My September 11 in Whitehorse
On September 11, 2001, I was scheduled to give a speech at the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce, in the Yukon. My assistant and I had flown up from Vancouver the previous day and spent the night at a small hotel in the heart of the city, its window looking directly out onto the main street — a vantage point that would matter more than I could have guessed that morning.
I woke a little after seven. I had just stepped out of the shower and was standing before the mirror, razor in hand, when the telephone rang.
It was my assistant.
Without any preamble, she asked, "Are you watching television?"
I assumed there must have been some news concerning my speech — perhaps an announcement she wanted me to know about. I said no.
"Turn on the TV," she said.
I did.
At that precise moment I saw the first of the burning towers. The screen was already filling with the unfolding catastrophe in New York when, before I had even begun to comprehend what I was seeing, the second aircraft struck the other tower.
For a few seconds I simply stood there, razor still in hand, unable to process the images in front of me.
Then the telephone rang again.
My assistant told me my speech had been cancelled. Whitehorse, she said, was about to come under aerial attack.
The words instantly transformed what I was watching on the screen into something that seemed to be happening everywhere at once — including, apparently, above my own head. My mind leapt to the most terrifying conclusion imaginable: that World War III had begun. If someone was preparing to attack a town as small and remote as Whitehorse, I reasoned, then surely the great capitals of the world had already fallen, and the attackers were now turning their attention even here, to the far edge of the map.
A few moments later I heard the roar of an aircraft.
I went to the window.
A jet was passing overhead. Whitehorse is a small place, and from where I stood it seemed to me that the aircraft was circling above the town. My imagination, already overwhelmed by New York, turned the ordinary sound of an engine into one more sign of impending catastrophe.
Then my assistant called again. Fighter jets, she told me, had intercepted the aircraft and forced it to land; the passengers were safe.
Because our window looked straight down onto the main street, I did not need to be told that something extraordinary was happening below — I could see a rough, fragmentary version of it for myself. Police cars moved through the street with a kind of urgency I had never seen in that quiet town. Traffic seemed to seize up all at once. People were hurrying along the sidewalk in a way that had nothing to do with an ordinary morning, and somewhere among the sounds drifting up from the street I sensed, more than clearly understood, that the town itself was being emptied out — that schools, offices, the whole downtown, were being cleared. I did not know, at the time, of the armed officers taking up positions at the airport; I only knew, watching from that window, that Whitehorse had the look of a place bracing for something.
For the next several minutes I stood transfixed, my attention divided between the television screen and the window — one showing the collapse of towers a continent away, the other showing an ordinary northern street that had, for the moment, stopped feeling ordinary.
Outside, another strange scene was unfolding. I watched a large group of Korean travellers making their way along the street toward a hotel, and they looked as though they had stepped out of one of Fellini's dreamlike films. They had evidently been bound for somewhere warm — California, perhaps, or Florida — and were still dressed for it. But their aircraft had been diverted to Whitehorse, and someone had since handed out winter clothing: heavy coats, mismatched and oversized, worn over summer shirts and sandals. The colours and shapes of the borrowed clothes looked almost absurd against their light travelling clothes and the bewilderment on their faces. Yet beneath the theatrical strangeness of the scene was something entirely human — hundreds of people who had set out that morning for an ordinary destination and found themselves, instead, stranded in an unfamiliar northern town in the middle of a global crisis.
My assistant called once more. Our flight back to Vancouver had been cancelled. She suggested we go to a supermarket and buy some food, worried that the sudden arrival of so many stranded passengers might empty the shelves.
I dressed quickly and went down to the lobby to meet her. But rather than going to the supermarket, I suggested we go straight to the airport instead — perhaps, I thought, we could somehow find another way home.
The airport was closed. I was told the Korean jumbo jet had damaged the runway; the airfield, built for a much smaller scale of traffic, had never been meant to receive an aircraft of that size.
So we went into town instead. The stores had already been largely emptied — people were buying whatever they could find. Only one small shop, apparently run by local residents, still had some provisions left.
My only thought, by then, was to get home. I tried calling my wife, Guity, but she was on a train on her way to her gallery on Granville Island and couldn't be reached. I called another assistant in Vancouver, hoping he might somehow arrange a way back.
He could not. There was nothing to do but wait.
And here my memory becomes strangely incomplete.
I remember the fear. I remember the television. I remember looking through the window at the aircraft overhead. I remember the bewildered Korean travellers in their borrowed winter clothes, and the emptied shelves, and my own desperate wish to be home. But what happened in the days that followed has disappeared almost entirely. I do not remember how long we stayed in Whitehorse, nor how, in the end, we made it back to Vancouver.
It is as though memory simply stops at that point — as if an ordinary day, transformed so suddenly into something the mind cannot absorb all at once, preserves only fragments: a telephone call, a television screen, an aircraft overhead, anxious streets, strangers in borrowed coats — and lets the rest dissolve into silence.
What remains, more than anything, is the feeling that for a few hours the entire world had become uncertain. New York was burning on the television. A passenger aircraft had been mistaken for a hijacking. Fighter jets patrolled the sky above the Yukon. The streets of a small northern city had filled, suddenly, with frightened people. And for one bewildering moment, I believed the next great battle of a new world war might begin in Whitehorse.
The Whitehorse Incident
The events I witnessed that morning were part of a remarkable episode that unfolded in Whitehorse on September 11, 2001.
Korean Air Flight 085, carrying more than two hundred passengers and crew, had been bound for New York with a scheduled refuelling stop in Anchorage. When the United States closed its airspace in response to the attacks, the aircraft was diverted north — first toward Alaska, then, as the situation shifted, on toward Canada and ultimately Whitehorse.
A tangle of garbled communications led authorities to fear the aircraft had itself been hijacked. A transmission containing the letters "HJK" was read as a distress signal, and air-traffic controllers instructed the pilots to activate transponder code 7500 — the international code for a hijacking in progress. The report set off an extraordinary emergency response on the ground: police evacuated the downtown core, schools were emptied, traffic snarled, and telephone lines jammed as residents scrambled to find family members. At the airport, armed RCMP officers and snipers took up positions in case the aircraft proved to be a genuine threat.
Canadian fighter jets intercepted the Boeing 747, and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien later confirmed he had authorized military action — including, if necessary, shooting the aircraft down — should it have turned out to be a terrorist threat.
In the end, the feared attack never came. The Korean Air jet landed safely in Whitehorse, and its pilots were taken off under armed guard. The supposed hijacking was later found to have been a false alarm, born of the confusion of that extraordinary day.
For Whitehorse, the episode left a lasting memory. For a few hours, a remote northern community that had seemed impossibly distant from the catastrophe in New York found itself, quite suddenly, at the centre of a terror all its own.
For me, it remains one of the strangest and most vivid memories of September 11 — the morning an enormous tragedy unfolding thousands of kilometres away seemed, without warning, to arrive at my own window.
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