[caption id="attachment_68156" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="A view of Guinan's from the railway platform in Garrison."]
Time doesn't quite stand still in Garrison, N.Y.
Indeed for the Wall Street Journal's Wendy Bounds, the 10 years she's spent in that Upstate hamlet have been fastest of her life.
Yet, in some ways Garrison hasn't changed much since the day 52 years ago that her friend Jim Guinan arrived with his wife and four small children. Other than the cars, the spruced-up trains and passengers reading iPads instead of newspapers, the small town might be something right out of the Eisenhower era.
And aside from the trees Hurricane Irene took in August, the landscape is the same that Bounds viewed on a trip there on Nov. 1, 2001. The then 30-year-old Journal reporter was brought by friends into a bar and general store called Guinan's. The 75-year-old patriarch from Birr, Co. Offaly, happened to be behind the bar on that day. He captivated her with tales of the Hudson Highlands, which provided a "front-row seat to our nation's history." By Thanksgiving, she'd moved to the town, which is 50 miles north of Manhattan.
Bounds saw the second plane hit from her 10th-floor apartment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She never returned to live in what was the most damaged residential building at Ground Zero. Gone were the days of her three-minute commute to the Journal's offices at One World Financial Center.
She wrote a book (as Gwendolyn Bounds in 2005), "Little Chapel on the River," about all of that and the serendipitous discovery of Guinan's, the family that ran it and its regular customers. Subtitled "A Pub, A Town and the Search for What Matters Most," it struck a chord in the post 9/11 world. The author still hears from readers from as far away as the West Coast, the UK and Australia, and from troops serving overseas. They want to know what has happened to the people in the book.
Much of the news to report hasn't been good, though. Jim Guinan died in Florida in April 2009, and his son John lost his battle with brain cancer the previous summer; the family business shuttered for the last time earlier in 2008.
"It's so sad. This place where life breathed in and out is an empty, dilapidated shell," Bounds said, but added that there are plans to open a bar and restaurant there in 2013.
The method of imparting developments in Garrison has switched in the last few years from email to Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, Bounds is at the cutting edge of technological change at the Wall Street Journal. East weekday at noon, she presents "Lunch Break," a 30-minute show that can be viewed on wsj.com and internet TV channels.
The world has moved on in other ways too. She married her partner, Lisa, in Garrison a few years ago.
When he learned that she was in a same-sex relationship, John Guinan, the first-born of the second generation, "was immediately gracious to me," she told the Echo six years ago. He confessed later to her that he'd held bigoted views until his wife's brother was diagnosed with AIDS. "It changed his life and changed his views," she said.
Bounds credited someone she never knew, his mother Peg Guinan, who died of cancer in 1988, for the welcoming and tolerant atmosphere in the pub and general store. Of course, it was the man she met and married when they were both young Irish immigrants in England who brought them back, day in and day out, to Garrison's most famous watering hole.
Bounds said of him back in 2005: "I was attracted to his warmth and his hospitality. I was also attracted to his ability to make anybody laugh, to always have a story at his lips. He's so fast, and I appreciate that in any person - it's just fun to be around somebody like that."
The North Carolinian added that she was in awe of "his practical knowledge and his ability to take care of an entire town."
However, it was the actions of two of his children, the late John, who worked with one of the town's arborists, and Margaret, a police detective, that prompted her to write the book.
In early 2002, when the Enron scandal hit, she saw the Guinans combine their regular jobs with longs shifts at the bar. They made considerable sacrifices "for nothing, for no glory, no stock options, nothing except for their loyalty to their dad and this town. I was very blown away by that."
Bounds took a three-month leave of absence to work at the pub and country store herself. She rose at 4 a.m. to dispense coffee, rolls and papers to the earliest commuters, those taking the 5:09 express train that arrived in Grand Central about 6:15, and she tended bar at the pub's famous "Irish night" of traditional music. "How many people do you know that inspire that kind of loyalty?" she said of the Guinans.
Bounds added: "Now, you can't get a cup of coffee; it's cold and bare."
She's buoyed, however, by local businessman Chris Davis's plan to open there in 2013. It won't be Guinan's, but it will be "low key," in the spirit of the old place.
After the trauma of 2001, Bounds said of Guinan's and Garrison: "I felt instinctively that this was where I was going to find my way back."
Ten years on, she said: "9/11 is the reason I ended up in Garrison, but there are many other reasons why I stayed."
ITALICIZE
"Lunch Break" can be accessed by clicking on "Programs" at wsj.com's Video Center.
