October 12, 2001 - Changed World

The first time we heard the news the words were appalling to hear, but ten days later the visual images still had the power to shock us. We dread seeing the moving images.

After 7 years living abroad in remote areas we have become accustomed to hearing the news days, sometimes even weeks, late. You stop trying to stay current and we find a month-old Sunday newspaper just as interesting as one we might have picked up on our way home after a late Saturday night out.

At first we were avid listeners to the BBC World Service but remoteness makes the daily news seem irrelevant and repetitive, so we generally tune in only occasionally. Likewise occasional forays to towns where international papers are available sees us overdosing on world news for a day or so before once again entering a news vacuum.

On September 11th we were on our boat anchored off a small village in the Penama Province of Vanuatu, utterly ignorant of the turmoil that the rest of the world was experiencing. We strolled around the village, talking to the ni-Vanuatu inhabitants about the festivities that were planned for Saturday to mark the grading ceremony for a villager who was being raised in rank. To cool off in the afternoon we swam and watched the eagle rays flying in formation around the shadow of our anchored yacht.

We are not entirely cut off from the outside world--we can send e-mails via our satellite phone--and that evening when we sent a few messages, we received one from our family in the UK. It simply said how the news was awful, they were all stunned and did not know what to say or how to react. But they assumed we had heard so they didn't tell us what had happened. They simply typed "tragic news about America" in the subject box.

Our SSB was not even tuned to the BBC, we use it most often to receive weatherfaxes, so we scrambled to find a frequency to discover what had happened. From the tone of our family's e-mail we were prepared for bad news. Nothing prepares you for that kind of news. Whatever we had expected this was an order of magnitude worse.

For days we listened all day everyday to news from the BBC and when we lost that signal from the Australian and New Zealand Pacific broadcasts. Without other people to discuss it with we sat mostly in silence trying to take it in the words and make some sense of it. We realized that without the visual images provided by TV and newspapers it is actually harder to take in the information, something this horrible is literally unimaginable.

After 10 days of saturation radio news broadcasting we arrived in Port Villa, the capital of Vanuatu. Though a small town, it has a limited supply of international newspapers and we were able to buy the International Telegraph and the weekend edition of the New Zealand Herald. Though much of the text covered details and stories we had already heard, seeing visual evidence of the tragedy for the first time was as shocking as the first news had been. We were winded by it all over again--we were at least as strongly affected as we had been on first hearing the news.

Although we know New York and could easily visualize the twin towers, we do not have the kind of imagination that allows you to invent the images that the newspapers displayed. The pall of smoke and debris rising from the skyline, the toy-like images of the planes hitting the buildings and the sight of victims falling from the doomed towers are not images sane people readily conjure up.

Radio coverage of necessity focused on the macro issues. From the newspapers we learnt more of the micro issues, the personal stories and tragedies, the bravery and the bizarre acts of chance that changed people's lives forever. Such things put us all in touch with our own mortality.

We have still not seen any moving images. It may be some weeks before we do. I suspect that this too will raise the horror to a new level, no matter that time has passed.