My own little 9-11

OK, WINNIPEG'S SKYLINE IS NOT NEW YORK CITY'S SKYLINE, BY A LONG SHOT.



But on Friday morning, I was on the 30th floor of our city's third-tallest building, wowed by the view from downtown and feeling very out-of-place and in awe of the elevation from the core of our city.



I try to avoid downtown if I can, and I certainly make every effort NOT to have to scale tall buildings in a single bound. Not that I'm afraid of heights...I just usually have no cause or business being there.



So I felt out of my element to begin with.



But there I was, waiting for a lawyer who kept me sitting there for 15 minutes at least, blown away by the view from 30 floors up near our most famous intersection, Portage and Main.



It was panoramic and mind-numbing and the pix I yanked off the Web below don't do it justice, but I didn't have my camera. Suffice to say the view, really, left me in awe.

But then, as I'm just taking in the view from 117 metres above Portage Avenue (admittedly, as I said, not even close to the height of New York's former Twin Towers), something happened that brought back images of this.

I'm trying not to over-dramatize this. I know it's a stretch. And there was certainly no purposeful intent, as those pictures we all dread, above, show in gruesome detail.

No, as I was standing in front of the huge window that showed most of the southeast side of our city, I was shocked and bewildered and amazed to see this fleet of jets do a fly-past a mere 50 or 100 or 200 metres away.

These are Canada's precision military flying team, the Snowbirds.

They weren't flying upside down as the pic above illustrates, but they did whizz past me in formation, as part of a 50th anniversary salute to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command http://www.norad.mil/50/nutshell.html).

The Snowbirds have, over the years, wowed the world. But they've also had fatal collisions.

And while I was there waiting for that lawyer to tell me what I already knew, it occurred to me how fully possible it was, should any of their wing tips touch, that one of those fighter jets could have crashed right into that building.

And blown me to smithereens.

Eek. My own little 9-11.

I guess life's kinda like that, huh, GWB?