Newspaper Article
Written by Martha Perkins, Haliburton County Echo
Three guys are gathered 'round a kitchen table in hunt camp at Haliburton Forest. As the rain hurls itself against the windows, a deep-throated growl of thunder shakes the cabin with its furious might seconds before the night sky explodes with a flash of brilliant light. Tall tales are not out of place in this setting, stories of blood-sucking black flies right out of a 1950s horror flick, huge fish that somehow manage to disengage themselves from the hook just before they're to be yanked out of the lake, and a gigantic moose that stares you down in a thrilling game of blink along a deserted forest road.
But the mood turns somber when one of the three men, the tall one with the sandy-colored hair and a jaw line that can stop all arguments, begins telling ghost stories. Real ghost stories. About living in the bowels of hell for three months.
These are stories that Dan Archibald rarely tells, not to his wife, his children and certainly not to the thousands of people he has escorted through the graveyard of 2,500 dead known around the world as Ground Zero. Only his fellow New York firefighters know these stories. But there’s something about being in the midst of a vast forest, exposed to the primordial forces of nature that can make a person journey to the center of his soul and back again.
Here are some of the stories told along the way. The story of finding a woman’s hand and forearm. The hand instantly transforms her into an entire person, with her own story to tell. When did she put on the nail polish and why did she choose that color? Was it to go with the outfit she wore to work at the World Trade Center on September 11? That wedding ring means she was married. Did she have children? Who bought her those bracelets? Yet as soon as the gaze moves up from the wrist, where the flesh turns into a skeleton, the questions end. Now Archibald knows the answer to that one, definitive, sickeningly horrible, question. What happens when terrorists fly a hijacked plane into the side of one of America’s pillars of economic strength? Hundreds of innocent people, including this woman and 353 of Archibald’s fellow firefighters, die.
Another lightning bolt flashes across the sky, briefly illuminating the three men, and another story is told. A firefighter’s widow arrives at the site where Archibald has found a small piece of flesh, taken a GPS reading of its precise location, put it in a plastic bag, numbered it and sent it off to a lab which matched it with the DNA of this woman’s husband, one of the 343 firefighters who died simply because they were doing their job. This is as close as the widow will get to being able to bury her husband’s remains and the group stands in a quiet tableau of bowed heads while she places flowers on the rubble.
There's a heavy silence between the three men even thunder wouldn't dare interrupt them before Archibald tells his next story, and his next. But the stories that Dan Archibald feels comfortable telling Brad Griffin and Peter Fromme-Douglas as they sit around that kitchen table become too intensely personal to share with a newspaper’s readers now that the three men have emerged from their four-day respite and taken their seats at another kitchen table, this time at Griffin’s home near West Guilford.
The three men had first met at Ground Zero last December and its only because of Griffin’s sheer determination (Archibald and Fromme-Douglas call it something far less complimentary) that they recently got together for a few days in the Highlands.
Fromme-Douglas is an artist from Bracebridge, Griffin his friend and business manager. Last December, the two were in New York to attend a fundraising auction for the firefighters widows and orphans fund. Fromme-Douglas had donated his painting of firefighters at Ground Zero, garnering $36,000 for the fund and a long hug from then-New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani for Fromme-Douglas. While they were there, they somehow managed to get a tour of Ground Zero, a tour that culminated in climbing to the roof of the fire station right at the edge of the yawning pit of horror. Their tour guide was Dan Archibald, a New York fireman, whom they knew only as Arch. They were together for only 45 minutes before it was time for Fromme-Douglas and Griffin to leave and for Archibald to give another group a glimpse of hell. But really, this story should start almost two months before then. This story should start just before 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
Peter Fromme-Douglas was at home in Bracebridge. It’s a rather unassuming place to find a man in search of his life quest, but several years earlier, Fromme-Douglas had gone through what he calls a time of personal growth and as a result, my quest for the past 10 years has been trying to find something to do of value. Art had become too much of a monetary pursuit; Fromme-Douglas would paint a painting, someone with a lot of money would buy it, the painting would disappear from his life and the relationship ended. I got tired of doing paintings for the rich, he says. I had wealth and fame and all that crap. I walked away from it because it was killing me... I wanted to do something for the big picture.
Because he often keeps his television on all night, on September 11 he awoke to the images of black smoke
spooling out of the tops of the World Trade Center buildings before the buildings collapsed with grotesque grace, creating an empty space where minutes before there had been the workplace of tens of thousands of people. "I didn’t get out of bed for two days," Fromme-Douglas says.
"There, on the television screen, was pain and suffering and death. What could I do, when the only thing I can do is paint? But in my world, I have to act."
A few days later, he and Griffin got together and Griffin showed Fromme-Douglas a photo of firefighters hoisting a large American flag above the rubble at Ground Zero. It was a modern-day Iwo Jima. “ I had actually taken that frame off the television 2 days before and stored it on my hard drive. Because it had moved Brad as well, I started to do a painting based on that single frame. " Fromme-Douglas says, his gaze as intent as his desire to create something meaningful. "I tried to make an image that would create empathy, respect and support for the firefighters, who were the one group going into the buildings while others fled."
It was difficult, emotional work for Fromme-Douglas, who doesn’t paint unhappy things. The image he came up with, first in pastels, shows three firefighters with bent heads, working amidst the rubble of Ground Zero. In the center of the image, other firefighters raise the flag, while in the dust-filled air above them floats an image of a fallen colleague.
"I wanted to make the firefighters look like they were made out of rubble, as if they were part of it," he says.
"I wanted to combine the suffering of that day, the look, the feel but also the American patriotism that comes to the surface whenever they’re under duress... All lines point towards the center, of them raising the flag. All emotions are packed into that image... There’s something so honorable and selfless about being a firefighter."
He called the painting ‘In Memoriam, With Love and Respect from Canada’, and then, quoting himself, “ I could not see what I saw, and not do what I did “. A friend told them about the fundraising auction in New York and Fromme-Douglas and Griffin quickly decided to donate the painting. Even more quickly, Fromme-Douglas had to re-do it in oils in time for the December 8 auction. The auction itself was not a big deal for Griffin, who was more interested in meeting some of the firefighters, but for Fromme-Douglas, the prospect of meeting Mayor Rudy Guiliani was one of the biggest thrills in his
life.
"I was really overwhelmed that Guiliani showed up at all," Fromme-Douglas says.
"I’ve met movie stars and kings and there was no one else I wanted to be in the presence of than Mayor Guiliani."
"[On television], I saw him hold the whole world together. It was an amazing thing he accomplished." The event raised $1-million but even more priceless for Fromme-Douglas is a photo of him locked in a bear hug with his hero.
 Since they were in New York, the men felt impelled to visit the hole where the World Trade Towers 1 and 2 once stood, proud sentinels of New York’s skyline. "It was like coming across a car accident you have to have your look but once you do, you say did I really want to look? Should you really be there?," Griffin says of the push and pull of emotions. How could they go to New York and not see Ground Zero? But how can you be a tourist at what is ultimately a burial site for 2,5000 people?
"I was ashamed to want to go there but the artist in me was driving me there to see it," says Fromme-Douglas.
"We would have done whatever it took to be there," Griffin says. (As it happens, what it took was two compassionate police officers who turned a blind eye to their presence in exchange for a poster, the two Canadians' proof that they genuinely cared about those who died.)
Dan Archibald had been living with the enormity of the destruction ever since 7 a.m. on September 12, when he showed up at Ground Zero, determined to do something, anything, to help. The previous day, he had been helping to build a house in the Hampton’s when he heard about the attack. Thoughts of anything else fled his mind as he rushed back to his workplace, Ladder 134 Farrockaway. That afternoon, the firefighters who were not immediately called to the World Trade towers gathered in a stadium, awaiting orders. Their frustration was palpable and, by early the next morning, unbearable.
Archibald, like so many of his colleagues, was born to be a firefighter. His grandfather was a firefighter, as was his father, one of the true heroes in young Dan’s life.
"Why wouldn’t you want to be what your hero is," he asks with that Long Island accent that comes straight out of the movies.
"My father was a hero he goes to work, helps people and everyone likes him."
Archibald wanted to help people, too, which was why he simply couldn’t wait for his superiors to tell him what he could do to help his fallen brethren. He simply showed up at Ground Zero and went to work clearing the rubble, hoping beyond hope that he’d also still be able to fulfill his prime duty of rescuing people.
Yet he also had another sense of duty, to his own fire house (don’t you dare call it a fire hall). Not thinking about sleep or family, he’d spend as much time as he could at Ground Zero before showing up for work, putting in a full shift and then returning to Ground Zero. This happened for a few weeks before he was seconded by Station 10, right next to Ground Zero, to help record the discovery of body parts.
"My job was to chart with a GPS every body part they found, foot, toe, guts, gore. We put them in a bag, put a GPS marking of where it was found. We did that every day, all day, 20, 30, 50 times a day." He’d work 24 hours on, 48 hours off. In those 48 hours, he’d go to a firefighter’s funeral, go home to sleep, go to a couple more funerals, go home to sleep, go to a funeral and then start charting body parts all over again. New York City firefighters do not leave anyone dead in a building.
Part of his job was taking dignitaries and others on tours of the sacred grounds. This was almost as emotionally trying as helping with the clean-up. After all, here was the burial site of 353 of his brothers and these people wanted to make themselves somehow feel better, feel they were somehow doing something to help, through some sort of visceral sharing of their pain. At first, Archibald resented their presence, but gradually he began to accept them in the hope that they in turn would go back to their homes and workplaces and raise money for the firefighters. widows and
children.
"You try to make sure you don’t act like an asshole," he says.
"Sometimes I felt like I’d had enough, I’d want them to go away and let me do my job. But you convince yourself every day to keep on, because you tell yourself that they’re there for you. Some people, however, were obviously there for themselves, and their own perverse sense of reflected glory and suffering." Archibald doesn’t include Fromme-Douglas and Griffin (who were accompanied by actress Cheryl Ladd ) among that crowd.
"People like Brad and Peter were there for one reason to help me. They were doing a service for my widows and orphans, not to go on David Letterman to say, I was there."
The trip to Ground Zero spurred Fromme-Douglas and Griffin to do more. The donation of the original painting had helped the widows and orphans fund, but could the painting serve another purpose? Could it also help the firefighters back at home? Could it fulfill Fromme-Douglas’s life quest of doing something for the big picture?
Foregoing the economic spin-offs of producing limited edition prints, the two men decided to go straight to posters. The posters could be sold as fundraisers for other fire departments, and, more precisely, for a memorial that Ontario firefighters want to build at Queen’s Park to honor their colleagues who have died in the line of duty.
That’s when Griffin enlisted the help of local MPP Chris Hodgson, who’s been a faithful supporter of the two men’s efforts. Hodgson invited them to sit at the head table at a summit on terrorism held in Niagara Falls in January. It was an honor for the two men, but the evening also marked the beginning of their growing frustration with the project.
You see, Fromme-Douglas has a mind that runs at high rpm’s. No sooner had he and Griffin come up with the poster idea, Fromme-Douglas also hit on a way to achieve another one of his life’s goals creating a postage stamp. A whiz with a computer, Fromme-Douglas created a stamp using an image of his painting. The only word on it was Memorial. His dream was to have Canada and the United States jointly issue the same stamp, his painting, as a memorial to September 11. It had never been done before.
The wheels were set in motion at the terrorism summit and soon they had a meeting arranged in Ottawa with Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, who also oversees Canada Post. (They were supposed to meet with Prime Minister
Chretzien, but Manley was already beginning to show his adeptness at filling someone else’s shoes.) Manley made all the right noises when Fromme-Douglas showed him his stamp design.
"He stood there and said great idea. I asked him if he could help and he said I run the post
office."
That was in April. Fromme-Douglas and Griffin haven’t heard from Manley since. We won’t quote them on what they think about that. Suffice to say that together with their frustration at how their idea of selling posters to raise money for the firefighters. ‘In Memoriam’ has become bogged down in bureaucratic red tape; they haven’t been impressed by their first real introduction to the world of Canadian politicking.
"It just goes on and on and on... It’s almost like they don’t want to do something nice for people," says Fromme-Douglas of his stamp proposal.
"Are two little schmucks from nowhere land the only ones who care about this? Who can lose on this? Its a win, win, win, win, win, win, win. You can’t have a safer thing."
Griffin scoffs at a letter from the head of Canada Post and threatens to move to the United States, where people embrace new ideas. The typed text of the letter patiently spells out the long process that’s involved in creating a stamp. Then, handwritten at the bottom of the letter, comes a note that says if the Americans go for the idea of a joint stamp, Canada Post will too.
As a way of shaking off their frustration and despondency, Fromme-Douglas and Griffin decided that they wanted to do something positive that would help at least one firefighter. They wanted to ask Arch, that nice firefighter they had met at Ground Zero, to come to Haliburton for a visit, a reprieve from all that death.
Problem was, they only knew him as Arch. And they knew he had been one of the signatories on three special limited edition prints that Fromme-Douglas had taken from fire hall to fire hall. (Whoops, sorry about that Canadianism. From fire station to fire station.)
"Brad is like a badger," Fromme-Douglas says with a huge grin.
"He does not stop until he gets what he’s after." Against all odds, Griffin tracked down Archibald. Archibald was more than a little surprised to hear from them.
"I met these men for 45 minutes out of the 700 hours I was there," Archibald says.
"I met thousands of people, hundreds of actors. They sent me photos [of their tour.] Thanks, have a nice day. Then, out of the blue, these two men invite him to a hunt camp at a place he’d never heard of as a way of saying thanks. I only knew Canada was north," Archibald smiles.
Although it was a respite from hell, Archibald did a surprising amount of talking about his feelings about September 11 during his trip to the Highlands. For one, he doesn’t see himself as a hero.
"On September 10, I was a civil servant. On September 11, I was a hero [in the public’s eyes.] It was embarrassing. It got to the point I didn’t want to leave [Ground Zero] because everyone wanted to hug and touch you."
Archibald calls the Highlands Gods country, but there have been times over the past months when he’s questioned Gods very existence.
"If God is so all powerful, he had to have had the power to stop all this," he says,
"but I’m also a Catholic who says God gives us free will. There was so much suffering but the good will hopefully outshine the pain that was created. The terrorists thought we were all about money but September 11 has proved that the human spirit is a renewable resource."
He knows he’ll never be the same old Arch again. "It’s hard to have a normal life get up in the morning, talk with your wife about the intricacies of domestic life, go to work, take the kids to a game when your mind is filled with images no human being should ever have to see. You have to play the facade and then go to work," he says of his attempts not to be consumed by September 11.
"It’s a struggle. My mind has a hard time with it. You try to play the game as you can, but do you remember the last time a fire department lost 343 men? I don’t. I’m crying every day. I left a big chunk of me there. These 343 guys were my brothers. That was me. I died there. Yesterday was September 11. Today is September 11. You have to embrace it, absorb it, and make it a part of you. You have to learn to live with death."
But everyone, as a society, should also try to learn to live again as a society, people who have time to talk to one another, do something nice for one another, spend some time with family and friends.
Asked what he’d like people to do in response to September 11, Archibald doesn’t talk about political responses or retribution or raising money.
Those things may be important, in their time, but September 11 was, is, about something larger than that. So what should people do?
Mow your neighbor’s lawn if she’s a shut-in. Take a friend out to dinner. Do something nice. Say thank you, please, your welcome. Show some humanity. And help the firemen in your neighborhood. When there’s a fundraising drive, support
it.
"It’s all about humanity," says Dan Archibald, who’s learned more than he’s ever wanted to know about the subject.
"It’s the one-on-one relationships we have to work on. With all the information we’re getting, we think we’re more connected, but we’re detached. We’re voyeurs on television. These past few days at the hunt camp, we had a great time, and that’s what it’s all about."
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