DeFede was in Miami on September 11, watching the news like most Americans, and what followed was paralysis rather than action. He describes those first hours not as a journalist’s instinct to report but as a civilian’s inability to process.

Jim DeFede

My sister had called me and said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. I turned on the TV and as I’m watching, I saw the second plane hit the second tower. I think I spent the next two or three days just sitting in front of the television with my mouth agape, not really knowing or comprehending what had occurred.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

The book that eventually reached readers was not the one DeFede had signed a contract to write. His original 9/11 project collapsed, and his publisher redirected him toward a small town in Newfoundland that had taken in nearly 7,000 stranded airline passengers when U.S. airspace shut down. Far from mourning the lost project, he regarded the reassignment as a stroke of luck.

Jim DeFede

This was a much more interesting story than the one I was originally hired to write.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

The Gander story also offered DeFede something his decade of investigative reporting in South Florida almost never did. His career had been built on exposing crime and corruption, a beat that rewards distrust. Writing about what the residents of Gander did in those four days meant leaving that professional posture behind entirely.

Jim DeFede

There’s none of the cynicism, there’s none of the skepticism. This is about the goodness and the humanity, which is not something as an investigative reporter, especially in Florida, that you uncover very often.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

DeFede arrived in Gander in February 2002, roughly five months after the planes landed, and spent six weeks interviewing the residents who had opened their homes. The connections between hosts and passengers were still new enough that people remembered specific details rather than generalities. But to explain why those connections had formed at all, he found he needed to go much further back than September 2001.

Jim DeFede

Newfoundlanders are an interesting breed of people. And when you start understanding their background and their history, you understand why what happened on 9/11 happened.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

Gander’s geography was itself part of the argument DeFede was building. The town sits near the eastern edge of Newfoundland, close enough to the Atlantic that it served for decades as a transatlantic refueling stop, which is why the infrastructure for handling large numbers of aircraft already existed in 2001. That practical fact combined with the community’s character to produce something DeFede frames as almost inevitable.

Jim DeFede

You couldn’t have picked a better location to drop off 7,000 people. And realize that they were going to be taken care of.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

DeFede’s central argument is that Gander’s response was not a spontaneous outpouring but the product of a specific history. Newfoundland is remote and climatically unforgiving, and the communities that settled it developed a code of mutual aid out of necessity rather than charity. He traces what happened on September 12 and 13 directly to that centuries-old logic.

Jim DeFede

If you’re in trouble, your neighbor just automatically comes to your aid. And if your neighbor is in trouble you don’t wait to be called, you go to their aid. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get through the harshness that is Newfoundland.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

The book was published in 2002 and won the Christopher Award in 2003, but its audience has continued to grow, partly through the 2017 musical Come from Away, which drew on the same events. When DeFede returned to Gander for a 20th-anniversary edition, he asked a former constable named Oswald Fudge why the story still finds new readers. Fudge’s answer is the passage DeFede quotes when explaining the book’s staying power.

Jim DeFede

You look around today and you have people fighting in airports. You have people fighting in supermarkets, yelling and screaming and getting angry, and people just being mean. And they see and hear about what happened in Gander, and they think to themselves, ‘I remember a time when people were better, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could get to that again?’

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

DeFede does not let Fudge’s observation stand as simple nostalgia. He had spent his career as an investigative reporter trained to puncture exactly this kind of hopeful claim, and he acknowledges the reflex before pushing past it.

Jim DeFede

Now, the cynic in me tells me that that’s probably not going to happen. But the experience in Gander says it just might.

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libarts.source.colostate.edu, “CSU alum’s book tells how small Canadian town helped Americans in wake of 9/11 | College of Liberal Arts | Colorado State University”

That sentence is the closest DeFede comes to a thesis statement: not a promise that the world will replicate what Gander did, but a documented proof that it once did, and that the record is worth keeping.