Today is a special date. 11 September. Exactly 25 years ago America was attacked in a way that is still hard to describe without emotion. A cowardly attack on defenceless people who had come to work in the morning and were doing exactly what millions of people do on any ordinary day. Except that on 11 September 2001 there was no ordinary day.
For me the date has one more, very personal dimension. In September of the previous year, 2000, I was in New York on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I remember the height, which was genuinely impressive. Helicopters flew somewhere below us, and the platform seemed to hang in the clouds. And it was precisely then that we wondered what an evacuation from a place like that would look like in a fire.
I was with colleagues from Germany who were masterful at sketching out every risk, and our city guide reassured us that the buildings had the most modern fire-protection systems and were prepared for every emergency. “Na ja, mal sehen,” well, we’ll see, was Mr Vonau’s only comment. And we did see. A year later.
But did anyone back then even dream that someone might deliberately fly a passenger jet full of aviation fuel into a skyscraper?
Today America is quieter. A little subdued. You can see it here too, far from Manhattan, in the north of New England, where life moves more slowly anyway. Flags at half-mast. Whoever can shows in their own way that they remember. And at the same time life goes on. So does our journey through New England.
New England is six states: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. We already have five behind us. We started with Connecticut and Mystic, then came Rhode Island and Newport, Massachusetts with Cape Cod and Boston; today we drove through New Hampshire and in the evening reached Maine. Vermont is left. We do not collect states like fridge magnets, but five out of six already sounds quite respectable.
We began the day at a place whose name is almost a currency of its own in America: Harvard. And here Europe can, for a moment, feel very old and very important. Harvard was founded in 1636. The Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1364. So when Harvard College was being founded in Massachusetts, the Kraków university was already 272 years old. Nicolaus Copernicus had had time to study there and to die, and his theory had already thoroughly shaken up the European way of looking at the world. But this is where the American part of the story begins.
Harvard turned a college into an institution, the institution into a symbol, and the symbol into one of the strongest educational brands in the world. Even the famous statue of John Harvard in front of University Hall plays its part in the story. The pedestal reads “John Harvard, Founder, 1638”, yet John Harvard did not found the college, Harvard was founded in 1636, and the figure on the statue does not depict John Harvard, because no reliable likeness of him survives. Students therefore call it the “statue of three lies”.
And of course there had to be shopping. Harvard on a T-shirt, Harvard on a sweatshirt, Harvard on a mug, Harvard on anything that can be printed on. The older I get, the more I develop the extremely useful skill of colouring my own past. A few more purchases like this and in a few years I might start to have doubts myself about whether I did not, by any chance, spend a semester here.
Jokes aside, my real alma mater is Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and I am very proud of it. Which is exactly why I am sorry that the university makes so little of its own brand. Harvard understood something that many European universities still do not: a graduate does not want just a diploma. He also wants a sense of belonging. I would like to buy a proper university pennant. A classic sweatshirt. A good T-shirt that I could wear in Boston or New York and want to show where I come from. But where would I buy one?
After Harvard we got into our brave Nissan and headed north. And here New England began to show the face we had actually come for. Less and less big city, more and more ocean, small towns, old houses, red brick, harbours and beaches. Portsmouth in New Hampshire turned out to be one of those little gems where you stop “for a moment” and then start working out what to cut from the rest of the plan so you can stay a little longer.
Then more beaches. The Atlantic, lifeguards on tall towers, wide sand, houses and that particular calm of the American coast after the season. The further north we drive, the more everything seems to slow down. People are in less of a hurry, the towns are smaller, the roads quieter. The America we know from New York stays somewhere behind us.
And since it was Friday, we of course had to eat fish, as Polish Catholic tradition has it. The problem was that a lobster appeared on the table.
And so began a serious theological and zoological debate: is a lobster actually a fish? No. A lobster is a crustacean. So is a crab. But both live in water, both appear in restaurants under the shared banner of seafood-slash-lobster, and neither resembles a pork chop, so we decided that the Friday tradition had been observed to a sufficient degree. Besides, we are already in Maine. Here, refusing to eat lobster could almost be treated as an act against the local economy.
And finally Portland and our little hotel. We deliberately chose something intimate. An old house, tall windows, dark green walls, silence. A hotel with character. Somewhat intellectual, you might say.
No television.
When we booked, it sounded wonderful. You immediately picture yourself with a book, maybe a glass of wine, holding an intelligent evening conversation about the history of New England. We forgot only one thing.
The US Open.
And suddenly our whole need for intellectual tranquillity dramatically weakened. So we leave the books, the beautiful room and the ambitious cultural plans behind. We head into the centre of Portland in search of a bar with a TV and the broadcast.
Success!
And that was the day. In the morning Harvard and four centuries of American history. Then Atlantic beaches, small towns, more beaches and the road further and further north. In the afternoon a lobster that is not a fish but on a Friday very much wants to be one. In the evening the state of Maine and a hotel without a television at the worst possible moment.
And above it all a date that reminds you that travelling is not only about seeing places. Sometimes you also return to your own memories.
Twenty-six years ago I stood high above Manhattan and watched helicopters flying below me. A year later the towers were gone. Today, 25 years after 9/11, we are driving through peaceful New England. Along the roads, American flags at half-mast.
America remembers.
So do we.
We are on holiday, though, so in order not to end on too solemn a note, I am pleased to report that we were the last to leave the bar. Just like in our student days. I already know that tomorrow is going to be a very demanding day 🫢
