A journey in surreal times. (Sept11 The Convention that wasn't).

If we hadn't stopped for breakfast that fateful Tuesday, we could have gone all day without knowing about the terror visited on New York City and Washington.

On Monday, Sept. 10, Bonnie and I were in Greenfield, Mass., her home town, researching her genealogy. We were to spend Tuesday driving west through Massachusetts and New York State into the northwestern tip of Pennsylvania, then south to Pittsburgh and the NCEW convention. We had planned to arrive by Tuesday night for Wednesday's pre-convention trip to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

We had had bagels and coffee in our motel room early Tuesday morning. Normally, that would have held us until late in the day. That Tuesday, however, we were delayed in Greenfield on some last-minute errands, so we decided to stop for a full breakfast before going on the road.

Since we rarely use the radio while driving, we hadn't heard the news.

As we were paying our bill, the cashier remarked about the disaster that morning.

"The World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been hit by airplanes," he told us.

As soon as we got in our car, we tuned in a National Public Radio station. It wasn't long before the magnitude of what had happened was obvious. As we drove through the beauty of the Berkshires, the voices coming from our dashboard told of unbelievable ugliness elsewhere.

We immediately changed our travel plans. Instead of heading west from Albany on I-88, we turned south toward New York City. It took us just two hours to get onto the Palisades Parkway. Then we hit the traffic. The parkway normally dumps its vehicles onto the George Washington Bridge. But all bridges and tunnels to Manhattan had been sealed off, and traffic was shunted onto two-lane U.s. 9W several miles north, creating a one-mile tie-up.

Things got progressively worse

From there, things got progressively worse. We spent the better part of three hours trying to find some way through the gridlock. Finally, we got an opportunity to turn left and get onto back streets that wound along the Jersey highlands. I kept watching the compass over my windshield to make sure I was working my way east, toward the Hudson River.

Suddenly, there it was. A short section of street, on the border between Cliffside Park and Edgewater, ran along the edge of the palisades, giving a clear view of all of Manhattan Island. A small group was standing there. Some talked but most just looked.

I grabbed my camera and found a good vantage point. As I shot, I kept thinking about the title of a book I have not read, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty.

The book, which concerns Ireland today, takes for its title an expression often used to contrast the beauty of Ireland with the travails of its people.

No phrase could better describe the scene before me. The sky was a light blue, the sun was bright, and a few white clouds hung high over the city. The sunlight glistened off a panorama of buildings from upper Manhattan southward. Near the south end, not far from the Empire State Building at my angle, a huge plume of white and gray smoke rose from where I knew the World Trade Center had stood. The view was majestic.

This was the smoke rising from a pyre in which possibly 6,000 people had died. It was beautiful, and it was terrible.

The other thing that struck me was the calmness of the onlookers. Perhaps they were just stunned. Perhaps the reality of what they were seeing had not struck home. Perhaps they already had heard so much that there was no more emotion to be shown. They were like any group of onlookers anywhere.

In fact, normality seemed the rule on the Jersey side of the Hudson. We heard nothing when we stopped for gasoline. We paid $1.38 a gallon for regular, about the same near our home. Only later, when we stopped at a service plaza on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, did we heard from another family of price-gouging; they had paid $4 a gallon.

It was much easier getting out of the traffic than getting into it. Soon we were on the New Jersey Turnpike. The Hackensack River bridge offered another good view of Manhattan, and we stopped in the breakdown lane for more photos.

Very little traffic headed away from the city. The only traffic headed toward the city was a steady line of ambulances with lights flashing.

The toughest part was yet to come. I had promised the Asheville Citizen-Times a column, and I had no laptop or even a typewriter with me. I had to dictate over a cell phone, trying to resurrect with limited success skills I hadn't used since my days a young sportswriter for The Palm Beach Post more than 40 years ago.

It was nearly midnight when we checked into the convention hotel in Pittsburgh. Only then did we get to see the TV pictures that had held the world's attention for more than 14 hours. We sat up into the night viewing what we had heard described on the radio all day.

We suspected that the convention would be canceled, but we didn't know for sure until Wednesday morning. After talking briefly with Tom and Cora Everett and John Taylor, we checked out. We decided to combine business with pleasure by visiting first Somerset, Pa., near where the fourth hijacked plane had crashed, then going on to Fallingwater. After that, we headed northwest to New Castle, my parents' birthplace, to visit a cousin.

Somerset seemed the model of normality. The luncheon crowd in the Main Street Deli paid no attention to the TV that was broadcasting a live FBI interview from the crash site 10 miles away. The local editor, NCEW member James Oliver, confirmed my impressions. He said that after an initial apprehension born out of uncertainty, the mood had returned to normal quickly.

Oliver's paper, the Daily American, responded quickly and with skill to Sept. 11's tragedies. The American ran a full page of stories on the local situation, in addition to the page-one lead, which was accompanied by a color photo of the crash scene.

In New Castle, NCEW member Mitchel Olszak, besides running the New Castle News editorial page, wrote the main page-one local story. The News did a fine job of tracking down former staffers and residents in New York City, including a former staff photographer who produced an outstanding photo of people fleeing the collapse of a World Trade Center tower.

We missed the convention. The program sounded outstanding, and NCEW always gives us the opportunity to meet new friends and renew old friendships. In its stead, however, we wound up with a week to remember.

NCEW member Bill McGoun retired in 1999 after 23 years as an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He lives near Asheville, N. C., where he contributes to the Citizen-Times.