News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
A memorial in Camp Sherman honored fallen firefighters.
As news of terrorist strikes in New York City and Washington, D.C. reverberated across the nation on Tuesday morning, September 11, residents of Sisters felt the shock.
At Sisters High School, some 150 students and staff gathered around the school's flag pole, its banner quickly lowered to half-staff, in an impromptu show of sympathy for the victims and support of the nation in crisis.
Sisters residents of all faiths joined together on the Village Green for a prayer vigil.
And we began to recognize that, here in a small, safe town in a beautiful rural area, we remain tied with what Abraham Lincoln called "mystic cords" to our brethren across the country.
Jim Craig of Sisters learned quickly that a business associate was among the missing.
The man was Dave Alger of Fred Alger Mutual Funds.
"Dave was a great guy," Craig said. "He used to fax me every week with economic forecasts."
Alger was among 38 out of a total of 58 employees of the company housed on the 96th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers who remain unaccounted for and presumed dead.
"You just kind of hurt when you lose neat people like that you know," Craig said.
But in a note almost of defiance -- as though to insist that a strike at an international economic nerve center could not cripple the economy in which his friend was a player -- Craig noted that work goes on, with records saved in other locations.
"They didn't miss a beat," he said. "They kept right on going."
Sue Beck's daughter Rachel is in college in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was far from "ground zero" -- to the relief of her family in Sisters. Yet she was affected by the attack.
One of her professors lives in New York City and commutes to work. Her husband is missing.
John Hornbeck of Sisters was in Washington, D.C. when a hijacked plane struck the Pentagon.
Hornbeck was working in an office building near Lafayette Park -- under the path that the hijacked airliner apparently took approaching the White House, before it veered away to slam into the Pentagon.
The first news of trouble came when someone burst into the conference room where Hornbeck was at work and said that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Then came rapid-fire news of the second WTC strike and word of an attack on the Pentagon.
Hornbeck's building was evacuated.
"The building I was in had a bomb threat, as well as this other madness," Hornbeck said.
The scene outside was chaotic.
"Washington downtown was just gridlock, a lot of people milling around," Hornbeck said.
Hornbeck could hear the roar of jets as the Air Force scrambled fighter aircraft --as we learned later, with orders to shoot down any commercial aircraft that did not respond to orders to land.
Then, the scene changed.
"Three or four hours later, Washington was almost deserted," Hornbeck said.
Hornbeck left Washington for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to continue his work.
"To drive out of Washington and see the Pentagon burning was just surreal," he said.
He caught a plane on Friday to return to Sisters -- in virtually empty skies.
A number of Sisters area residents were left stranded by the grounding of all flights after the attack. Dan Fouts rented a car and drove home from Denver, where he had been covering a Monday Night Football game.
Another traveler drove home from Minnesota.
In Sisters, schools and business carried on with a kind of patriotic determination to defy terror by affirming our everyday life.
The Sisters Outlaws played their scheduled football game, adding a color guard and a candlelight ceremony at halftime in honor of victims of the attacks.
In a message to students and those attending the game, high school principal Boyd Keyser said:
"We will show our resolve. A resolve not to let the actions of terrorists steal away our way of life. Terrorists succeed not just from the damage they do, but also by the fear and reaction that they cause. High school sports have become community events in thousands of towns across this country. They are a wonderful piece of Americana, bringing us together to revel in our vitality, strength and ambition as a people. The game goes on as a show of our resolve to be free of fear and despair."
At all three Sisters schools, teachers and students talked about the week's events. According to counselors, it took younger students a while to grasp the enormity of events (events that strain the understanding of adults).
But, one counselor said, the students gradually came to realize the significance of these far away events, recognizing that something fundamental has changed in their lives.
Some families await military action with some trepidation -- knowing their children may be sent into harm's way.
And folks all over town flew flags -- if they could get one. Lutton's Ace Hardware reported a run on American flags -- and pennants and windsocks, anything that showed the colors that suddenly evoke strong feelings in a small town, far from ground zero, yet tied so tightly to the rest of the nation.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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