BOOKS FOR THE WIN #1
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, by Jim DeFede
It’s a running joke in my house that my dad’s love language is hand-drawn maps. You may recall the kind – routes to roadside attractions, gas stations, or the Big Boy restaurant in Menominee, sketched on napkins in those days when long-distance friends would call you up to announce that they were passing through and yes, they’d love to stay in the guest room. The week in 2018 that Jonathan and I got married, Dad spent a whole morning driving my new town so that he could draw the best routes between all the various wedding locations. “I need your help on other things,” I snapped. “The guests can look all this up in their phones.” It took me a few more years to realize that these hand-drawn napkin maps are a dying art – an affectionate link to a time when people depended less on devices and more on each other.
Jim DeFede’s 2002 The Day the World Came to Town tells the story of how, when US airspace closed due to the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, exhausted and worried passengers from all over the world were routed to a small Canadian town and taken in as friends. Though this time on an epic scale, it was a style of northern hospitality that I recognized – part of that dying art of hand-drawn maps and spontaneous guest room stays I remember from my childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Like the way-up-north town in which I was born, few people live in chilly Gander. In 2001 the town’s population was just over 9,000, with several smaller towns nearby. Nearly as many people landed in Gander on September 11 as there were residents. The flight manifests included the chairman of clothing giant Hugo Boss, a Texas couple adopting a child from Kazakhstan, four Moldovan refugee families, the mayor of the German city of Frankfurt, the parents of a NYC firefighter missing at the World Trade Center, a Nigerian princess, an Orthodox rabbi, and even a few single people who had no idea that they were about to find love on the rocky shores of Canada’s third-least populated province.
When the citizens of Gander heard the news of the planes lined up for arrival, they scrambled to prepare. Yet in many ways they were already ready. Gander had been a destination long before, being a crucial refueling stop on early transatlantic flights. Fidel Castro is said to have sledded through layovers, and countless Soviets to defect from their planes and plead for political asylum. The modernist stylings of Gander’s expansive airport remains a testimony to the glamour of Mad Men-era plane travel.
The swinging sixties décor may have surprised the bleary-eyed 9/11 passengers arriving for processing, but they truly didn’t expect what came next – school busses taking them to community buildings stocked with bedding straight from local people’s houses. Delicious meals and local flavors. People hailing them in Walmart and inviting them home to take a shower or borrow their cars. Uproarious celebrations in which honorary residents were created by drinking local “screech” and kissing a rotten cod. When the planes were ready to depart five days later, many passengers didn’t want to leave.
DeFede’s book is full of memorable anecdotes – enough for a Tony award-winning musical, Come From Away, which is still touring in the US. One of my favorite stories DeFede collected is quite simple. It has to do with a map. He describes how Gander residents repeatedly assure new arrivals that the local geography is easy to master because the major roads all form the shape of, well, a gander. After reading this, I pulled up a map of Newfoundland and then burst out laughing. The road layout in question does somewhat resemble the head of a gander . . . if the gander is lying dead on its back and you draw in the neck yourself. I chuckled at the faintness of the resemblance, but I mostly chuckled at the reminder of my dad. It made me think of our making the shape of Michigan with vertical and horizontal hands, using our left thumbs (which stood in for the Keweenaw Peninsula) as a pointer. And yes, it made me think of his hand-drawn maps.
Recently I read of a survey asking Generation Z about their preferred mode of communication. The researchers expected these technology natives to offer some device-centric answer. Overwhelmingly Gen Z said they preferred to talk in person. Maybe my dad’s hand-drawn maps, Gander’s hospitality, and Generation Z’s post-pandemic treasuring of social presence are all part of the same thing — a neighborliness in humanity that, despite the fears of every generation, will persist. In 2017 the mayor of Appleton, Gander’s neighboring village, said “There is goodness in the world that floats to the top in times of disaster." Read in light of all the upheaval of the early twenty-first century, DeFede’s book about an event at its very beginning gives me hope. Maybe we really might be okay.
In future emails, this is where the giveaway winner will be announced!
So happy to find this!