I don’t usually find myself reminiscing about moments like this (or putting it to paper), but perhaps it is because of all the coverage online surrounding the 25th anniversary of September 11. Some memories, no matter how much time passes, remain remarkably clear.
At the time, I was still living in Vancouver, Canada, but I was on one of my yearly trips to the French Riviera. I had been visiting the region regularly for years, long before I ever imagined that one day I would actually live here.
The weather that morning was beautiful, much like it is today. I was staying in Nice, and early that morning I took the train to Cannes to wander around, do some shopping and simply enjoy the day. There was nothing particularly unusual about it. It was just another wonderful day on the Côte d’Azur.
After spending several hours wandering around Cannes, I took the train back to Nice. Once I arrived in the city, I stopped at a grocery store to pick up some food before returning to the boutique hotel on Rue Paradis I was staying at, in the pedestrian zone of the city.
By the time I got back to my room, it was almost mid-afternoon. I was tired and hungry after spending much of the day walking around, and I remember sitting on the edge of the bed before picking up the television remote. I almost never watched television while traveling, but for some reason I decided to turn it on simply to have some background noise.
The very first thing I saw was smoke pouring from one of the Twin Towers.
The broadcast was in French, and at first I had no idea what I was looking at. Then, only seconds later, another plane crashed into the second tower.
It seemed completely unbelievable.
My first thought was, What kind of movie is this?
I must have sat there for quite some time trying to understand what I was seeing and slowly realizing that this wasn’t a movie or some fictional disaster. An attack was unfolding in New York City.
What struck me almost as much as what was happening on television was what was happening outside my hotel window.
The normal sounds of street life had almost disappeared. This was a popular part of Nice, yet there were surprisingly few people around. The city seemed to have gone into some sort of hibernation. Even the traffic was sparse and noticeably quieter than normal.
Of course, this was long before social media had taken over our lives and before we carried a constant stream of news around in our pockets. I didn’t have a laptop with me. In fact, I didn’t even own one at the time. I didn’t have a smartphone or anything resembling the technology we now take for granted.
So I decided to walk around Nice and see for myself what was happening.
Everywhere I went, the city was unusually quiet. There weren’t many people on the streets, and I assumed that most people were inside watching the news on their televisions. The planes that normally crossed the sky over the bay on their way to and from the airport had stopped completely.
Early that evening, I noticed flowers being left outside the doors of the police station behind Le Méridien. There was clearly a sense that what had happened in New York had affected people here too, even though it was thousands of kilometres away.
The city was also taking immediate precautions. Refuse containers on the streets had either been removed or turned over, eliminating anything that might potentially be used as a hiding place for something dangerous.
There was a sense of utter shock and mourning.
And, perhaps understandably, there was also uncertainty. People were asking themselves what came next. Was this the beginning of something much larger? Was the world heading toward another major war? Was this somehow the beginning of a Third World War?
Even the staff at the small boutique hotel where I was staying kept asking how I was doing. They knew I was Canadian, but that distinction hardly seemed important at that moment. I was North American, I was traveling alone in Europe, and what had happened had suddenly made everyone wonder what might happen next.
Eventually, I made my way to an internet café that evening.
These were very different places back then. The computers were often old, the connections painfully slow and the whole experience was nothing like getting online today. My only real connection to home was an old Hotmail account, which itself was still relatively new technology.
When I logged in, I found a stream of frantic emails from friends, co-workers and family.
The tone of those messages was almost more startling than the number of them. People were frightened. They were worried about me. Some were convinced that whatever had happened in New York was going to spread and that Canada could somehow be next, and rightfully so.
Those closest to me knew I still had another three weeks in France, with the final week and a half planned for Paris. Some were pleading with me, and in a few cases practically demanding, that I try to get on a flight and come home immediately.
Of course, by then the news was already reporting that flights were being cancelled across the world, so there wasn’t exactly an easy way to jump on a plane and return to Vancouver.
Others had a completely different view. Some people, including those who had never even been to Europe, were telling me that I should stay exactly where I was because I was safer away from North America.
It was an incredibly strange feeling.
My decision was to stay in France and continue with my plans. I had no idea whether my eventual flight home would actually operate as scheduled, but for the moment there seemed little point in panicking about something I couldn’t control.
The following day, the mood remained incredibly somber. People were still trying to absorb what had happened, and I was no different.
That morning I decided to take the train to Villefranche-sur-Mer, wander around and eventually go to the beach.
Even that felt strange. And wrong.
Part of me felt guilty about doing something so ordinary when such an extraordinary tragedy had taken place. Before heading down to the beach, I stopped at a tabac. There were several locals there talking about what had happened the previous day, and the cover of a regional newspaper carried a photograph of the Twin Towers.
One of the local women noticed me looking at the newspaper. She apparently assumed I was American and asked whether I was and whether I was okay.
I explained that I was Canadian, but that it was all still incredibly shocking. They mentioned being shocked too and they appeared very sad about the situation.
I mentioned, almost in passing, that I was planning to go to the beach but felt somewhat guilty about doing so.
An older man who had been listening to the conversation spoke up.
His message, as I understood it, was simple: if something terrible was going to happen in the world, you still had to live for the day you had.
There was something about that which stayed with me.
I thanked him and made my way down to the beach. I did go, but I still felt strange about it and didn’t stay very long.
For the rest of my time on the Riviera, there was a subdued atmosphere. More information continued to emerge from the United States, security measures were being introduced and people were clearly watching developments closely.
Yet at the same time, I still felt safe.
The Côte d’Azur was still beautiful. The Mediterranean was still there. The trains were still running. People were still going about their lives.
But something had changed.
There was a strange conflict between knowing that life had to continue and feeling almost guilty for continuing to enjoy it.
In retrospect, watching how people responded was also an education. There was a sense that people understood you couldn’t control everything happening in the world, but you could control how you responded to what was immediately in front of you.
Eventually, I continued my trip by train and traveled to Paris.
That was where I really noticed how much security had been heightened.
You couldn’t simply walk into a large department store without having your bag searched. There were lineups and additional security measures almost everywhere. It was inconvenient, but nobody seemed particularly upset about it. There was an understanding that these measures were necessary.
There was also a feeling throughout France that, based on the country’s own history and previous experience with terrorism and war, authorities understood the importance of dealing with the present as effectively as possible.
Eventually, my flight home to Canada remained scheduled.
Security at the airport was certainly much tighter, but otherwise things were operating as normally as they possibly could under the circumstances.
I wasn’t particularly frightened about getting on the plane.
Perhaps it was because I had already made a decision that if something happened, at least I had spent those final weeks being somewhere I loved, in a part of the world that had already become enormously important to me.
And, in a strange way, September 11 also reinforced something that had already been slowly taking shape in my mind.
We really do only have one life.
You can make plans, postpone things, tell yourself you’ll do something someday and assume there will always be another opportunity. But sometimes the world has a way of reminding you that none of us actually knows how much time we have.
For me, one of the consequences of that trip was that the idea of eventually moving to the French Riviera became much more concrete.
The thought had already been there, slowly developing in the background. But after September 11, it became harder to ignore.
Looking back 25 years later, I still remember sitting on the edge of that hotel bed in Nice, turning on a television simply because I wanted some background noise, and seeing smoke rising from the Twin Towers.
I remember the silence in the streets afterwards.
I remember the flowers outside the police station.
I remember the emails from people back home desperately trying to make sense of something that none of us understood.
And I remember the older man in the tabac in Villefranche-sur-Mer telling me, in his own way, that if the world was going to change, you still had to live the day you had.
I think I finally understood what he meant.
Twenty-five years later, that may be the part of 9/11 I remember most.
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