Down Around Midnight (26 page)

Enough time has passed since the night of the crash to invite reasonable interpretation. And in contemplation of the events of that night, what I can say—the best and the worst of it—is that I've struck a kind of balance with them. I've attained a sort of equilibrium. I wouldn't describe it as harmony. Call it an accord. Let's say I've arrived at equipoise.

W
ithin a century of its European settlement, the Cape, its thriving precolonial forests lush with heavy stands of timber, had been stripped of its vegetation. The pine, post oak, American beech, yellow birch, black birch, American holly, hickory, American chestnut, and coastal basswood were gone, and the clearing gave way to so much topsoil loss that Cape Cod, as early as the end of the eighteenth century, was reduced to the sand dunes and salty air that Patti Page would fall in love with 150 years later. By 1850 it was an ecosystem that biologists describe as depauperate, lacking in both the number and variety of species it once supported. The thin surface of the fragile moraine, already vulnerable to wind erosion, now impoverished of nutrients, resisted cultivation, and with the end of the Civil War and the opening of the West to farming, agriculture was largely abandoned, allowing the pioneer species we see today, the pitch pine and the scrub oak, to colonize the abandoned fields. The second-growth forest took hold—more undergrowth, less biodiversity—reaching its peak at about the time Patti Page was topping the charts. In the 1950s, more woodland covered the Cape than at any time since the 1700s.

The trees of the Cape, when the colonists came, were harvested for housing, shipbuilding, and fuel. And one tree that grew in abundance back then was harvested almost exclusively for cash, a tree that had been a staple of trade since before the settlers arrived. It was not religious or political freedom that had enticed the earliest Englishmen to drop anchor on the edge of the primeval forest. It was a tree that had first drawn them here, explorers like Bartholomew Gosnold, the man who is credited with giving Cape Cod its name, and the adventurers who followed him, the first of them sailing under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. They came for a tree, the product of which was as highly prized by Europeans as the spices of the Indies and the incense of Arabia.

They came for the sassafras.

The root and bark of the sassafras, a member of the laurel family, are the source of an essential oil that was used as a fragrance in perfumes and soaps, as a flavoring in candy and root beer, and as the extract necessary, by definition, to the infusion of sassafras tea. Its leaves were dried to make filé powder, the seasoning and thickening agent used when okra was out of season in the preparation of gumbo. But of greatest importance to Europeans in the Age of Discovery were the curative properties sassafras was believed to possess. It was widely used in medicines. Sassafras was considered a wonder drug, an elixir with the power to ward off numerous maladies and cure a variety of others, including venereal disease. One of the first European imports from the New World, sassafras was also one of the more valuable. By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was exceeded as a colonial export to Europe only by tobacco.

“This is one of the only places where sassafras grows in the camp.”

The wilderness out of which firefighters carried me that night is still wilderness today, a forest that remains the property of the Boy Scouts, and Bill Monroe, president of the local council, has just led me to the heart of it. Monroe doesn't know it for a fact, he says, but guesses that, at something like a mile square, it is the largest piece of privately owned undeveloped property on the Cape.

There is nothing primeval about the forest. The under-story is waist-deep in places, an expanse of bramble, bull brier, wild blueberry, and low-growing laurel that makes walking a straight line impossible. Thrashing through it, here and there, in various parts of the camp, you come across the remnants, now overgrown, of the stone walls that stood over a century ago when the land was given to pasture, evidence of the agriculture that flourished here before the second-growth forest reclaimed the territory.

Such a random thing to have happened in such a random place
.

It was across this dense, inhospitable terrain that Suzanne fought her way in the dark before coming upon a trail that night. This is the rough scrub we pushed through moving clear of the wreck, the same underbrush through which firefighters bushwhacked a path to reach us, then carried us out. It is possible that those firefighters, forcing their way into the forest, created the path Monroe and I followed to get here.

“This trail did not exist” back then, says Monroe, who grew up in Centerville and has been hiking these woods since his youth, when he himself was a Boy Scout.

An emergency dispatcher for the Barnstable Fire Department's Centerville-Osterville District, Monroe, forty-seven, the father of three boys who also passed their scouting days here, is spending this weekday in late July the way he frequently spends his day off, taking care of business around the camp. His running across me today, if unexpected, was not unanticipated. Monroe is a veritable picture of the Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” From the sturdy soles of his hiking boots to the peak of the baseball cap projected over the lenses of his sunglasses, he is outfitted for a day of orienteering. Around his neck is a red bandana, and circling his waist, cinching the khaki cargo shorts into which his T-shirt is tucked, is a wide leather belt stenciled with the words “2005 National Scout Jamboree.” It's a good bet that in at least one of his pockets is a decent magnetic compass.

I was driving home from asking questions at the Yarmouth Fire Department when, without having planned to do so, I skipped the on-ramp to the Mid-Cape Highway and found my way to the camp entrance. I didn't know what I'd run into. Maybe I'd come away with a name, I thought, someone to contact who held some institutional memory of the place. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival, I was introduced to a man by the name of Ed Matthews. Known to the scouts as Uncle Ed, Matthews, who today operates the camp trading post, was a provisional scoutmaster the year of the crash. He was one of two or three people in camp that night, which fell at the end of a staff week preceding the start of programs.

“We heard the plane coming over, [but] we heard them all the time,” he told me.

Matthews, with what he wanted me to know were “forty-three years at this camp,” had not much to tell me about the crash, but his memory of it seemed clear enough. His reason for having so little to say was probably implicit in the first thing he said when I mentioned it.

“It was a sad thing,” he told me, looking away.

I thanked him after spending a few minutes with him, and let him get on with his work. I was standing in the tiny administration building, leaving my number with the helpful woman who'd greeted me as I entered the camp, when Bill Monroe happened to walk in. He and I were introduced, I told him what I was looking for, and Monroe said, “Follow me.”

The slope where the sassafras grows is maybe a half a mile from where the trail ended in 1979. The camp has undergone changes since then. To get where Monroe and I are now standing is a hike of no more than a few minutes from what today is the camp athletic field.

“My first recollection of the crash was the newspaper,” Monroe is telling me, and he says he remembers asking himself,
Where is that? That's the worst place they could've come down.

Monroe was nineteen years old that year. For the three years preceding that summer, he had been on the camp staff, but by 1979, having started college and working summers to pay his way through, he was coming by just once a week to say hi.

“I don't think it really affected the program that summer,” Monroe says, scouring the slope, “because it was this [remote] part of the camp. This part was used back then for long-range hikes, orienteering class . . .”

Whatever curiosity he had as a teenager did not extend to the presence of the fuselage that for several days lay cordoned off in the woods.

“I didn't,” he answers, when I ask if he hiked out to see the wreck. “Actually, for whatever reason, I stayed away. I think I had an uneasy feeling. I remember talking to another kid who was on the staff who hiked in from the other side and came upon it.”

The sassafras is growing on the edge of a stretch of narrow pines just below the top of what is known as Prospect Hill. The pines, and the oaks intermixed with them, are smaller, clearly younger than the range of trees sloping away on either side of them. The sassafras is about the same age.

“This is what comes in after you disturb this ground,” he says. “Scrub pine. That's the first thing that grows back in. It's the first thing that seems to be able to take root.”

After you disturb this ground.

“This is the spot where I have always been led to believe the fuselage lay,” he says.

Bob Phillips mentioned this place.

He mentioned it to me at the ballgame and to Monroe sometime before that. While out on the trail with scouts one day, he had come upon this spot. Growing on its border is a tree whose trunk is stripped of its bark in a large, deep, circular scar about fifteen feet off the ground. Catching sight of the damaged tree, Phillips at the time had remarked to himself, as he later told Monroe, “That's probably from the plane crash.”

Having been here that night as a firefighter, the night the trail had first been cut, Phillips would have been in a position to know.

“I can't think what else would have caused it,” Monroe says, seeing it now for the first time. “Up that high . . . It was never in a place where a Boy Scout with a hatchet could have cut it. That's something large that . . .”

He pauses for several seconds.

“That's something large,” he says, “that cut that tree.”

With regularity, all the time we've been out here, the roar of incoming aircraft has punctuated the conversation. They've been erupting in on us overhead, airplanes skimming the tree-tops, so low you can count the rivets, drowning out our words, vectored in on final approach to runway 24 at Barnstable, two and a half miles to the southwest.

What scoutmasters announce as airplane breaks, around campfires or during class, are a frequent occurrence in the camp. They are observed with regularity, whenever a plane comes over. “If a guy just keeps talking,” Monroe explains, “you've lost thirty seconds of whatever it was he was saying.” Such breaks, he tells me, were common when he himself was a scout. “You'd hear it coming, and he'd say, ‘Plane break!' and he'd fold his arms and he'd wait for it to go by and then continue as if nothing ever happened. The eerie thing of it is, as a kid, being in camp on a foggy day, you couldn't see anything, but you could hear it. The ceiling comes in very, very low.”

I can imagine the ceiling coming in as he says it.

I remember lying here twenty-eight years ago. I remember being unable to see anything. I can remember how, here in the night, in the stillness of the forest, the eldest of the three sisters slipped in and out of consciousness, screaming, how she screamed when the power to the emergency light died and the doorway of the downed airplane, the only source of illumination, went dark, how at that moment, the impenetrable, fog-shrouded night went from bewildering to immaculate black.

Once we'd escaped the airplane, terror gave way to a certain sense of relief, but it never really departed the field. I remember lying still, adrenaline pumping, wondering if they knew we were down. It wasn't a question of whether they'd find us, but how long it would take them to do it, and how many of us would be alive when they did. How many would be alive when dawn broke? Here we lay twenty-eight years ago, we lay here for over an hour, though it seemed longer than that. I remember little of how the time passed. And the things I remember are among those things I continually have to remind myself to forget.

Quite a thing, as someone said, for a summer evening on the Cape.

Monroe and I are making our way back to the trail when he tells me about the stories. Here, on foggy nights, he says, in the dark shadows around flickering campfires, one of the ghost stories that animate the bedtime hours is the mysterious tale of a plane that crashed, vanishing one midnight long ago, deep in the deserted forest.

Monroe is careful to add that he cannot attest to the details.

“I've been told that people tell the story, but haven't heard it told.”

I try to imagine how the story is told, wonder what it would be like to hear it. I wonder if it changes in the retelling. It has been passed down as part of the folklore, and summer-to-summer, turning in on itself, it has entered the realm of the apocryphal. Here, where they happened, the events of that night are enveloped in the mist of legend. Here, on this ground that has been disturbed, the sassafras, beginning its rebirth on the Cape, stands in witness to a strange reciprocity. This place that haunts our memory is now the shadowland of a children's fairy tale, and we upon whom its horrors were visited are the ghosts by which it is haunted.

I first heard mention of the stories before I met Monroe, when I stopped by the camp some months earlier, curious as to whether it was still in use and, if so, whether those who used it had any knowledge of the crash. The season had ended, and I was talking to the young ranger in residence, an Eagle Scout attending the community college. He looked to be just out of his teens. And he was as curious as I.

“They say one night, a long time ago, a girl walked down through here who crashed in a plane. Is that the one?” he asked.

“That's the one,” I said.

“It's a story they tell.”

“It's a true story.”

“It really happened?”