Everyone has a 9/11 story and this is mine.
I was in the States on a mission to buy an MRI machine and had been examining it at a company in Palo Alto in San Francisco. After that I was due to attend a course on another MRI system in Milwaukee.
This meant I had to change planes in Chicago, something I’d done many times before but for once I thought I would spend a couple of days there before taking the eighty-mile flight up to Milwaukee.
Chicago, the Windy City, lies on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. It’s called windy probably because of the freezing air that blows in off the Lake, though some claim the name comes from the city’s infamous windbag politicians.
Even in September it was starting to get a bit chilly but I spent a pleasant day walking along the Chicago River and going up the Sears Tower (the colloquial name, though actually called the Willis Tower) which was once the tallest building in the US, and indeed the world.
I retired to a crap hotel because I wasn’t on expenses for this layover part of the trip. The room only had a rubbish TV with colours so faded the picture looked almost black and white. Whilst watching this I fell asleep.
I awoke the next morning. The TV was still on and I was startled to see a plane fly into a skyscraper. This was on a local TV news station so I assumed it was showing the Sears Tower as it was the only really tall building around. Pulling back my curtains I saw the tower, still standing pristine in the clear blue air.
Finally, I realised I was watching the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, one of which I’d been to the top of a few years before.
I kept looking from the TV screen to the Sears Tower. And, over the next hour or so, the Sears Tower once again became the tallest building in the US.
Everything was going to hell in a hand-basket but I was still due in Milwaukee later that day. The airspace across the US was shut down, with all flights to the country being diverted. Passengers on transatlantic flights were finding themselves being dumped down in places far icier than they’d budgeted for.
Perhaps I should have stayed put but I was, as usual, so focussed on the job I felt I still had to get to Milwaukee. The train was the obvious answer but the station nestled right under the Sears Tower. If it was the next target of whoever was doing this, then the station risked being buried under countless tons of rubble.
Stupidly, I grabbed my suitcase and dragged it across the city to the station. I got there just in time for soon the carriages filled with confused commuters sent home early lest the financial buildings in the city came under attack.
Once out of the city, the train whizzed by the McMansions that were just then becoming popular in the wealthy little commuter towns along the lake shore. This was in the days before smart phones so people were using their dumb cell phones to contact their spouses and asking them what the fuck was going on.
Milwaukee is an unremarkable town except for the fact that it was for quite a while the largest centre of brewing in the world. It was the home town of Miller, Pabst and Schlitz and was boosted to prominence when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 put the kibosh on that city’s brewing industry.
At its height as the Beer Capital of the World, Milwaukee was producing over 30 million barrels of beer a year, almost every drop of which the rest of the world’s beer drinkers regarded as gassy, tasteless piss.
Once the train got me to Milwaukee, and now back on expenses, I stayed at an upmarket hotel a little out of the centre. So upmarket in fact that when the plane of President Bush (the father rather than the son) was forced to land in Milwaukee because of the emergency, this is where his staff put him, though I never even caught a glimpse of the man.
I sat in my room that evening watching the events of the day being endlessly replayed. I was hungry but felt guilty at the thought of going to a restaurant as it seemed almost disrespectful after the terrible thing that had happened.
But I hadn’t eaten at all that day and I really needed something so eventually I left the hotel to look for somewhere to grab something to eat.
Though the hotel was on a major highway surrounded by countryside, there was a little oasis of buildings, two of which were those barn-sized restaurants you often find in the States. I thought they would be closed but this proved untrue. I thought that even if they were open, they would be empty because people would be huddling together at home, too traumatised to eat out.
Wrong again. Both restaurants were heaving and indeed the first was full. The second had a single spare seat so they let me in. This was a sort of sports bar restaurant, again common in the US, with lines of huge TV screens along all four walls, usually showing different sporting events.
But now every single screen from a host of different TV stations was showing the horrors of the day; the planes crashing into the towers again and again like a recurring nightmare you can’t wake from.
Meanwhile a room full of American diners were chowing down in their usual unrestrained way, laughing and joking with each other.
It was bizarre and appalling. The only time the clatter of cutlery on plates and the munching of a couple of hundred or so mouths stopped was when President Bush (the son not the father this time) appeared on the screen to address the nation. The bar staff turned the sound up and everyone listened in respectful silence. When the President was finished, they got back to their meals.
The final straw for me came when the text on the screens first began to intimate that perhaps three hundred firefighters and police had perished when they rushed in to help the survivors, only to have the towers collapse on their heads.
I couldn’t see this have any effect on the customers who kept right on eating.
I’d been picking at my meal but now I abandoned it and left in disgust.
When I tell Americans this nowadays, and I do, they just don’t believe me. Nobody in the world can now doubt the anger this ignited in America, as all the military interventions and drone assassinations in the War on Terror have since shown.
I’ve tried to explain it away to myself. As a Brit who’d lived through many terrorist incidents arising from the problems in Northern Island, I was perhaps more sensitive to such things. That the Americans just weren’t used to terrorism, that perhaps they were somehow conflating what they saw on the TV screens with some cops and robbers TV show.
Or perhaps it was just delayed shock. Maybe it was such a big country that they didn’t quite empathise with people in faraway states (Milwaukee is about 900 miles from New York).
I don’t feel any of these explanations really hold water so I still don’t understand this strangely blunted response to such an unbelievably awful incident.
And US business was kind of like that too. I was visiting one of the biggest firms in the US, and indeed the world. This American company showed the profundity of its grief by holding a minute’s silence for all of its workers.
This was a few days later and during the workers’ lunch break so it was on their time not the company’s.
That was it. Otherwise, it was business as usual.
For this and other reasons I’d had quite enough of the States and wanted to get home. Trouble was, all flights were cancelled. Eventually some restarted so I went to the airport hoping for a ticket but it was chaos. British Airways were literally using a lottery to award people seats. I was lucky enough to win one.
Up to then I’d never been able to sleep while flying back across the Atlantic and couldn’t see how it would be any better this time.
As we were about to depart, the English Captain announced: “I realise you will all be very worried about what has been happening lately. The crew and I have carefully inspected the aircraft and I can assure you that you are all perfectly safe.”
He said this in such a calm and reassuring manner that I leaned back and relaxed, closing my eyes and falling asleep.
And I didn’t open them again until the wheels hit the runway at Heathrow.
The BA Captain earned his corn that day as far as this passenger is concerned.
So how did this cure my irritable bowel syndrome? I’d been plagued with a gnawing pain in my lower abdomen for years. I was pretty sure it was IBS but the doctors seemed to need convincing and subjected me to all sorts of investigations, the choicest of which was having what looked like a six-foot black metal snake wormed up my bottom.
After the blood tests, piss tests, x-rays and the less than gentle caresses of the snake, the doctor looked me in the eye and said: “It’s irritable bowel syndrome, there’s no cure, so you’ll just have to learn to live with it.”
Thanks a bunch!
So, I’d been in the US during the worst ever terrorist incident. I had been stressed to buggery (even without the administrations of the black snake), my diet had gone to pot, I was drinking alcohol like a fish drinks water and I wasn’t exercising.
A perfect recipe for exacerbating my IBS.
The funny thing was, however, that as I came to the end of my nightmarish stay in the US, I realised the pains in my abdomen had completely vanished. I hadn’t even noticed them going away.
I got back to the UK and resumed my running, my healthy diet, and once again stopped drinking like a fish.
And within a couple of weeks the pains came back. I may be no Hercule Poirot, but even I was smart enough to realise that something I did when things were normal was causing my IBS. By a process of elimination, I worked out that the culprit was All Bran, the breakfast cereal. I guess it’s just too fierce for my system.
I stopped eating it altogether, the pains went away again and I haven’t had a twinge in twenty years.
So, Osama Bin Laden really was instrumental in curing my irritable bowel syndrome, though I doubt that was his intention.