; surely they’d report on what was going on. We were just passing out of town, lumber mills to either side when the music on the music was interrupted.
“The World Trade Center is gone,” they said.

“Gone?” I said. “Where could it possibly have gone?” There were seven buildings, after all. They were enormous. The Twin Towers were about 415 meters tall. They were 110 stories, both of them.

The radio station cut away to a television broadcast. We heard too many references to the visual footage and had no clue what they were talking about so we turned to CBC radio for their continuing coverage; they, at least, knew we couldn’t see what was going on. We remained rooted to CBC until we lost transmission, barely speaking as we tried to process the fact that at least two planes and possibly a third airliner had been hijacked and driven into the World Trade Center, the third narrowly missing the Pentagon, only then listening to CDs, checking to see if we could pick up Sudbury CBC after a half hour, and every ten minutes or so after that until we picked up the broadcast again.

What was going on? A state of emergency had been declared. All air traffic had been forced to the ground. Borders were closed. Were we at war?

Reports were still a mass of confusion when we resumed listening as reporters asked questions that few people had answers to, relying on eyewitness reports, invariably focusing on the human tragedy, the loss of those within, the sacrifice of law and fire personnel. We kept hearing mention of “The Falling Man.”

We pulled into Espanola, fueled up, picked up a meal-to-go and other essentials from the Independent grocery store there, overhearing the one and only conversation of the day, The Discussion.

When we arrived at Bev’s family’s camp on Silver Lake, just five minutes beyond Silver Water, we turned on the TV. Of course we did. We’re a visual culture now. We turn to the TV when things happen. Nowadays people would probably turn to Twitter, but it was 2001, not 2006.

The reception was crap, more snow than picture. There was a great deal of rabbit ear and knob adjustment—it was an old tube TV, perched on top the fridge and prone to fuzz when the fridge pump kicked on.

I finally got a clear picture. Clear-ish, anyways. It was still grainy.

The first thing I saw was a vision of the eponymous Falling Man, plunging headfirst past the rush of vertically stacked windows behind him, his clothing whipped and rustling about his body, one knee drawn up to his waist, the other trailing. His head was thrown back, his eyes downcast, as though watching the ground’s rapid approach.

My heart lurched. My breath caught in my throat. My knees grew weak. I had to sit down. Tears welled up, further reducing the clarity of the man’s tragic, terrible, terrified panic and courage, and his desperate decision to have chosen such a horrific end rather than to be incinerated in the hell that must surely have raged around him.