Down Around Midnight (3 page)

“I'll go,” said Suzanne—no surprise there—and she was the first to step into whatever was out there.

And that wasn't the extent of her fearlessness. Once we got people moving, Suzanne
reentered
the plane. It was she who eventually moved the injured girls from the forward end of the passenger cabin to the door at the rear of the plane. She and Brian carried the older of them; she moved the younger one by herself. The blood in which her clothing was soaked that night when she stepped out of the woods wasn't her own.

After we got everyone through the door—it was a drop of about three feet to the ground—the missing passenger showed up. He simply materialized outside the craft. This would be explained later, again by federal investigators. Apparently the young man, a Harvard student, who'd been sitting in front of Brian, had been launched through the flight deck on impact. He had exited forward, as it were. The investigators were of the opinion that he hadn't been wearing his seat belt. He ended up outside the airplane, on the ground just in front of the cockpit. Later that night at the emergency room, where he was treated and released, he was diagnosed with a broken nose and a couple of broken ribs.

He told me his name was Jon, and he proved to be very helpful. Quite cheerful under the circumstances, he had that reporting-for-duty attitude, and with Suzanne making plans to disappear, I dispatched him to the other side of the airplane to keep an eye on the copilot. Or rather, to continue to do so. The first thing he had done after getting to his feet was to extricate the copilot from the wreck.

I'd had a brief exchange with the copilot, and not a very friendly one, shortly after I'd gotten the door open, hailing him when I heard sounds of life coming from the front of the aircraft, the first I'd heard since hearing the expletive barked from that direction. Shouting in the darkness from one end of the plane to the other, I had come away from the exchange with two pieces of information. There was nothing left of the pilot, and the copilot was slipping into clinical shock. He had been bleeding badly, I now discovered. I asked Jon to go back and stay with him, and we had a quick back-and-forth about tourniquets.

I wasn't going anywhere. I was now down for good. Once I had stopped moving, it was over. The adrenaline had done its job. It had taken me as far as it was going to. My mobility was now so compromised, it was questionable whether I could even stand up. But Suzanne was another story. She was determined to go for help. I tried to talk her out of it. She said she knew where we were.

“I don't think it's a good idea,” I said.

My reasoning went like this: It was not as if nobody had noticed. People might not have known where we were, but they had to know the plane was not in the air. If we stayed where we were, they'd find us.

Suzanne, however, was adamant:

“I know where we are. It's not far.”

And saying good-bye, she was gone. My lieutenant had left the field.

As it turned out, we were not where she thought we were. That she found her way out of the woods at all she owed to pure luck that night, and to what I would forever believe to be (I would know her for no more than an hour) a deep reservoir of good karma. In one way, her instincts were perfect. The people charged with our rescue did not know where we were. The only clue they had to our location, beyond the designated flight path itself, was where we had dropped off military radar, the point at which the plane's electronic signature had vanished from the screen at Otis Air Force Base at the upper end of the Cape.

Our location was, in fact, quite specific. As pinpointed by one of the newspapers, published the following morning, we were “in the middle of nowhere.” We were two and a half miles from the airport, half a mile off the nearest trail in an expanse of heavily wooded wilderness, 330 acres of which were owned by the Cape Cod & Islands Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Known as Camp Greenough, in operation since the 1940s, the facility, with the woodland surrounding it, featured several bodies of water, and according to the same newspaper, there were “few areas as remote and inaccessible left on the Cape.” Today there are probably none. It was an hour and a half before rescuers found us. Longer still before, using brush breakers, they were able to get their equipment anywhere close. The plane had crashed around eleven o'clock. It would be close to two in the morning when firefighters carried me out of the woods.

We waited not far from the airplane, maybe fifty feet at the most, having pushed our way through the undergrowth just about as far as we could, given our collective physical condition and the fact that two of our number had to be carried. Light, however dim, emanated from the crack in the doorway through which we'd escaped the plane, acting as a point of reference until the battery powering it died. The darkness then was total. Invisible to one another, those of us lying on the left side of the airplane were spread out over an area of maybe fifteen feet square, separated by the airplane from Jon and the copilot, who lay in the woods on the other side, just below the cockpit. Jon, using the copilot's necktie, had tied off the leg that was bleeding.

The camaraderie commonly imagined when dreaming oneself into such a scenario, the noble feeling of shared sacrifice, never fully took hold. The evacuation had been accomplished in the absence of any genuine sense of it. Missing in action somewhere was that military esprit de corps. Invisible was any trace of bravado. We were draftees, a reluctant army. We had done what we had to do. Nobody was feeling heroic. Now that we were no longer channeling it into saving each other's lives, everybody had time to luxuriate in an inescapable combination of fear and thoroughgoing anger.

Attempts at lightening the mood went largely unrewarded. Shouting across the airplane to Jon to help keep up his spirits was the tail trying to wag the dog. He seemed to be doing well under the circumstances, and his good humor, as much as he tried to share it, inspired little response from the others. The middle sister did most of the talking, unable, it seemed, to stop, and I could have been a lot more sympathetic in trying to calm her down. While no doubt in shock herself, it was more out of concern for her sisters that she seemed to be so out of sorts. My insisting that she be quiet, an attempt to keep the level of panic down, was as much a sign of frustration with my own powerlessness.

The initiative was no longer ours. There had been some early strategizing, but it had ended with Suzanne's departure. We were counting on others now. Conversation was at best sporadic, as we slipped in and out of the same privacy of thought that had taken hold in the last ten minutes of the flight, those minutes that followed the landing announcement, in which all of us as passengers had trusted in a more prosaic deliverance. If the young woman hadn't been going on as she did, there wouldn't have been much more dialogue than you'd find on the page of a film script.

In the more than an hour in which we waited to be rescued, the copilot said nothing at all—nothing that was audible to anyone but Jon.

Knowing where Suzanne had come out of the woods may have helped narrow down our location. It's unclear to this day whether she emerged from the woods before rescuers arrived at the crash site. How long it took her to reach the highway is still something of a guess. When I volunteered a head count and an inventory of casualties to paramedics upon their arrival—acting as if I had things under control, with my back up against a tree—I insisted that all on the scene understand that their work in the woods wouldn't end that night until they had found the eighth passenger, the young woman who'd walked away.

What happened to Suzanne after she left me, I learned reading various newspapers. A bona fide hero and willing interview subject, she was understandably a darling of the press, and her adventures were widely reported, but only up to the point at which she finally reached help. Her declining to go to the hospital—cool with the Cosmic Wimpout guys, everything was cool with them—was indicative of what one of them later described as “how together she was.”

The plane had been down for more than an hour, its whereabouts unknown to Air New England, and the airline had refused to share that fact with the people waiting at the terminal to meet it. For more than an hour, the airline had been stonewalling. Personnel at Barnstable Airport were offering various excuses for the plane's delay—that the flight had been diverted, for example—recommending that people go home and wait there to be notified. Leaving the ticket counter unmanned, spending much of their time in an office behind it in a frantic attempt to get answers themselves, they were unconvincing at best.

“I'm not going home,” Suzanne's mother had told them, “until my daughter walks through that door.”

My girlfriend, Mary, was among those waiting, and it was she, barging into the airline office, who confronted Air New England personnel with the understanding that the masquerade was over. In the face of their continued denial, she told them, “One of your passengers just walked in.”

 

 

I spent a week in the hospital. Among the highlights of my stay was a Western Union telegram I received from my friend the Boston mystery writer Robert B. Parker, instructing me to “Recover at once.” A telegram, a great hard-boiled artifact. You'd expect nothing less from Bob. We were both rising stars at the time (he, of course, would ascend to heights that not even he had the bad manners to predict), and each of us would go out of his way whenever he got a good mention to point it out to the other.

“Glad to hear you're as tough as I suspected,” he wrote in a subsequent letter. “I am so tough I wouldn't have crashed.”

Getting play in the press on Bob's turf was a great source of amusement for me during my rehabilitation, and I couldn't wait to confront him with one of the get-well cards I'd received. It had been sent to me at the hospital by a stranger, a woman named Susan in Rhode Island, who wrote that she would like to meet me, and whose signature was followed by this: “age 33—blonde—hazel eyes—125 pounds—fun loving, etc.”

My only contact in the hospital with the other survivors of the crash was a visit I received from the parents of the three young sisters from Michigan. They came by to thank me for what I'd done for their daughters and to return the shirt I had been wearing that night. I had placed it over one of the girls when she began shivering. I worried that I might not be worthy of their thanks. I would always wonder if carrying their children from the plane had resulted in making their injuries worse. Evacuating the girls had been done at my urging, and it proved, after all, to be unnecessary. The plane never did catch fire.

I celebrated my birthday in the hospital, I was released at the end of June, I moved into the unfinished Cape Cod house to recuperate over the summer, and twenty-seven years went by—twenty-seven years in which I never saw, spoke to, heard from, heard of, or considered reaching out to any of the people with whom I had spent that night in the woods.

O
n a day like today, looking southwest from the windows on the water side of the house, you can see the upper reaches of the Cape. You can trace the lazy arc of the tree line as it curves around the inner edge of the bay. Some seventeen nautical miles of uninterrupted ocean lie between here and the mouth of Barnstable Harbor—a long fetch, as the local oyster-men say, an empty expanse of nothing but weather—and on a typical day anything moving this way, a vessel, a vagrant memory, is going to be running straight down the wind.

On a typical day on Cape Cod Bay, the prevailing wind blows southwest: out of the southwest, northeastward. In defiance of intuition, such a wind is said to be blowing down Cape. The Lower Cape designates the peninsula's northern stretch, its outer stretch, the forty or so miles of National Seashore hooking around to land's end. The Upper Cape lies to the south. This confusion owes its persistence to a peculiarity of maritime geography, the rules of which have been in force around here since the continent was first explored. Sailing from the inner to the outer waters of the Cape, a mariner navigates east, “down east” across the meridian lines, down the hours, minutes, and seconds of arc to a lower degree of longitude. Thus, the Lower Cape. The coast of Maine, which is farther north, is down east of here.

Life here is like life aboard ship. The marine forecast is the regional catechism. Here, weather, even more than character, is destiny. You tend to forget, on a day like today, awash in the bright blue of an undisturbed sea, that some three thousand shipwrecks lie buried in the sand below the surf that breaks along the back shore. The bones of dead sailors, lost to storms over the centuries, lie scattered beneath the shoals, strung out along the arm of the outer beach like charms on a broken bracelet.

Just east of Barnstable Harbor, which was choked by fog that disastrous night, sits the town of Dennis. A well-established Cape Cod community of some fifteen thousand residents, Dennis is one of fifteen towns on the peninsula, all of whose populations increase in the summer, in some cases by a factor of ten. Dennis stands out from its immediate neighbors, being better known to certain people off-Cape. The Outer Cape towns, out where I live, the towns of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown, are home to a significant year-round population of what I like to think of as refugees: artists, writers, various entrepreneurs, escapees of all varieties. These are people, many of whom, when they dress up to go to the office, don't make their way to Boston but travel instead to New York. None of the Upper or mid-Cape towns exhibits a similar connection to Manhattan, with the exception, perhaps, of Dennis. And this is by virtue of the Cape Playhouse, the venerable summer stock theater there, which for generations has been distinguished by the caliber of Broadway talent it attracts.