1. ‘The Day The Rains Came’
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‘In heart I am a Moslem; in heart I am an American;
In heart I am Moslem, in heart I'm an American artist, 
and I have no guilt.’  

“Babelogue”, Patti Smith, Easter  
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On September 11, 2001--the day we were forced to re-evaluate our relationship with America, and therefore the world--I set out on a quest that would lead me from the Pacific Coast of Canada to New York City, and back again. By journey’s end, I would have covered over 14,000 kilometres, but the distance I was to cover across my emotional landscape has yet to be fully evaluated.  

A flurry of memories. Those first inklings that something wasn’t right, whisperings from morning radios, 7:30 am Pacific time, tickling the back of consciousness. Something about missing airplanes -- did the announcer just say eight of them? Turning on the TV despite it being a Tuesday, a school day. That primal shock warring with the shrill internal argument of denial. And the images of small things falling from massive towers like embers, or like leaves. (They couldn’t be people. No. They couldn’t be people.) The last-second adjustment of something grey and shiny and predatory as it banked and slid seemingly without sound or effort through something that had previously appeared solid. Oddly slow blooms of fire, smoke, devastation. Television talking heads. These images. Trying to make sense. Really, honestly, trying to make sense.  

One man, a retired airline pilot, still haunts my dreams with his gaunt face and pinched frenetic eyes as he explained the kind of piloting skills required to do what we had apparently just witnessed. Grimacing in his struggle for words, he whispered almost guilelessly, "This is the day the rains came."

On the day the rains came, then, the open road called to me and I set out eastward to cross this huge continent, not even sure whether the border rossings -- any of them -- would be reopened any time soon. As it turned out, I stayed on the Canadian side as far as Northern Ontario, a four-day drive.  

2. Northern Lights  __________________________________________________

‘Sundown in the Paris of the prairies
Wheat kings have all their treasures buried
And all you hear are the rusty breezes
Pushing around the weather vane Jesus’  

 “Wheat Kings”, The Tragically Hip, Fully Completely  
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There is a vast apparent simplicity to Canada that is reassuring. Driving eastward, once you cross the Rockies, changes in the landscape become subtle. The golds and oranges and browns and russets and yellows of mid-September merge and twine and trail and blur past your windshield as you follow the gently curving Trans Canada Highway steadily and sensibly, past slow feeding derricks dipping for our society’s dark sustenance, past huge wooden grain elevators -- some with peeling paint, others well groomed and shining -- and past the even more massive and daunting grain terminals.  

Canada’s prairie towns flew the Maple Leaf at half-mast everywhere. The few people I talked to (at gas stations, restaurants, convenience stores) were subdued and sad, almost not there at all. This is very difficult to express: but there was an eerie quiet to people. Which was mirrored in turn by the jet-bereft silence of the big skies. And by the empty distant words of radio talk show hosts. I felt I was driving through layers of absence.  

I stayed in generic motels at night -- CNN still gaudily trying to hammer the square peg of murderous insanity into the round hole of all our past assumptions -- through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the long miles rolling under relentless wheels by day. One night, east of Regina, under a sky fizzing with star fields, I had the realisation that a cloud to my left was not a cloud at all, but was in fact (when it occurred to me to actually look directly at it) the shimmering cascade of the Aurora Borealis, with its dancing sheets and slow ribbon swirls of green, blue, red. I was breathless, stunned, that a world this painful can also -- sometimes -- be this beautiful. And I couldn’t help but think there is hope in that.  

Disoriented, trying hard to assimilate the events of that incomparable Tuesday, yet with only rare opportunities for human connection, I nevertheless managed to take comfort in the landscape of this beautiful Northern land, my chosen home.

 
 

I crossed into the United States at a place called Pigeon River, south of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Into Minnesota. I found myself on Highway 61 heading for Duluth, which just happens to be Bob Dylan’s birthplace. The road construction seemed endless and Lake Superior lay oceanic and implacable and probably bloated with toxins to my left. I thought a lot about Dylan while I sat in traffic. When I finally made Duluth three hours later, I went and looked at the house of his birth at 519 N. 3rd Avenue East. I didn’t actually find Bob Dylan, but I don’t think I was looking for him anyway. I did find a solid middle class neighbourhood, lushly wooded, well groomed. And I also discovered that on September the Eleventh he had released his 43rd album “Love and Theft” with the eerie timing of -- well -- a lover and a thief.  

What do we love, and what was stolen? These prophetic words are disturbingly poignant in their painful echo of events in New York, but at this point I wasn’t aware of that reality. I still had a friend to visit on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, and not much was making sense yet.  

We look to our icons and heroes to help us make sense in such times. We need to shelter from the storm. It may or may not help, but we do it anyway. I also thought a lot about my own blue-eyed son. What does he see? What’ll he do now? What happens when the rain starts a-fallin’? I was to find out, literally, as soon as I continued on my way.  

Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. I think I only began to outrun the rains in the latter two states, after night had fallen. Earlier in the bad daylight, incredible noisy, babbling deluges fell across the Midwest. Squint-eyed with concentration, I passed the cities of Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Wilkes-Barre, continuously harassed by the lashing misty water demons who drove liquid hissing whips around windshield distortions, and sucked eighteen wheelers past in gushing molten sprays. I saw the world through the ravaged eyes of a 21st Century van Gogh, everything steely and liquid, merging and swirling and dangerous. Delirious with fatigue, I crossed the state line into New Jersey at the Delaware Water Gap just when the rains seemed to have finally abated at last. Given the name of the latter, this seemed apt.  

I was nearing New York City, just over a week after the atrocities.  

4. Holland Tunnel Closed: God Bless America   
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Those flashing orange road-side construction signs, once purely utilitarian, now alternated between ostensibly neutral information (Holland Tunnel Closed) and apocalyptic entreaties to the gods, or God. I saw other examples of the latter in a thousand mundane places, from the signs in front of a Dairy Queen to tattered banners draped over Interstate bridges to flag-adorned t-shirts:  

What does it mean? Bless us now? If not now, when? Do we still trust? Is there just the tiniest suggestion of an admonishment to this negligent God? For surely if any God worth His salt had indeed blessed America a little earlier, might not those doomed people in the Towers have avoided their fate? It is not my place to find answers, but I cannot help at least question the impulse at the core of these seemingly ubiquitous sentiments. I am surely in as much shock as anyone else who saw those tortured buildings implode, yet I am perplexed by what appear to be forlorn platitudes. To me, anything resembling a god appeared, Elvis-like, to have permanently left the building(s). It -- this god-thing, this god-need -- is an anomaly. At this juncture, I ought not even try to understand. Later, perhaps.  

So the rains had slowed, left slick empty lanes of Turnpike painted in orange as I crossed the state of New Jersey, a little red bug. It was very late at night, and deserted. The asphalt seemed impossibly wide, and I felt impossibly lonely.  

This was anticlimactic, this journey’s end. Back when I had first merged on to I-80 in Ohio, I had seen a sign that read: New York City 600 Miles and I had smiled at the hubris of any place bold enough to announce itself so early in anyone’s journey like a real life Emerald City. Yet now, there was no glowing green vision -- only industrial sodium lit dull orange wet asphalt endless high fenced dim housing lonely trucks kicking up dirty spray. I was tired and depressed listening to a weary Springsteen and heading for the George Washington Bridge.  

Somewhere I made a mistake. I was looking for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway but found myself in Manhattan instead. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. Almost every intersection was lit like a movie set, and contained a huddle of NYPD officers and, occasionally, state police too. Ramshackle barricades blocked vehicle access nearly everywhere. Already hopelessly lost, looking for Brooklyn, constantly swarmed by yellow cabs, and unable to drive on many of the barricaded streets, I was forced to ask for directions like an embarrassed Canadian tourist. But New Yorkers are big hearted, and this was a city trying to beat in unison right now. Cheerfully, they loaded me up with loud and complicated directions. I briefly wondered why so many cops at so many intersections, and came to the conclusion that it was a comfort thing, a reassurance to the denizens of a city still in shock. Right then, to be honest, it worked for me, too.  

Somehow I found Brooklyn and my friend’s house. It was around 3:00 am. Mike welcomed me and led me to the roof of his Federal brownstone. His demeanour was hushed and urgent, and I followed him. We emerged into a rooftop night still orange and expectant and warm, a night in which strange forces moved and everybody either slept or waited wide-eyed for something to make sense again. I saw bristling Manhattan for the first time in my life, and Liberty in the oily waters, and the Empire State Building midtown, lit vaguely red, white, and blue. I saw all the pearl string bridges glistening.

And I saw the exhalations of demons, the billowing white clouds of dust and smoke, backlit by Klieg lights, emanating like a monstrous phantom from a traumatized skyline. Those twin wonders of a thousand movies were gone. Just. Gone. And an ugly stinking electrical death-breath poured from their vacancy. I felt like I had been sucker punched. My entire skin rippled with goose bumps, and my mind flinched from the sheer scale of it. I stood for a long time on that tarpaper rooftop in a part of Brooklyn once known as Dead Man’s Hill, trying to absorb the low-key howling pain of the world’s city. I felt empty and sadder than I’ve ever felt in my life. I felt assaulted by grief.  

The following day the rains caught up with me again. I heard that the rescue effort (we all still used the word ‘rescue’ then) was severely hampered by the rainwater mixing with the dust and creating a slick grey sludge at Ground Zero. No one can even hope to negotiate four-feet-wide I-Beams that are slimed with that slick-ass shit. I walked around Sunset Park and tried to glimpse Manhattan through a sodden sky. I felt sorry that I had brought this rain. My friends were generous, however, and spoke to me of both loss and life -- of someone who had lost 90 people, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, all from a company on the 93rd floor of one of the towers; of a woman who noticed a run in her pantyhose that morning, before entering the Subway, and had turned back. She worked on the 91st floor of the South Tower. Individual loss, collective agony, frozen around the need to talk.  

As afternoon blurred into evening, we headed into Greenwich Village, dodging sudden fat raindrops on Bleecker Street. We sheltered briefly in a doorway, and the rain fell like wet needlepoint and hissing percussion. Blues bands still plied their heart-murmur trade up and down a subdued strip. There remained yet the hardcore lovers and the hoarse romantic visitors, searching for that elusive bohemian frisson, that big fraught apple-tang zap. We took in some more of that bark and moan and rhythm then ducked out in search of yet more connection -- Washington Square Park, wet, dripping, green. Here is a part of another email I sent to someone:  

'At one point, I was in Washington Square Park at night, where the chess players try to entice you to play. They are so fast it is almost inhuman, but there was little joy in their audacious dexterity that night. They were going through the motions. Alongside is an arch/monument not unlike a smaller Arc De Triomphe. It was surrounded by a chain link fence, which in turn was surrounded by maybe a thousand candles, not to mention flowers, posters of missing people, and scores of forlorn or defiant messages. Sadly, the weather had turned wet by then, and most of the candles were doused, or sputtering at best. Many of us who were there tried desperately to relight the candles but the wicks were too soaked; they sat in rain. We were dogged, determined, but it was frustrating and kind of futile, pathetic even. When I remember moments like that, I realize I was truly at "ground zero", and the helplessness of that is almost unbearable. Yet I was there -- a true witness to the first tentative efforts at healing. One young woman looked at me with defiance and continued trying to light her candle, a bright stupidity on her heartbreaking face.  '

I wished that my friend in Scotland, who has always loved the Blues, could have shared this moment. This was the Blues, trite as that may sound.  

Mike and Sheila gave me a car tour through Manhattan after a brief stop at another Village watering hole. Versace, Klein, Macies, Lauren, Gucci, Trump Tower, familiar signs and logos, all flashed by my eyes but I didn’t really care. The lights and sounds were impressive, formally elegiac even, but I felt distant now -- I had entered the secret lost place of deep grief via a soaking wet Bleecker Street and it seemed to me that no-one, I mean no-one, would ever understand that as well as I did right at that moment.  

Later, someone handed me a Village Voice with a cover depicting a hand holding a postcard of the old clear vibrant New York skyline in front of the present depleted version. The words above this poignant view were simple: Wish You Were Here. Inside this famous journal were a number of pages on which the “missing” were exhorted to contact their anxious friends and relatives. They were still considered to be only missing then, of course. I could quote hundreds of imploring messages, but I will offer just this one example:  

MISSING: Uncle Lee
Written on a street memorial, New York City: “For Uncle Lee. 90th floor, 2nd building. Did you make it? Still don’t know. We all cried for you today. I wait by the phone run run run faster please you are strong just keep running. I hope you are safe.”  

Some have tried to say this was an attack on Western values, Western culture. Perhaps that is partially true, but the reality seems to be a lot more complicated than that. Look, here are some more random names-of-the-lost from those pages: Lugo, Shahid, Hernandez, Dukat, Rosenbaum, Fitzgerald, Song, Shastri, Brown, Khan, Cascio, Chalasani, Crawford, Marino, Heffernan, Zelmanowitz, Medina, Suhr, Feehan, Prakkat, Adams, Gonzalez, Lizcano, Luparelli, Stackpole, Antigua, Katsimatides, Alvarado, Bergstein, Bravo, Campbell, Carlson, Savinkin, Santiago, Rivera, O’Grady, Wong, Walendorf, Tsoy, Ortiz, Sword, Babakitis, Dataram, Gambale.  

All gone, just like Uncle Lee above. Do they sound like something hive-minded? Exclusive and whitebread Western? Don’t you see? The only thing they share is their inability to outrun gravity’s rubble. And we all share that fragility.  

6. Blind Hearts
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‘Well I've been in town for just about fifteen minutes now
And baby I feel so down
And I don't know why
I've been walking for miles’  

Change tense. New York City is humid. You sweat a lot, even in mid to late September. The Subway is a concentrated version of the larger metropolis, a dirty hothouse, a vile asthmatic oily sauna, although in truth no worse than the London Tube or the Paris Metro. Rats love it down there. In the maze.  

I’m a people watcher, a long time voyeur of impromptu psychology experiments, so I love it down there too, despite the anxiety and the sweat. Hasidic Jews, urban gangstas, street punks, tourists, local commuters, skater teens, fresh-faced students, African princesses, seniors, Muslims. Many wearing on their immutable faces the thousand-yard stare. How much is that the defiant assertion of personal space, and how much the signs of trauma? Damaged hearts gazing through dull windows.  

I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It took a very, very long time between the actual trauma events and my eventual recognition of the symptoms. I am so afraid for others. In Manhattan, riding the rickety swaying silver cars under the ground, I see the stirrings of much future pain in the people around me. I am still in therapy for my own disorder, so I cannot exactly claim to be a shining example, but I have learned some stuff in my attempts to heal and move on. I want to tell every person I see to please stop staring and start fucking talking about it. In this Kingdom of the Blind, I might actually have some limited vision. This is very little consolation. In fact, it’s no consolation at all.  

At some point, I find myself in Times Square. Here’s another email I sent to friends:  

Today, I took the Subway to Manhattan, to 42nd Street and Times Square to be precise. Again, I felt humbled and dwarfed in that vast buzzing dancing canyon, that paean to capitalism, consumerism and excess. A maelstrom of endlessly electronically cycling, recycling and morphing livid liquid commercials competing with crowds, cabs, constant noise and rich smells of food. It's either a vision of hell, a Bladerunner taste of dystopia, or the unapologetic hubris of the world's most powerful nation. Or all of the above. Interspersed in all that flagrant decadence, however, were small islands of candles, flowers, messages, flags, and -- saddest of all -- the thousands of posters of missing friends and relatives tacked to every available square foot of wall space. News crews circled the entire area, dragging equipment, some reporting in front of cameras, some roving, looking for interviewees, looking for the native New Yorker angle, for something different -- looking for yet more trauma stories.  

The world wants trauma stories in order to help it cry it all out (it thinks). America pumps them out obligingly. Some are profound, some maudlin. Perhaps, through them, we can humanize the horror, diminish the scale, cushion the impact. We really do need our bearings here.  

It’s funny, I feel at home in the massive brooding stands of Douglas fir, Western red cedar, giant spruce and hemlock of the coastal rainforest, yet I suddenly cannot cope with the oppressive towers here, so I grab the nearest subway and quickly find myself in a bar in the West Village. I drink beer and talk to people who in turn want to talk about their personal versions of September 11. We get drunk together on a quiet afternoon, and I tell Sally from Trinidad and Liz from down the street and Georgia from Newark and Stuart from Hoboken that what they are doing now is the best thing they could be doing -- talking, talking, talking, telling their stories, risking their dignity, wearing their pain and their grief in defiant masks, screaming out the unfairness, mourning lost friends, relatives, neighbours, howling and chattering and raging and keening. They are good people, concerned about the world, in love with their New York, but blinded by a sadness that has settled as surely as did the sodden canopy of cloud on my arrival. No one seems to be telling them much about this, and I am tentative, nervous of this new role as one-eyed king -- if that is even what I am. I feel a sudden bright love for these big-hearted people, these wounded New Yorkers. I do my absolute awestruck best.  

I return to Brooklyn, and I think: this is a shattered city. All night, the brilliant arc lights illuminate the gaping hole where the WTC once stood. Smoke and dust still drifts above it like ectoplasm. It is truly a ghost haunting this larger than life place, constantly reminding its inhabitants of the almost incomprehensible horror that lies beneath that rubble. It is a mass grave. When the wind is right, it smells something like burning rubber, something like electrical fires, something like burned bodies -- it's a horrible otherworldly smell. Nobody refers to that head-on; conversationally, it’s always an oblique reference to “the smell”. I drift into a shallow disturbed sleep, lungs lutching at the warm wet air.

7. Ground Zero  

I spend the following morning cheering inanely in front of a TV in a midtown Manhattan bar. My English football team, Manchester United, maul their opponents convincingly while I consume the best omelette I’ve had in years. Afterwards, I buy tacky souvenirs (a standout is the t-shirt that says, white on black, New York Fuckin City, a ringingly brash if forlorn rebel yell now), then anxiously relinquish my car to Mike, and ride the subway to Central Park. I am a tourist, no apologies. 5th Avenue, Park Avenue, Lexington, Madison, Avenue of the Americas. Hard Rock Café, FAO Schwarz, Planet Hollywood. This big city could be London, Paris, or Rome with its bustling wide streets, yet it is also distinguished by its height of course. Towers like impossible concrete storks with unsettling shadows rise on all sides. They loom slightly threateningly over startlingly green parks. I am restless in the new sunshine, so I ask someone for directions to the Staten Island Ferry and they tell  me to take the Subway to Bowling Green. I don’t know this city, and I have no idea how pivotal this is as I head towards lower Manhattan clutching a revised Subway map now suddenly conspicuous by its absences, its significant spaces. The map reads: “Dotted lines represent service that is temporarily suspended and stations that are closed.” Nearby Wall Street may indeed be temporarily closed, but World Trade Center is closed forever, I think darkly.  

Regardless, I emerge from under the ground at Bowling Green and I notice metal barricades everywhere, effectively herding people in preordained paths. I follow the dusty sidewalk past a classical columned building, the former United States Customs House, and realise I am at Battery Park, which is currently cordoned off with yellow tape, and now occupied by U.S. military personnel. It is like some kind of bizarre nexus of history. Americans fought my ancestors here once. Even the U.S. Customs House is now a museum for Native American culture. Camouflaged Humvees line the street in front, Battery Place. The police and military presence is conspicuous, and there are numerous people moving belongings along dust-laden streets, leaving dust-clogged apartments. Western urban refugees, with cat boxes and glassy stares. Religious groups are passing out flyers and brochures. Tourists congregate ghoulishly. I feel sickened that I am here, but I look anyway, in the direction of others’ gazes. Through gaps in the buildings, underneath walkways, between distant twisted metal, catching glimpses of ragged remnants in the grey, choking horror they call Ground Zero. I watch a crane move lazily.  

Here’s another email:  

I could see the devastation, twisted blackened steel, eerily distorted facades, between the concrete canyons. The dust was thick everywhere, it clogged my throat, and tasted and smelled horrible, burnt, rubbery, toxic. The place was crowded but subdued and possessing an almost churchlike hush. Soldiers in combat fatigues stop people from traversing those two blocks into hell. Personally, I am relieved about that, not wanting to contemplate where my own shamefaced curiosity might have led me.  

I make my way to the Ferry at last, a knotted fist of grief in my guts. But let me relate the rest in its raw form, exactly as I wrote it to my friends and family at the time:  

I took the Staten Island Ferry and we pulled away to get a longer view of that crippled skyline. There was something embarrassing, like looking at a once proud old man displaying his increasingly toothless smile. I wanted to look away, it was so unbearably sad.  

Further south and the "green lady" came into view, her torch literally golden as she caught the rich  equinox light. She stood, a failed guardian, with wounded Manhattan behind and to her right, a reminder that simple freedom may no longer be enough. The crowds, snapping and flashing, were nevertheless almost reverential.  

I came back to Brooklyn emotionally drained, yet was cheered by the incredible ethnically diverse normalcy of the district -- young black, white and Hispanic men playing basketball in local chain link courts, entire families out on their stoops laughing, dancing, playing salsa music, hip hop, tossing a football, swinging at a baseball in between the relentless traffic.  

I cannot shake Ground Zero. There are other places on earth reeking of similar harrowing loss, I am sure. But I have never visited Auschwitz, for example. Or Rwanda. Or the killing fields of Cambodia, Srebrenica, or Kosovo. As traumatised as I am, I remain a relative innocent, no small mercy. It seems so odd that the devastation wrought in the financial district of the most overtly capitalistic nation on the planet should affect me so deeply. Was it the falling people? Those doomed jumpers who clutched each other in mid-air? Or perhaps the lone fire-fighter at street level who was actually killed by one of those awful terrorized victims who fell 10 long seconds towards unyielding ground? Was it the sudden gut-wrenching awareness on the part of the airplane passengers, as those impossible towers loomed suddenly clear on that beautiful fall morning? Was it the dust painted refugees trudging five, ten, fifteen grim miles across the bridges, home to their anxious families in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx? Was it the elementary school children who saw the people falling? Or perhaps those same children, or their classmates, who would wait in vain for a parent to show up at the school gates? Or the passers-by who witnessed fire-fighters hurriedly covering fresh bodies as quickly as they could, damn it? Or rescue workers realizing there would be no agonizing triage, that this was it, no second chances, no inspiring miracles? Is it my own personal history of trauma that’s resonating like a plucked cello string? Or did we see evil pass this way?  

Inevitably, the continent groaned and eventually tilted, and I began to roll westward again. A 21st Century beatnik in a Honda Civic. A plastic pioneer. I tried not to think about what I had experienced in New York City as I headed out, but I tend to watch my rear views obsessively. Tiny memories loomed surprisingly intense (objects may appear smaller than they really are); a homeless man’s lapel flower; a neat black man briskly quoting scripture on a quiet ferry ride; the kindness of two smiling young Asian woman in the Subway; the strange absence of flowers in Brooklyn stores; a graffiti halo over the head of a billboard Guiliani. I drove and drove and drove. The endless woods of Pennsylvania. Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. Iowa. South Dakota. Evocative place names (Punxsutawney, Clarion, Michigan City, Moline, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Vermillion, Sioux Falls, Rapid City) were strange and rhythmic. Still flashes in my rear view – flashes of dust, flashes of shock, flashes of loss. Dream startle reflexes. The harsh road toward home rasping under tired wheels.  

My partner in life collects sand and earth from all the corners of the world. She has jars of black sand from Hawaii, golden sand from Oregon, blonde Jamaican sand, Scottish, Mexican, and Japanese sand -- all lovingly gathered and given to her by friends and family who visit these places. Scooping the grey dirt of New York, however, would have seemed crassly irreverent. But one morning, upon leaving yet another generic angular motel, I discovered I was in the Badlands of South Dakota, a dry stone’s throw from the Pine Ridge Reservation of Wounded Knee fame. Deciding to pay the ten dollars to drive into the canyons and arroyos of the National Park area, I pulled over and scooped some of the bleached chalk-soft dirt into a plastic bag. I looked around me, in the silence and the still of morning. The sky was blue but dark clouds gathered beyond. A red hawk shrieked. The fractured hills were banded with shadows and subtle rose, purple, adobe, cinnamon. This was a stark desolate haunted place, dry as powdered bone, indifferent to human concerns, alien in its insouciant pride. It struck me that I had traversed the continent from the concrete ravines of New York to the rock canyons of the Badlands and I was heading back to the stately forested amphitheatres of the coast. There's some kind of balance there. Each place echoes with awe or trauma for someone. I returned to my car and drove out of there.  

More places, more endless highway, more bad road food. I could hear ancient drums solemn in the hills, softly strummed guitars around campfires, harmonica laments keening over the plains. Music and trauma and history – the things we all share -- wove tapestries around me. I passed through a part of Wyoming, into Montana, and finally crossed the border somewhere north of Kalispell into the province I call my home. It was my fortieth birthday. I had been gone for three weeks. British Columbia was raging with fall colour, golden against deep blue skies. I had returned home, a speck of dust borne on dust, followed by a quiet wind of ghosts.  

So where did all this lead? Was there any purpose to this mad trip? Have I, have we, learned anything at all?  

I sometimes fear we haven’t learned much. We are more haunted, perhaps. But if we weren’t already haunted by some of the world’s harshness, we either weren’t paying attention or we’d already closed our hearts.  

I realised something about my own place in the world after September the Eleventh: this Canada is like a little brother. No matter how much our bigger and stronger sibling to the south teases, ignores or even lashes out at us, we'll still come to his aid and defense in extremis. That's a clumsy way of saying we're a kind of family, dysfunctional as hell, but nevertheless occupying the same boat on the same treacherous waters largely through an accident of geography and history, so we'd better keep paddling and working on plugging the leaks and perhaps even trying to make it a better boat for everyone.  

So as a result of the attacks, I would say that I've at least checked my knee-jerk anti-Americanism and tried to leave it on the shore. As for the more thoughtful anti-Americanism, it's still here with me, precious as ever. As it ought to be. My neighbour still happens to be the biggest military-industrial complex the planet has ever seen. It's headed up by a frighteningly small-minded Texas oilman. It executes innocent people. It still argues its right to teach kids that religious dogma is science. It loves guns. I'd be remiss if I didn't continually check and question the motives and foreign outlook of such a nation, one that also happens to share with us the world's longest friendly border. They may be family, but someone has to be ready just in case big brother goes rogue.  

It is also scary how much people hitched their own favourite prejudices to the post 9-11 bandwagon in the aftermath of the attacks. Thoughtful reflection became mindless conformity very quickly. Those walking softly were threatened or ridiculed into joining the lockstep march. The idiot wind gathered strength everywhere. I love the idea of America. I love its large horizons. Those Americans I met along the way were good and kind people. It’s just that the politicians are front and centre there. I think maybe we need the artists and the computer nerds and dancers and grade schoolers and construction workers and reporters and nurses and biologists and priests and grocery store owners and waitresses and librarians and firefighters and soccer players and poets and research scientists and astronauts to be more involved in the process of how we address our future and that of our children. After all, what do politicians actually know? What really qualifies them?

Citizens of between 70 and 80 countries died in the World Trade Center. This was global. The horror was captured live and direct and then aired repeatedly for weeks. The brutal acts should have been no surprise to those of us who watched helplessly in the previous decade as 800,000 people were viciously slaughtered in Rwanda and another 200,000 in Bosnia. Yet it still shocked and traumatized us. I can't really pretend to explain that fully. But I do know that I view the world somewhat differently now. I am more tolerant of individual Americans, I place my own personal traumas into some kind of perspective, I recognize that we're each as vulnerable as the next person, I insist that we all pay attention more -- not just to our surroundings, but to the myriad ways in which our apathy and silence contribute to situations that can escalate wildly out of control.  

One last thing -- I am still disturbed by my memories of those shell-shocked people wheeling their dust-laden worldly possessions away from their homes near Ground Zero, in amongst the apocalyptic doom preachers, the soldiers and the gawking tourists. I felt some shame being well and truly in the latter camp. And I realized that refugees of all conflicts -- whether they shuffle through the cold bleak streets of Kosovo, dejectedly traverse the steaming jungles of Rwanda, or stream across the Brooklyn Bridge -- are all equally deserving of our compassion and kindness. They are not they, after all; they are us. I grew up in England, and I remember the IRA bombings, the sectarian killings, the government hard line, hunger strikes, threats, warnings. But now I think all of us, and Americans in particular, might have finally awakened to the undeniable possibility that horror really can visit any one of us in this rapidly shrinking world. So what will be the response to that awakening? Will we all speak our hearts clearly through the howling idiot wind?  

I made this journey with a literal soundtrack blaring from my car speakers, or running subliminally in my mind’s ear. Music is woven into this story, beyond all the expended words and flights of philosophy. It has always helped me on a personal level, accompanying me when I’ve had to face my own demons. It richly deserves the prominence I give it here. I hope anyone reading this strange odyssey will be familiar with at least some of the songs I mention, although that is not essential. Regardless, I feel like I have to give Bob Dylan the last word. He more than many has always seemed to recognize the paradoxical nature of our lonely alliances. Our dissolute kinships.  

‘Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy,
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin' glory…’  

“Idiot Wind”, Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks

Author's Biography

David Antrobus has used words and stories (other peoples' and his own) to make a living his entire adult life. 

A former youth and family worker, he now attempts to braid his immigrant experience with a painful first hand knowledge of whispering trauma and grimy-monochrome street life, to produce something distinctively shining, however dark its roots. 

Originally from Manchester, England, he now resides near that Pacific jewel of a city -- Vancouver, Canada. He has one (incredible) son. 

E-mail David at digitalis@shaw.ca 

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