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Essay. The full story of Charles Strohmer's harrowing experience the morning of 9/11 and the days immediately following. Shorter versions published in Third Way, Sept., 2002, and Crosspoint, Fall 2002, for the first anniversary of 9/11. Edited for the Web. (Back to Articles.)

The Kindness of Strangers:
Heaven on Earth at an Air Force Base
by Charles Strohmer

Four hours out of London, flying uneventfully through florescent blue sky six miles above the Atlantic, the passengers aboard Delta Flight 59 were digesting their meals, quietly absorbed in laptops, reading novels, or drowsily captive to that vespertine atmosphere created on planes when the movies are running. Other than departing Gatwick 45 minutes late, so far the only bother could now be heard in hushed buzz of passengers asking air hostesses why all the video screens had suddenly gone blank. The movies should be back on in a few minutes, came the reply over the intercom. It happens. A computer needs re-booting. (A mere fib, it turned out.)

Passengers stretched, ordered drinks, queued for toilets. Some broke the spell of counterfeit evening by sliding up their porthole shades. Outside, the blinding powder blue evanescence went on forever. Pilots call the phenomenon "severe clear." It hurts your eyes to stare at it too long. Twenty minutes passed. People fidgeted. Five hours to go before 3.40pm touchdown in Atlanta. The Boeing 777 droned on.

Suddenly everyone's attention focused on the Texas drawl coming from the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. May I have your attention. Your serious attention." The dreaded words. Within a millisecond, worst nightmares sprung from the fuselage, the overhead compartment, the unconscious—wherever those boarding the plane had stowed them.A kind of holy moment spread through cabin. We're going down. No one spoke. No one dared.

Captain William's steady but troubled drawl continued: "There's been a major incident in the United States and all air space throughout the nation has been closed. All planes in the air in the United States are being directed to land at the nearest airports, and all international flights into the U.S. are being diverted. We are okay. I repeat. We are okay. But we cannot land in the U.S. We will be landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia in about an hour-and-a-half. We can't give you any more information at this time. Please be patient and bear with us. We will have more details for you when we get on the ground. Thank you for your cooperation."

On cue like synchronized swimmers, passengers turned to face their seat-neighbors. Wake me, please! Whispers drifted round the cabin. What do you think it is? Who knows? Maybe we're going down. Must have been a nuclear bomb. A huge earthquake. Maybe the air traffic control system has failed. Who knows?

A nuclear event seemed likeliest to passenger 34G, and my mind skipped a beat into worst-case- scenario self-talk. If a nuclear catastrophe had occurred in one part of the country, why had allthe airports been closed? What had happened? I had to know. But I knew I couldn't. I quickly calculated to Eastern Time and concluded that my wife would be in class with her first-graders. Not knowing what had happened, or where, how could I be sure? What had happened? And where? Who had been effected? Was I even going to get home? Maybe the announcement was just a ploy to keep us from freaking out until we crashed. Reign it in, Strohmer. Someone must know something. Coming up the aisle was a stewardess whom I had spoken with earlier. "I know you won't tell me what happened, even if you know," I said, whispering to her, "and I'm not asking you to, but can you at least tell me, does the crew know what's happened?" She nodded discreetly and then continued up the aisle. It was one of many gestures the next five days that I found most comforting.

An hour-and-a-half later Delta Flight 59 became the penultimate of forty-two planeloads of international air travelers permitted safe harbor at Halifax airport, which then ran out of wing space. As we circled overhead, what I saw on the ground took me by surprise. On the asphalt service road parallel to the runway were onlookers filling cars, vans, and pickups who had queued to watch the landings. The sight immediately reminded me of the way bystanders congregate to stare at a bad car wreck or a blazing house fire. Well, they had. It wasn't just the striking sight of forty-two huge international, commercial jets that had them out. They knew what had happened. Unlike the 150 of us aboard Delta Flight 59, they knew why we had been grounded. It would be nearly twenty-four hours after the attacks before our imaginations would be seared by television images of flying machines, twisted I-beams, and charred bodies crashing, falling, and billowing in the explosive chemistry of terror, dust, and loss.

Taxiing to our place in the queue (a mile from the terminal), we eased past the congregation until  Captain Williams brought the 777 to halt, thanked us for our cooperation, and gave us what sickening details were then available to him. "Hopefully," he concluded, "they'll re-open U.S. airspace to get these international flights to their destinations. So maybe we'll be able to get out of here in a few hours." When the crew began circulating, we asked a thousand questions. Few answers were known, to any of the newly arrived flight crews in Halifax.

A glance through the porthole revealed two long, perfectly executed lines of 747s, 767s, 777s, Air Buses, and L1011s parked side-by-side on the tarmac. None would be flying anything for the foreseeable future except their carriers' logos on their tails. Ten thousand stranded passengers—a small town, and all the problems that come with it. The scene had been repeated across Canada, from Newfoundland to Vancouver. And across America. That the extreme workout suddenly demanded of thousands of air traffic controllers went without incident is astonishing. In the U.S. alone, the FAA had ordered some 5,000 civilian planes to be landed immediately so that the military could isolate any rogue planes still in the air. Within four minutes, 700 planes had been landed. Nearly 3,000 within the next hour. All 5,000 had been safely guided to the ground in under two hours. An impressive impromptu performance, never once rehearsed in aviation history.

Free to mill about the entire plane, I found a spot to stand near the open cockpit door to listen to the scratchy, AM radio signal coming out of Halifax and to chat up the pilots. There were stories here. "Why did you make the kind of announcement you did?" I asked Captain Williams when there was a lull. "Why did you choose that kind of language? Why not just tell us what had happened?" He didn't hedge. He explained that he and his co-pilot had discussed exactly what to say for half-an-hour before making the announcement over the Atlantic. "We've got almost sixty years' experience between us," he said. "Personally, we've never been in this kind of a situation before, but colleagues who have been have told us that, in the air, some passengers may panic when they hear the words ‘terrorist attack' or ‘hijacking', so we talked for a long time about the right words to describe the urgency but not panic anyone."

Passengers were equally impressed by other wise decisions. After a couple hours on the ground, flight attendants began arriving at the cockpit with reports from the cabin. Snacks and water were running low, it was getting stuffy, a couple infants needed baby formula, some passengers wanted a smoke, others needed fresh air. Squeezed into my spot near the cockpit, I listened to sixty years of experience quickly process all this and come to some wise decisions. The Halifax ground crew was notified about snacks, bottled water, and infant formula. And the rear starboard door would be opened for smokers. "But for those of you who need to smoke," Captain Williams announced, "please take turns. Don't crowd the area, and try to keep the smoke from filtering into the cabin." The want of fresh air was solved when the front starboard door was opened to admit supplies. "Let's leave that door open for a while after the ground crew leaves," Williams said. Such gestures, especially access to the pilots, made a world of difference in our social microcosm. They defused building tensions and made the confines more comfortable. I later learned that crews on some of the other carriers had not been so wise.  

But there was still the matter of reaching my wife. I gave up my post near the cockpit and meandered the narrow aisles several times, deciding if I should return to my seat. Without success, people were wearing down their fingerprints punching numbers robotically on their cell phone pads every few minutes hoping to reach loved ones. For some reason, I began a conversation with a friendly married couple who, apparently, had no phone. They introduced themselves as Robert and Georgia Matthews, from Memphis. A Christian minister, he explained that he had been in London for the opening ceremonies of a colleague's church. I'd been in England on a speaking trip for nearly three weeks, I said. We had been talking for some minutes when Captain Williams announced that the FAA had decided not to reopen U.S. airspace, which meant that we weren't flying home any time soon. "We might be here for another day," he said. The Matthews and I were digesting this when Robert's trouser pocket suddenly began beeping. His daughter in Memphis had been playing phone robotics herself, and through some sort of satellite magic, viola! A connection. Passengers turned toward us, astounded. No one on the plane had been getting out, no calls had been coming in. "I don't have a cell," I said. "Do you think your daughter would contact my wife for me?"

Blessedly, flight 59 was half full, which made the seventeen hours we spent on board more tolerable. Well past midnight I copped three empty seats side-by-side at the rear and curled up to sleep, to be awakened in the middle of the night, quickly deplaned on to the runway, shuttled to the terminal, hustled through customs, and then driven ten miles in a school bus to Shearwater, a Canadian Air Force Base, where I would be a "guest" of Canada. That was the word I remember being used by the animated politician who at the school bus gave a warm Canadian welcome to "our good neighbors from the south" and promised us with many promises that we would be well-looked-after. Questions about how long we'd be your guests were met with we're taking it a day at a time.

The Shearwater encampment numbered about 750 and included two Delta flights besides ours, two British Air, and one partying Air Tours group from Scotland filled with vacationers now wondering if they would ever make it to Florida. The remaining ten thousand had been housed across the area in schools and homes and in what remained of hotel rooms not already filled by tourists. The experiences of several would become the subject of the PBS documentary "Stranded Yanks," which aired during the one-year anniversary of 9/11. Legends in their own time, forty-two winged ghost towns now filled the tarmac, the topic of talk radio, press coverage, and conversations in every Halifax-Dartmouth home.

I awoke at 7am amidst dim lighting, unfamiliar surroundings, and much snoring. My lower back ached from the stiff cot even after only 3 hours of (broken) sleep and I slipped from under the blue blanket, sat on the edge of the cot, and bent over to touch my toes. I stood to stretch and saw before me lay the serried ranks of two hundred others in the huge gymnasium, curled up on cots or mattresses in various stages of sleep. I saw military personnel and Canadian Red Cross workers posted in the hallway, where the stranded roamed carrying white bath towels, evidently going to-and-fro from the showers. I heard a television in the distance and remembered my wife cautioning me, when we finally spoke by phone several hours earlier, about the images I'd be seeing. Where would I eat, how long would I be here, what would I do here for clothes, a razor, deodorant, a hair brush? We had been allowed to bring only our carry-on bags to the Base. Pretty unbelievable. But here we were. September 12, I realized, had dawned.

Although I've been a Christian for thirty years, I've never been able to grasp what heaven's life must be like. Truth be told, I stopped trying to picture it long ago because life on Earth is pretty cool. Images of cloud-sitting harpists and streets of gold didn't help. I'm not a musician, and I'm not into gold, though that may be the whole point of the image; after all, what we treat so dearly here on Earth has been reduced to the value of mere asphalt in heaven's city. Christian eschatologies have never helped me get a line on heaven, either. When I learned how they contradicted each other or carried too much of an evolutionary feel or reminded me of UFO, "global evacuation" myths, I lost interest in them, completely, as theology. They may yield some entertainment value, however. Note the huge success of Left Behind novels. Unfortunately, too many people read those novels as if they were instruction manuals about the future. I've no interest in reading even one of those books—a Strohmer factoid that has amazed some Christians who have asked me for my opinion on them. Anyway, Bible passages, too, like this one from the book of Revelation, about the "leaves of trees being used to heal nations" merely puzzle me. Where are these trees and nations located? In heaven? If so, why have I never heard even one sermon preached about heaven's nations? Perhaps these trees and nations are on Earth. If so, why do they appear in what appears to be a description of heaven? It's Oh too much. So years ago I much shelved the whole notion of heaven, finding earth-life under God mysterious and demanding enough. But then I lived in a crisis on an Air Force Base.

What do strangers locked in crisis do? They can make it worse. They can try to make it better. We chose the latter. In New Testament terms, we gave grace to one another. Begun on the plane by the crew and passengers, it spread exponentially at Shearwater. The Base itself freely provided beds, cots, mattresses, hot showers, even earplugs! We had virtually free roam of the huge Base and use of it televisions, recreational facilities, and movie hall. We were fed three superb meals a day from its buffet-style restaurant, and our second day there they opened the officers' mess to us, where chefs grilled steaks outside in a terraced courtyard or served up barbecue chicken, and where the beer flowed.

Very early the morning of September 12, about the time I finished showering, parents, teachers, and schoolchildren from the Tallahassee Community School of Dartmouth began arriving at the Base with large cardboard boxes full of toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, shampoo, underwear, hair brushes, mousse, razors. You name it. It got to me, all this neighborly grace. Life became more normal. Navy personnel, who had been brought in to help run the Base during our stay, gave us lifts into town when they got off-duty. By Thursday, my arches were aching terribly from walking miles everyday around the Base to get exercise in only my dress shoes. I copped a ride to WalMart to purchase some tennis shoes. Others got lifts to Halifax to stroll the harbor or shop for gifts. Even the weather was a grace to us. With the exception of a couple hours one afternoon, every day brought blue skies and delightful temperatures. The stranded began to joke that the "service" here was so good that if we were now offered a hotel rom, we'd decline and stay put. I couldn't disagree. Here were not strangers but neighbors indeed. They opened their lives to us, their resources, their hospitality, freely. Jesus' Good Samaritan no longer seemed mere story. Kathy Ringger from Salt Lake City put it this way: "It reminds me of Jesus saying, ‘I was a stranger and you took me in and fed me and clothed me.'" I thought about a time described in the book of Acts, chapter 4, where Christian living—the only place in the Bible — is described as being one of "great grace," for no one among the community lacked anything they needed because all shared. The whole ethos at Shearwater seemed organized around givingness, and it seemed so normal that it judged the way I did "normal" life back home. If I had enough time, I could probably demonstrate that this can be traced ultimately to God's image in us: so durable that even the worst evils cannot quash the human ability to respond with grace.  

A curious, new relationship to time also provided a glimpse of what heaven's life must be like. I noticed it strongly those days, as if time had stopped, yet on it went, but altered, a state pretty clearly existential not in its philosophical sense but as a condition that Christian theologians might recognize as a realized eschatology but that I want to say was eternity now or the not-yet here. At Shearwater, the days the stranded would be there kept getting pushed into the future—no one could say how long we'd be there. The future wasn't there for us, just today.

It was within that novel, extended existential moment that life passed for us, and the time we experienced because of it was really quite remarkable. Everyone's paths would cross, you see—and they did repeatedly cross—in or outside the gym, in the mess hall or the lounges, at the shower lockers, on the paths to and from the barracks—we had time, time to say "Oh, hi, again" and then to stop, stop to pick up a previous conversation. After all, what else was there to do but get to know each other?

Narrative abounded. A shy 19-year old student from Oxford kneels beside the cot of a very lonely 40-year old Kenyan woman, befriending her. An animated discussion between a 60-year- old CEO from England and a 25-year-old designer from Germany as they queue for lunch. A middle-aged man from the States strolls the grounds chatting up a twentysomething au pair from France. Reverend Matthews and his wife comfort young newlyweds from England whose honeymoon 9/11 had interrupted. From the cafeteria line carrying a tray of food a lone soul emerges but can't spot an empty table; two Canadian Navy Lieutenants notice and invite him to join them at their table. A knot of strangers from different nations and races is seated on uncomfortable, grey plastic chairs in the sun outside the gym sharing their histories with each other.

There is no disconnect, either, I noticed. We arrived as who we were. After I had arrived, I found that I had brought with me a bad mental habit. It kept surfacing and was hostile to the new time.  Pleasantly lost in someone's narrative for I didn't know how long, I'd suddenly think: I've got to get going now. I've got to go. But just as quickly: I don't have anyplace to go, nothing to do, I don't have to do anything, I've got time."Odd, isn't it? we've got time to get to know each other. Where are you from? Where were you going? How are you holding up?" Our relationship to time had changed. Heaven must be like this, I thought, as much time as you want to get to know all sorts of people. "Oh, there you are again. Remember when we were talking about...."

At Shearwater, strangers became neighbors and human suffering tasted something sweet of the saving grace of God. God's grace, I am convinced, transformed self-interest and alienation into opportunities for self-denial, giving, and unity in our diversity. It awakened in us a depth of compassion and caring that we didn't think we carried with us. Heaven broke in and broke down walls between races, professions, classes, nationalities. Time had changed. In all those days, nowhere was there a more stunning symbol of the transformation than during our three-hour flight from Halifax to Atlanta the morning of our release, September 15, the fifth day. The dark blue curtains separating the economy/business/first class sections were never pulled. The no- longer-stranded meandered the plane without hint of reproof regarding status or class—the neighborliness begun on the ground between the well-heeled, the pedestrian, and the flight crew quite naturally sustained in the air. I'm a frequent flyer and I've never seen the ritual "pulling of the veils" suspended before. It just never occurred to anyone to revive old barriers. We'd been changed by what grace had created for us.

It was a 9/11 morning, gorgeous and bright and clear. Captain Williams flew us down the Atlantic Coast and it seemed to take forever to pass over New York City, where, even five days on, plumes of smoke spiraled toward us from the huge grey crater; nee: the World Trade Center. I stared from a first-class porthole until I could no longer see the ascending trails of tears. So, it really had happened.

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