On the night of September 10, 2001, I was working at the cantina I managed. It was popular with expats as we had a massive satellite dish and 5 TVs, and were the local Quepos home for any type of sports programming from the US. It was the opening weekend for American Football, and the first Monday night game featured the New York Giants against the Denver Broncos.
Both teams had a sizable local following and I was kept busy until the late hours of the evening. During the game, Broncos wide receiver Ed McCaffrey suffered a gruesome leg fracture. Replays from various angles showed the magnitude of the injury and left the Denver fans stunned.
The next morning I got up, fixed a pot of coffee and turned on the television. My normal routine was to go to cable channel 25, which was the NBC affiliate out of New York City, and watch the news. The TV on this morning was tuned to HBO and I chose to watch a half hour of various previews and trailers before switching the channel.
The first thing I saw was a backdrop of the twin towers on fire, while the talking heads on the screen struggled to grasp the situation unfolding. At that moment, I did not know the fires were caused by two hijacked planes, flown into the buildings. Then the feed switched to the DC area, and a shot of the destruction at the Pentagon. Then the news that a fourth plane had crashed in a field enroute to Washington.
Like most US citizens, I watched in disbelief as the towers crashed down in real time. Five years earlier there had been a terrorist attack on a government building in Oklahoma City. But that was one massive bomb, set off by a US citizen. This was a multi-pronged attack backed by Osama bin-Laden and pulled off by anonymous Middle Easterners.
I had only recently returned from a month in the US, and my perception during my stay was that the country was running full speed ahead on all cylinders. If the 20th Century was the American Century, as many of us liked to believe, there was no reason the 21st Century couldn’t be as well.
When the initial shock wore off, I called the US from my landline phone. After several minutes of ‘all circuits busy’ messages, I got through to my brother in the Los Angeles area. He was unaware of what had happened. “Turn on the TV”, was all I could say. I got through on a few more calls to friends and family, and realized that life in the US had ground to a near halt. Here in Costa Rica, life went on. I had a small bakery business we ran from home and had numerous deliveries to make.
At every stop, the TVs were tuned to the news, and the news was bad. Thousands dead, reactions of shock, citizens openly weeping in the streets. Later, I opened the cantina and it was more of the same. One specific memory is of a regular, a career military guy, insisting that the plane that crashed into the field had most certainly been shot down by the US to prevent it from attacking. Afterward came a narrative of a heroic band of men fighting the terrorists to the death, but I always remembered the certainty with which that retired officer spoke.
My many Tico friends and relatives were generally reserved in their reactions. Those with family in the US, or who had previously visited the US, took it a bit more personally. As long as I have lived here, there has been a strong connection between our two countries. The majority of tourists here are US based, and the impressions of Costa Rica that they take back are overwhelmingly positive. The US remains Costa Rica’s top trading partner.
Expat Costa Ricans have formed communities in New Jersey, LA and other areas. The local reactions were mostly sympathetic and pro-USA. In the aftermath, tourism dried up for a few weeks, then slowly picked up and by December, high season was in full swing. That Tuesday night when I closed the bar and walked home, I reflected upon the events of the day. It was a genuine before and after moment, a slice of history; a moment in time that everyone alive could forever look back on and remember where they were and what they were doing when it went down.
It was a shot across the bow of our perceived invincibility, and a preview of a chaotic and uncertain future in the first quarter of the 21st Century. The country was briefly as united as it would ever be in the face of the attack, but that unity wouldn’t last. When I got home, I thought about the previous evening, when the night’s tragedy was Ed McCaffrey’s shattered leg. That was the final ‘before’ moment, and already seemed not only irrelevant, but as if it had occurred long ago, and not a mere twenty-four hours earlier.
