Epilogue

Gary guided the truck off of the highway just outside of Hebron and onto a dirt stretch called Monument Road.  Kim, Helen, Dr. Bunting and I were squished into the king cab of his big pickup.  Now Gary pointed it toward a nondescript clump of trees in the distance toward a place he had not been for thirty years.  He knew right where it was, though, and had thought about it a great deal over that time. 

             “It’s only a few miles from here,” he said to Kim and me.  I considered the clumps of trees in the distance toward where we were headed, and considered the last time I was there.  I felt anxiety rise in me.

            I had seen it in my mind so many times, an image created from the one dimensional colors of the handful of photographs I had perused in the intervening years.  I had pictured a scraggly line of trees flanked by barren fields, and dark and gloomy skies.  Something forbidding and not quite part of the world where decent and caring people live, like a graveyard in a Charles Dickens novel. 

            Gary took a left turn and continued up a dirt road that paralleled an empty field surrounded by barbed wire fences.  That time of the year the corn hadn’t been planted yet and the brown dirt surrounding us spread out towards the ends of the earth, as far as we could see.  Then he made one more turn and slowed the vehicle down, stopping beside a small earthen dike leading toward a small tree-ringed pond.

“This is it,” he said.  We all got out.

Kim and I slowly walked a distance to where the trees met the field and stood in silence looking over it.  It was like walking into some kind of time transporter, to another place.  The empty field was level plowed dirt as far as we looked.  It would have looked like this that day, roughly, empty and devoid of vegetation.  I tried to grasp what I saw, but this was nothing like I had expected.

I had thirty years worth of dreams about this place, and the horror it would bring me to behold it.  But now here I was, and I was transfixed.  What I found defied my every expectation. 

            What I found was a lovely pond ringed by a beautiful and healthy strip of forest, mere yards from a section of the Oregon Trail.  Pioneers heading to the California gold fields may have stopped at this spot at some point to refresh themselves in the shade of the trees or the clear water of the pond. 

As we approached the woods, two large deer suddenly bounded from the trees on the opposite side of the pond and ran across the gently rolling ground to the shelter of another thicket nearby.  The peace and tranquility that I felt at that moment so defied the picture of what I had known to be the truth for so long that it was hard to believe that this was really the place. 

Kim and I walked along a faint cattle track that wound around the outer perimeter of the pond, just inside the ring of plum thicket that surrounded the woods.  Kim continued to walk through the trees and I made my way through a gap in the thick plumb bushes and then out onto the open field, taking it all in.  I looked around, trying to identify the crash site, but from that spot, there was no trace.  I again wondered seriously if this could really be the place.  I figured there would be some sign, some indication of what we went through.  Some monument that for a few dark hours we had laid there and fought for our lives.  But it seemed like it was all gone. 

I turned and went back into the woods to look for Kim.  As I got to a corner of the pond, I suddenly noticed what appeared to be a gap in the tree line that surrounded it.  I walked over to the spot and could see that much of the growth there appeared to be newer than the rest in the area.  I worked into the gap and found myself in a tiny clearing a just few feet from the pond.  Long dead branches and the remains of a couple of knocked down large trees lay around the area.  I walked over to one dead and bare stump that was still standing.  All that was left of it was a scrubbed clean trunk about twenty feet high.  At the top of it, the wood was jagged and torn. 

Suddenly I knew why. 

I realized with a thump in my chest that thirty years before, it had ripped the wing off our airplane as we sheared through it.  The path we had traveled began to resolve around me as I stood there and soon became clear.  I could suddenly make out the entire thing.  It was here, after all!  It had happened right here!

My head spun.  I had to find Kim and tell her!  I turned and hurriedly walked back along the cow path through the trees looking for her.  Then saw her.  She stood a few meters away from the clearing I had found, in the shade of a few trees.  She was looking intently at an object that she held in her hand.  Dr. Bunting stood a few feet away.  They glanced up at me as I approached a stunned look in her eyes.

“Look at this…” she said and handed me the object.  “I found it on the ground right here.”

I took it.  It was a shiny metal chunk.  It was obviously deformed as if it had been smashed by something.  It was heavy chrome, so whatever twisted it, had done so with considerable force.  The realization of it took me and I looked disbelievingly at Kim, and then looked over at Dr. Bunting.

“It’s called a pitot tube,” he said.  “It’s used to measure airspeed.”

“From...the plane?” I asked in barely a whisper, still not quite getting the meaning of the artifact I now held in my very hands.  He nodded.

I stared at it for a second, still in shock. 

Never in my wildest imagination of this trip did I ever think I would ever actually hold a piece of our plane.  I believed it all had simply vanished like a cloud into the passage of time and could not have possibly left any trace.  I got hold of myself and directed Kim to follow me back to the tree.  As I did I scoured the ground in case there were more artifacts.  I stopped upon coming across a small jagged piece of clear, curved plastic.  I knew immediately it was from our windshield.  I bent down and picked it up, studying it intensely.  My head reeled.  I felt like I was going to faint.    

I am still trying to formulate the impact that that moment had on me and it is hard to put into words, but that moment was the instant that I really knew the truth.  It was the moment I really became part of this whole thing and realized it had happened to me...all of this really happened to me.  Up until that moment, I don’t think I ever really understood that. To hold those pieces of that plane in my hands changed my whole perspective forever.  They were the physical link to the puzzle that made it real - truly real - for the first time in my life. 

It was as profound a moment as I have ever experienced.  I have no other to compare it with.

I had come here to try and find for myself what it was my dad had seen when he went into that field - foreboding, black, and thick with fog, like some horror movie.  To try and relive what he must have felt when he had stumbled across what was left of his wife.  To try and grasp the sensation he learned as our blood smeared his clothes while he tried to save and protect us.  I had come here to get in touch with that horror and maybe get a taste of it so that I could know the truth of what had happened.  So I could break through it and try to make sense of it all. 

But what I realized instead was that it simply wasn’t there.  It was just a pond, and a forest, and a field, and the spring breeze, and the birds.  It was just me and Kim walking through the trees.  It was my new friends as they watched us.  The horror was long gone.  It had vanished long ago like the fog, maybe as my dad left with us, maybe by the wash of Larry’s rotors, maybe by the departure or the CAP team, or the wake of Gary and Dick’s truck, or the wind from Looking Glass’ engines. Maybe it only existed in the minds of those who witnessed that night from the same perspectives.  At any rate, it was gone by the time I got there. 

I felt as though I was too late when I realized that, and for a moment I was crushed because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to tell the story without it.  But then, as I stood in the shade of those trees, listening to the breeze and the birds, I suddenly realized that I didn’t need it to tell the story.     The horror wasn’t the story.  The words on this page are.  The words from all those people.  The impact of what came after.  The life of my mom.  The healing that Jon spoke of.  ATLS.  That was the story.  Not the pain.  Not the dark.  Not the death.

The life. 

To my surprise, I was uplifted by the life I now saw all around me, like I was observing it for the first time.  Suffice it to say that my own life took an entirely different meeting at that moment and it made me understand finally why I was standing there: 

I was just supposed to tell this story - any way I could. 

As I stood there, the truth was like being hit by an unexpected wave.  I was stunned and amazed.  Joyful and horrified.  I simultaneously wanted to scream and laugh and dance and spin around and fall to my knees and pound the earth in rage on the very spot where my mother lay dead and bloody so long ago…but I couldn't make any decision of which one to do. 

So instead I just stood there immobilized by the enormity of it, holding an old chunk of metal and a broken piece of plastic that had no meaning to anyone at that moment but me and Kim.  All I could do was gaze around at it all and take it into my frazzled mind where it sloshed around like water in a bucket. 

And yet in the midst of it all I was aware of a peace and calm slowly draping itself over me, the likes of which I had never before known. 

Like a gift from my mother.

After awhile I forced myself to breathe, and then I found that I was able to move again.  I looked over at Kim, then at Helen and Gary and Dr. Bunting with tears in my eyes.  And I smiled.  I affirmed for myself in that instant what it was that I had to do.

So I tell you the story…

And I am glad.

The end.