Cult of Jef

It’s dif­fi­cult to find any humor about the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.  How­ever, prob­a­bly the most humor­ous and mov­ing expe­ri­ence related to the ter­ror­ist attacks hap­pened on the other side of the world in Australia.

After my employer released me to go home early after watch­ing the twin tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­ter col­lapse on tele­vi­sion, I decided that I would do what any­one would do at such dis­com­bu­lat­ing moment:  I went shop­ping for a beach towel.

Since I was grad­u­at­ing from The Art Insti­tute of Atlanta with an asso­ciate degree in Mul­ti­me­dia & Web Design, I decided that I wanted to cel­e­brate by tak­ing an exotic vaca­tion.  I had always been fas­ci­nated by Aus­tralia, so I con­vinced Jeff, Reid, and Laura to go with me.  Since we were sched­uled to visit Syd­ney (Bondi & Manly Beach) and Cairns (Great Bar­rier Reef), I fig­ured that I prob­a­bly needed a beach towel.  And as I vis­ited one store after another, I’d pick up a towel and con­sider it, then think, Almost 3,000 peo­ple died today and nothing’s ever going to be the same again.  Even­tu­ally, I just grabbed a blue one and paid for it.  I don’t even like shop­ping.  How­ever, I didn’t want to go home, either.  There was nowhere to go, in fact, that you could escape the after­shocks of the ter­ror­ist attacks … and the unknown of what would hap­pen next.

A week or so later, my travel agent con­tacted me to explain that Ansett Air­lines of Aus­tralia had gone under due to some finan­cial prob­lems from the ground­ing of all flights on Sep­tem­ber 11, so our 1:00 p.m. flight had been bumped to a mid­night flight on Qan­tas Airlines.

As my vaca­tion approached peo­ple began to ask every­one in my group if we still planned to fly to Aus­tralia.  “Aren’t you afraid?” a co-worker asked. “I wasn’t until every­one started ask­ing me if I was afraid to fly,” I said.  “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life afraid of doing any­thing.  Now get out of my way, I need to use the copier.”  Of course, that was eas­ier to say before I arrived at the airport.

Fly­ing used to be fun.  You could prac­ti­cally take a rocket launcher onto your flight with­out any­one bat­ting an eye before Sep­tem­ber 11, and after­wards you had to check an ever expand­ing list to find out what was now anath­ema.  Over­all, we didn’t have too much trou­ble until we made it to the secu­rity check point at LAX for our inter­na­tional flight.  We now had to remove our shoes as we went through the metal detec­tor.  I watched a secu­rity guard scream at a man who appeared not to speak Eng­lish and was pre­sum­ably fly­ing back to Mex­ico.  The guard kept try­ing to make the man take off his shoes by scream­ing “Sabado!  Sabado!” and the man looked bewil­dered, because I’m sure he was think­ing, What about Sat­ur­day?  Why do you keep scream­ing Saturday?

Once we made it to Aus­tralia, we spent time in Syd­ney, flew up to Cairns to see the Great Bar­rier Reef and Dain­tree Rain­for­est, then trav­eled to Alice Springs to expe­ri­ence the famous Out­back.  We arrived in the after­noon, dropped our bags off at the hos­tel we were spend­ing the night at, then Jeff, Reid, and I wan­dered down­town.  Jeff talked asked a few Abo­rig­i­nal women if he could take their pic­ture.  They agreed, but then would turn away when started to snap the image.  I had an inex­plic­a­ble crav­ing for apple pie, which is unusual because I don’t like apple pie.  Then we heard a bois­ter­ous “Yoohoo, boys!”  Laura ped­aled up to us on a bicy­cle from the hostel.

“Did you rent that?” Jeff asked.

“Oh, are we sup­posed to rent them?” Laura asked, before spy­ing a beer gar­den.  “You know, I’m kind of thirsty.”

So the four of us ended up in a beer gar­den in the Out­back, and were chat­ting with a nice Ger­man cou­ple when dis­tin­guished man and woman strode in, fol­lowed by a crowd of pho­tog­ra­phers and reporters.  He smiled and extended his hand to us as the paparazzi sur­rounded us.  “I’m John Ander­son, Deputy Prime Min­ster of Aus­tralia and I want to know we have your vote in next week’s election.”

Then Laura said, in her South­ern drawl, “Well, howdy.  I don’t know who y’all are, but you’re wel­come to sit down and have a beer with us.  This is Dieter and Uta from Ger­many, and they were just telling us how they met.”  It was all I could do not to bust out laugh­ing as media watched John Ander­son anxiously.

For just a sec­ond, you saw a flicker in John Anderson’s eyes where he must have been think­ing, Crimey, here I am drag­ging my wife around in the Out­back with the media to get the sup­port of the typ­i­cal rural Aus­tralian and it’s just my luck that I walk right into a gag­gle of Yanks.  Then he smiled and explained that his posi­tion was com­pa­ra­ble to Vice Pres­i­dent of the United States.  “I just want you know that we feel ter­ri­ble about what hap­pened on Sep­tem­ber 11 and we’re with you.”  With just a few words, some­thing inside me that had been hard and frozen since the ter­ror­ist attacks melted inside me.  Some­times we just need for some­one to say that they’re sorry to make every­thing all right, and in this moment, I just needed to know that some­where, even Down Under, some­one cared.

Imme­di­ately sens­ing that there were no rural Aus­tralians in the beer gar­den, John Ander­son spun on his heel and led his wife and the media onto more promis­ing sound bytes, while Dieter told us all about Uta’s strudel.