I mean, were you an eyewitness to it? I don't mean watching it on TV; I mean in real life!
I barely missed the crowds at the Vatican after the Pope died... I was on a trip to europe with my grade 11 class and we spent a lot of time at the Vatican the day before, the day the Pope died. I remember having heard that he was sick, and someone was selling these boxes that opened like books, and they had a color picture of the Pope in his Pope-clothes holding his Pope-things, behind a pane of glass... I got one... inside there was a rosary... because I thought it was a good souvenir seeing as how the Pope was sick and might die while I was there...
I was an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Dawson College shooting in Montreal (I was down there when it happened) and I was also in the middle of the 1998 ice storm (also in Montreal) when I was 10.
Here's my account of the Dawson shooting (I have yet to write one about the ice storm!):
I was still trying to get my last high school credit for grade 12, but
it's hard to in Quebec (I was in Ontario for awhile but then went back).
On Wednesday, September 13, 2006, I went up to Dawson College to ask about that.
I was coming off the subway; I had just come through the turnstyles,
when a group of about 10 foreign students came out from the tunnel to the school, babbling excitedly in their native Middle Eastern tongue. I thought they were just excited about their classes, about studying in
Canada.
It was eerily deserted. The people seemed to all be walking fast in
the same direction. That was when I saw the security guard pointing
through the Alexis Nihon Plaza. Confused, I followed where he was pointing, just like everyone else. We got to another security guard, who pointed down a hallway to the stairs leading to an exit. I asked loudly, "What's going on?" I thought there had been another subway bombing. No one paid attention. I asked the guard, "What's going on?" He said, "I don't know, just--," and gestured down the hall to the door before resuming pointing.
I thought that if there was a bomb in the subway I ought to be
running, but no one else was, and the other part of me thought, "Don't make a fool of yourself... it's probably nothing." So I compromised and started to jog, passing most of the crowd. Most of them were talking and didn't know what was going on, but then I drew level with two girls who seemed to know.
I asked them. One of them said there was someone with a gun in the school. I asked where. She said on the second floor. Someone else said he was shooting. An Asian guy said someone had been shot.
We came out in a small park in the middle of an intersection called
Atwater Park, which was getting more and more crowded, forcing us, the first ones out, to the edge along the street. I stood and exchanged gossip with the girls (one of them said the shooter was in the atrium [and if I hadn't missed the first subway train I would have been in the atrium with the shooter]) while the Asian guy kept going and then coming back to us with more news: he had actually been shooting, someone had been shot, several people had been shot. A girl said there was blood all over the atrium. There was a helicopter up in the sky and a guy said it was CTV. I asked if CNN was there too and the response was "Probably."
A girl said that there were three killers... one had been shot down by
the police, one had killed himself, and one was believed to be hiding
in the school.
The helicopter sounded like a burst of gunshots and for a moment I
thought it was a military helicopter about to shoot down on us... after
all, there was a rumor about the third shooter being on the loose. If one of us looked like him it was the end of us. Only then did I hear it was
CTV.
A male gym teacher came over to us and started talking about a previous, bloody shooting that I'd also heard about. We told a lot of people who
didn't know what was going on and they didn't believe it! Then someone told us to go to this other school, where all the students were gathering to await further instruction.
We all moved off down the street. We stopped at a coffee shop where a crowd was watching the news in French. Everyone was talking so loud I couldn't hear anything. It showed people being loaded into ambulances.
One girl told me that a girl was shot in the underside of the wrist.
I say, "Oh my God, her hand--"
"Must have come off, yeah."
"That was probably her blood all over the floor," another girl said.
"Someone else was shot here," the first girl said, pointing to a
point between her temple and face.
"Do you know--?"
"I don't know if they're dead, but they were shot here, so they're
probably dead."
"Yeah, probably. Who would survive that?" We both laughed. I was embarrassed about laughing about something like that, so I covered my face with my hand, but was relieved to see that she didn't bother to hide her interest and excitement. She wasn't ashamed. That made me ashamed of being ashamed.
Everyone was wandering all over the place, this way, that way. No one
knew where the shooter was. Someone said that the whole Westmount
square area and all around where we were was being blocked off so that they could catch the gunman who was on the loose. The subways were stopped to prevent him from leaving or going in there to shoot people. Yet they overlooked an obvious security hole. They didn't stop the buses. I wondered why. Were they posting police in the buses and that was why they let them run? Finally, I give up trying to listen to the news and wander off down the street in search of a news scoop, for lack of a better word. But all the conversations I heard were confused. Every third person was talking on a cell phone. I found the pub called the Cock and Bull, where the news was on in English and there were hardly any people, so I could actually hear it. When I entered the people at the bar all swivelled around on their stools and asked, "Were you there? Were you there? Do you go to Dawson?" They seemed a bit disappointed when I said that I
wasn't. One of them said that four were dead and 16 wounded. No one knew if the four included the gunmen. Upon hearing that the suspect had been "neutralized" and thus not shooting any more, one student scoffed, "He ain't shooting any more because he's dead!" His friends had the same attitude, scoffing at what they suspected was a premature shooting of a suspect. Their empathy for him made me feel relieved in a wierd way, not that they were right or anything. There were so many rumors flying around; you'd fall asleep if I mentioned them all. You probably are already. I'll never be able to compete with the people who were in the atrium, so why am I writing this? I got into friendly debates with teachers, people argued and almost got into physical fights, and when people joked about it and the barmaid protested, saying it was disrespectful, one guy said, "You're in the wrong pub if you takeeverything that serious. Get out." Hardly anything was open, and I felt like a fraud trying to pretend I was one of the traumatized students and going to the gathering at Concordia, where people were given food, counseling, and access to a phone, teachers stood up and made announcements about classes being cancelled until Monday, and friends greeted friends with screams. The subway was closed and a cop said it would be for several hours. No buses went near where I lived, so I was kind of a prisoner downtown for several hours. People always wandered around, many
of them saying "I thought this only happened in America" and "It could happen to us, too!" When a guy in black with a guitar case slung over his shoulder walked in, I was ready to bolt. Everyone was in a state of enhanced awareness that one might call extremely paranoid. It got quite hostile.
Me and my aunt thought that my parents were at the hospital looking for me, but it turns out they were gone because they were at work! LOL!
It wasn't much of an experience, but it was more excitement than I'd
had in a long time! All the people I talked to were excited, smiling
even. Their disaster-happiness-- and my nosy aunt's, when I talked to her later-- restored my sanity; I thought I was the only person around who was as disaster happy as me!
03 Sep 2007, 1:33 pm
