The Last Word On Nothing

For most of my life, I’ve been obsessed with plane crashes. It began when I was in first grade, and my dad and his squadron went to Turkey on TDY (temporary duty assignment — the military equivalent of a business trip). They were there to practice dropping bombs from their fighter jets. Dad qualified as mission ready on the day that Charlie Koster died ejecting from his F-4. I became mission ready too — prepared for the next plane crash.

My little sister and I were back at home, getting ready for the walk to the school bus, when Mom gave us the news. I can still hear her words echoing against the stone entryway to our house in a West German village off-base. “Life’s not fair Christie. You might as well learn that now.”

I could never accept this message on fairness, but I did internalize the expectation that planes will fall from the sky even when the bad guys aren’t shooting at them. To this day — nine years after my father retired from flying — I can still close my eyes and re-enter the nightmare that plagued my nights for so many of the years that Dad spent in the cockpit. The dream took place in many settings, but the sequence of events was always the same. I’d be walking amid the rolling green hills of the Eiffel, or the damp fields of Korea or New Mexico’s dusty desert, and suddenly I’d feel the rumble of a jet overhead. I’d know it before the pilot did — the plane was about to crash in a giant fireball. The pilot would die, right before my eyes. Every time I closed my eyes, it was groundhog day all over again. Plane. Crash. Boom!

The recurring nightmare convinced me that this sequence of events was inevitable. A plane would crash. Someone would die. I’d witness everything. I spent my childhood preparing myself for the inevitable trauma.

It turns out, the nightmare was true. Yesterday evening, for at least the second time in my life, a fatal airplane crash happened within my eyeshot. But here’s the thing. For the second time in my life, I saw nothing.

The only reason I even know about yesterday’s deadly plane crash is that I read about it in the morning newspaper. According to the Daily Sentinel, a Cessna 210 flying from California to Aspen crashed in my neighborhood. Had I been standing outside, or even looking out my office window, I would have surely seen the fireball that neighbors called 911 to report.

Instead, I was in the kitchen, preparing the arugula salad my husband had picked from our garden earlier in the day. While a pilot was dying and firefighters were extinguishing a fiery heap, we were having had a lovely dinner, oblivious to the horror happening just up the road. This wasn’t the first time I failed to notice a fatal crash.

On the afternoon of April 7, 2004, I left the apartment where we were living in Zuoz, Switzerland to go for a short trail run down the Engadin valley. I later calculated that it must have happened sometime during that run, probably after I’d turned around to head back toward home. A Piper PA-46-350P Malibu with five people aboard — four adults and a young child —  crashed into the meadow directly across from our living room window. There was no fire, but all five people died at the scene. Despite my proximity, I saw nothing.

Hours later, I watched from our window as crews inspected the scene and wondered how I could have missed the commotion of the crash. In my dream, the crash devastated me every time, but in real-life, I felt strangely detached and unshaken.

Was it possible that my repeated nightmares had actually prepared me to handle the aftermath of a fatal plane crash? Or was my calm reaction simply a sign that I’d spent those years bracing for the wrong thing?

I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. Early wounds built my defenses against certain threats, but perhaps they also distracted my attention. It was never a plane I was afraid of losing; it was my father.

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Image from the Swiss Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau AAIB accident report.