Slippy

On September 11, a town of fewer than 10,000 people looked up and saw 38 airliners coming down out of the sky toward them. Nobody had ordered them to take those people in. They took them in anyway. Every one. Into their homes. For five days. The town is called Gander, in Newfoundland, on the far eastern edge of Canada. At 9:45 that morning, the United States closed its airspace. Every plane over the Atlantic bound for America had to land somewhere, now. Gander sits on the point of land closest to Europe. In the Cold War it had been a refueling stop. By 2001 its runways were mostly quiet. Then the planes started coming. Thirty-eight of them. Wide-body jets from Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rome, Dublin. 6,122 passengers and 473 crew. Nearly 6,600 human beings. The town had a population of about 9,600. The mayor, Claude Elliott, said it plainly afterward. Every municipality has an emergency plan. There is no page in that plan that tells you what to do when 7,000 people decide to drop in for four or five days. So they wrote the page themselves. The passengers sat on the tarmac for hours. Some sat on their planes for more than a full day while security screened every aircraft. They had no idea what had happened. They were watching cell phones die. They were watching the fuel gauges and the faces of the flight attendants. Then they came down the stairs onto the ground of a town they had never heard of. Here is what was waiting. Every school in Gander was closed. Every nonessential business was closed. Not to hide. To free everybody up. The community television station put out a single message. Lend a hand. Do what you can. The town's ice rink, the only refrigerated building large enough, was turned into a food warehouse. The mayor called it the largest walk-in freezer in the country. Sandwiches. Casseroles. Soup. Everything the town could cook was coming in faster than it could go out. The pharmacies filled prescriptions for strangers and did not charge them. Heart medication, insulin, whatever a person had left in a suitcase they could not get to. The phone company installed banks of free telephones so people could call home and say the words. I'm alive. I'm in Canada. I don't know where. Schools, churches, the Lions Club, the Legion hall, the Salvation Army, all of them became dormitories. Cots, mats, sleeping bags on gymnasium floors. And when those ran out, the people of Gander opened their front doors. Strangers from Germany and Nigeria and Texas and Israel slept in the spare bedrooms of fishermen and schoolteachers. They took showers in the houses of people whose names they could not pronounce. They ate at kitchen tables next to children who kept asking them questions. Passengers who had money tried to pay. Nobody would take it. A woman on one flight later described the feeling she could not shake. She had landed in a place where nobody was going to let her be alone. On the fourth day, the American airspace reopened. The planes could leave. And the passengers did not want to go. One of them told the 9/11 Museum, years later, that they had been having a wonderful time with those Newfoundlanders. He said it without embarrassment. He had watched the worst thing he had ever seen on a television in a stranger's living room, and the stranger had brought him tea. On the flight out of Gander, on a Delta jet, the passengers passed a hat. They started with $15,000, on the plane, that day. A scholarship fund for the students of the Gander area. Something for the children of the people who had taken them in. That fund has grown to more than a million dollars. Every year since 2001, a kid from Gander goes to college on money from strangers who slept on their floors for four nights. The town has been awarded the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador. A Broadway musical about those five days ran for years. And this week, twenty-five years later, thousands of the plane people flew back to Gander to see the families who took them in. The airport unveiled a mural. Grown men who had been terrified passengers in 2001 hugged grown men who had been teenage volunteers pouring coffee. Here is the part worth remembering. The people of Gander did not know if the planes on their runway were safe. They did not know if there were more hijackers. They did not know who was on board. They did not know how long this would last. They opened the doors anyway. The town's emergency plan had no page for this. They wrote it with their kitchens. 🇨🇦🇺🇸