WILLIAMSBURG, VA. -- James Southall could not be more polite.

The tavern owner stares over his wire-rimmed glasses as he listens politely to the rambling customer from the north go on about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anxious state of the world since.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Southall says finally, pushing up his slipping eyeglasses, "but we don't know anything about that here."

Here is Nov. 9, 1774. Here the seasons pass but never the year. It is always 1774 in Williamsburg, and perhaps that is why, in the first summer after the Sept. 11 attacks that James Southall has no knowledge of, the attraction is more popular than ever with Americans.

Here, perhaps, is what Eliot meant when he wrote how, in turbulent times, we seek out the still point of the turning world. More still than Williamsburg it does not get.

That is not, however, to suggest that there is no anxiety here in the fall of 1774. There has been talk of war with Britain over unfair taxation. The governor is off fighting "savages to the West" and, says Mr. Southall of the 1774 Raleigh Tavern (also Ron Warren, retired history teacher in 2002) there remains a continuing threat from terrorists.

"Pirates," he says. "They come up the river and invade the plantations and make off with the livestock and slaves."

Ron and Penny Ericson of Holbrook, Mass., came to Williamsburg for the peace and escape. Typically American, they have found the impending anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks increasingly weighing on their minds, and by sheer coincidence Alan Jackson's country anthem Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning) came on the car radio as they pulled into the parking lot.

Tears welled up in Mrs. Ericson's eyes. She knew exactly where she was, just, she says, as Americans of previous generations know where they were when JFK was shot or when the Second World War ended.

A nurse, she had taken the night shift at the veteran's hospital nearby, and as the events of that horrid Tuesday morning played out, she had listened as an old Second World War veteran, a seriously ill man with a heart condition, told her he would like to volunteer as an American suicide pilot to strike back at those who had done this terrible deed.

The moment she arrived home that day her mother was on the telephone. And not just any mother, but Theresa Davis, a 75-year-old firebrand who is past national president for the American Gold Star Mothers. Her mother was already mobilizing support for whatever action might have to be taken.

"I know the price of war more than most, I suppose," Mrs. Ericson says. Her mother's only brother, Joseph Saulnier of Nova Scotia, died in Normandy in 1944. Her father, Richard, was killed in a military explosion in the late 1950s, when Theresa was pregnant with her fifth child and Penny was just 8. Her brother, also Richard, died a military hero in Vietnam. Her husband, Ron, is a Vietnam veteran still dealing with the horrors of those years.

"I'm a nurse," she says. "And I know that I should feel an obligation to protect life, but I also knew that we had no choice but to retaliate. . . . And we have to keep after them for the sake of our country."

For a moment, stuck this day in Nov. 9, 1774, the Ericsons imagine a theme park where it might forever be Monday, Sept. 10, 2001: the affairs of U.S. Representative Gary Condit dominating the headlines of every newspaper, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declaring "War on Bureaucracy" to cut down costs at the Pentagon and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, on the verge of passing from the scene relatively unnoticed, declaring his own "War on Squeegee Kids and Graffiti Scribblers."

Such a simple, innocent time, with Barry Bonds frozen forever at 63 home runs, Michael Jordan forever contemplating yet another comeback in basketball and the closest thing to a real war on North American soil a bitter dispute between the United States and Canada over softwood lumber.

Mr. Ericson just shakes his head in disbelief. "You can't pretend it didn't happen. It happened -- and we have to get on with what we're going to do about it."
Tomorrow: The commercialization of 9/11.