On January 15th, U.S. Air Flight 1549 left New York’s LaGuardia Airport en route to Charlotte, with continuing service to Seattle. Famously, that flight failed to reach either of its destinations—that flight didn’t even successfully leave New York City. Moments after takeoff, it struck a flock of geese, destroying both of the plane’s engines. With insufficient altitude to make it back to LaGuardia or any other airport, the plane’s captain landed it in the Hudson River. Rescuers recovered all 155 people from the plane, which led to the event becoming known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
When this happened, I was at home, three time zones west. I slept in that day, and when I awoke and settled into my morning internet routine, I found two stories of interest: A plane had landed in the Hudson River, and the Red Sox had agreed to a four-year contract extension with first baseman Kevin Youkilis. Presented with these two bits of information virtually simultaneously, my brain found one of them shocking: What? The Sox locked up Youkilis?
I have no concept of normal.
Once the significance of the day’s events sunk in—once I remembered that most people have lives that weren’t defined by the fragility of airplanes—I read up on that whole plane-in-the-Hudson thing. Something about it tugged at the back of my mind—something about the number 1549 sounded relevant to my existence. I searched my email, and the results reminded me why the flight number sounded familiar: Less than a month earlier, I flew onboard U.S. Air Flight 1549 from Charlotte to Seattle, on my way back from Arlington, Virginia, where I’d attended the memorial for the 20th anniversary of Pan Am Flight 103.
I’m thinking about this now, because of Joe Monti’s story last night, because of his close call. Calling my Flight 1549 experience a close call would ring insincere—it’s not like someone called in a threat against a U.S. Air flight, or if those geese targeted the plane1. Misfortune, not malice, downed Flight 1549, but I still felt like I’d had a near-brush with near-death anyway.
Within a week of Pan Am 103’s fiery fall onto Lockerbie, investigators determined a bomb was to blame, but it took much longer to determine who to blame. In the ensuing information vacuum, conspiracy theories arose, and the media, lacking any concrete information, reported speculation instead. One story claimed the Palestinians were behind the attack, while the next assumed an Iranian source2. Perhaps the most harmful theory posited that an Arab-American student onboard the flight, Nazir Jaafar, unwittingly carried the bomb onboard on behalf of someone else, with some stories speculating it had been presented to him as a supposed gift. This theory gained traction in the media for a time, leaving his family to deal not only with the grief of his death, but allegations that he had been an accidental terrorist as well.
In the summer of 1991, after two and a half years of research, authorities finally assigned blame for the attack to Libya. Those authorities had reconstructed the plane in a hangar outside of London, allowing them to trace the source of the blast within the fuselage. They determined the bomb had been hidden inside a Toshiba Bombeat boombox3, behind the cassette compartment. In addition, they traced fragments of the timer’s circuit board back to a Swiss manufacturer named Mebo, while scraps of clothing could be tied to a Maltese shop.
Science and old-fashioned detective work allowed the authorities to piece together the puzzle of Flight 103’s fall. Spy satellites and helicopters searched the countryside around Lockerbie for wreckage, and, after their sweeps were completed, police searched again by hand. Scientific breakthroughs were even made in the process: After one seismologist noted the plane’s wing section hit Lockerbie with force sufficient to register a 1.3 on the Richter scale, he reasoned that seismometers could search for meteorite impacts.
For once, I’m not thinking about airplanes. Breaking from the familiar confines of I-5 for the first time this trip in favor of eastbound I-10, I’m giddy to leave Los Angeles behind4. As I drive through downtown, my car’s stereo blasts Death Cab for Cutie’s The Photo Album5. I selected this soundtrack specifically for track five, “Why You’d Want to Live Here,” a scathing screed against this very city that coincidentally begins playing right as I pass the Staples Center.
I burned The Photo Album this morning before checking out of my hotel as part of a fresh batch of CDs for this new leg of the trip. For almost anyone living today, it doesn’t seem noteworthy that I store my entire music collection on a pocket-sized hard drive inside a computer that’s light enough for me to carry around on a day-to-day basis, but this development might make my father’s brain explode, if he were somehow revived and presented with it.
The world changed dramatically since his abrupt removal from it.
When my father moved left Exxon for Prosys Tech, he explained his new job to my mother by telling her that he “made the computers at oil refineries talk to each other.” My father worked in computer networking back when “computer networking” sounded like jargon, and despite serving as president of a software company, he never owned a personal computer.
This does not bother me. I intuitively comprehend the likelihood that my iPhone has more computing power than every device my father ever touched combined. I easily understand the idea that I’ve lived my entire adult life with only a cell phone, while he lived his entire life with only what we now refer to as “land lines.” My father’s bosses in England considered him forward-thinking when he convinced them to acquire a pair of fax machines instead of constantly overnighting documents back and forth across the ocean. His future, our past.
My parents using outdated technology makes perfect sense, thanks largely to my mother, who, on two separate occasions, has insisted that she “just bought” a laptop that, upon further investigation, turned out to be five years old. She excitedly called me in 2006 to exclaim that she had purchased an iPod6, and remains the only person I know who uses AOL as her primary email.
While it sometimes feels like I live in a completely different world from my mother, she at least knows about the things she often fails to adopt. On the other hand, my father probably couldn’t have imagined modern society—in twenty years, the socio-politics have changed even more than the technology.
My father lived his entire 35 years under the specter of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, whereas the Berlin Wall came down when I was in first grade, and my aunt even returned from a trip with pieces of it for my sister and me. My father never saw even a second of a President Bush, while I’ve lived through three terms of Bush presidencies. A few months ago, I celebrated the election of the first African-American president, but when my father was born, only half of the teams in Major League Baseball had fielded even a single African-American player. His hometown Boston Red Sox integrated last.
My father cheered for the Sox, like every good New Englander—Maurice mentioned yesterday how my dad compared the Red Sox to locusts, saying that every seven years, they had a good one. He lived and died with the team, although in those days, it was pretty much all dying. At age 21, he lived in Boston, almost certainly watching eagerly as Carlton Fisk’s famous home run won Game 6, only to see the World Series championship elude the team the following day. At the same age, I lived in New York City, and celebrated in the middle of 7th Avenue outside of a Sox-aligned bar after they finally, at long last, won it all, capping the most improbable postseason run in history. In the midst of the madness, I thought of him.
I lived in New York then because my love of music landed me an internship there.
Music represents its own divide: When my dad died, virtually none of the bands I so greatly treasure existed. Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead were in college, the members of Arcade Fire were in elementary school, and Jenny Lewis, now the crush-worthy thirty-something front-woman of Rilo Kiley, was just another child actress.
Even the legends who were around then were completely different. Michael Jackson was still an African-American also known as the King of Pop, instead of, well, what he later became. U2 was riding the high of The Joshua Tree, en route to the critical failure of Rattle and Hum, before Achtung Baby would reinvent the band and launch them into the stratosphere. R.E.M. had recently released Green, but their masterpiece, Automatic for the People, was still nearly four years away. The bass line from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” had not yet been ripped off by Vanilla Ice. Nirvana began recording its first album, Bleach, three days after my father was murdered.
Cinema suffers from the same phenomenon: A few years ago, while discussing Field of Dreams with my mom, she said, “Your father would have loved that movie.”
Field of Dreams hit theaters in 1989.
What I consider the cornerstones of modern pop culture didn’t exist when my father was killed.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around these things. I know my father died two decades ago, but the scope of all the things that have come and gone since then is unfathomable. To me, there is no world pre-Cobain, pre-Achtung Baby, pre-Field of Dreams. I have never lived under the threat of nuclear war, but I have always lived under the threat of terrorism.
My dad probably never worried about terrorism.
He never knew to fear what killed him.
As I approach Arizona, signs along the side of the road count down the distance to Blythe, a town that represents the easternmost bastion of civilization in California. I should feel like I’m making real progress, or contemplate the wisdom of a pit stop. If I were a reasonable person, I would be thinking about what, if anything, this town has to offer me. Instead, I think about a different Blythe entirely.
When I attended the University of Washington, I worked at the student newspaper, The Daily, along with a girl named Blythe. I don’t remember her as part of the social core of the paper, but she was always around, and we got along pretty well. Like many people at the paper, I had a rule about not getting involved with anyone else there. Unlike those many people, I actually stuck to it.
One quarter, Blythe was appointed editor of the quarterly career guide supplement, and I offered to pen a story, only to discover via a later email that her deadline conflicted with my schedule for editing the weekly Arts & Entertainment section.
When I saw Blythe in the office soon after, I asked for a minor extension and promised I would get the story to her. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “I know you’re good for it, and if you’re a little late, it’s not like I’m going to be standing here over you, cracking the whip.”
That’s how I remember it, at least, but that can’t be what she actually said. That phrasing wouldn’t have inspired what happened next: I gave her a quizzical look and replied with some sort of quip, and something about this quip made us both laugh hysterically. For the next several weeks, we had an inside joke about “cracking the whip,” which led another co-worker to mistakenly conclude that the two of us were partaking in some antics outside of the office.
This Blythe story makes me feel remarkably old—only five years have passed, but try as I might, as I stop for gas in the town that shares her name, I can’t recall what she actually said. I remember the context of the inside joke, but not the joke itself. I remember how hard we laughed about it, but I can’t explain why we laughed about it.
I am too young to be this senile.
What I do recall, though, is the semi-epilogue to this story. A year or two later, I replaced my laptop with a new one, and ended up with a spare battery for a computer I no longer owned. Remembering that Blythe had a similar computer to my old one, I shot her an email offering the battery to her for free. She replied saying that she had replaced her laptop as well, and asked what I had been up to, since we hadn’t seen each other in a while. I was on the computer when her email came in, but didn’t want to reply immediately, so I put it off.
Two weeks later, I realized I had forgotten to get back to her, and felt so stupid about it that I never replied at all.
This sort of thing happens more frequently than I would like to admit. While there are many people no longer in my life because I don’t want them in my life, there are many more who disappeared simply because I forgot to keep in touch. I’m not a flaky person in general, but when it comes to maintaining relationships with people, I’m the worst.
As I continue into the heart of Arizona, I’m a thousand miles and counting from all of my friends, worrying if I’ll remember to get in touch with them when I get home.
I really should email Blythe.
When I arrive in the Phoenix area, two things seem abundant: daylight and traffic. The former factor motivates me to continue on to Tucson in an attempt to get ahead of my scheduled driving pace, but the latter factor takes priority for the moment. It’s rush hour, and the interstate is flooded with the SUVs of people who are presumably still wintering here.
I exit in Tempe and find my way to a gas station, filling up yet again and, in what has become a disturbing trend, scraping the remains of insects from my car’s windshield. Some day, when flies evolve to the point where they develop a language of their own, their inevitably polytheistic religion will hold a special reverence for Chrysler Sebring, the great God of Death. They will tell their children stories about his threatening grill, about the invisible glass that smashes them to death, and how they can hear his roar moments before their demise. To them, Sebring will be the most feared of all deities. To him, the flies will be nothing at all.
As they are now.
Having cleaned my windshield, I drive across the street to acquire some dead flesh for myself at a Whataburger. After I’ve consumed my combo meal, I drive onward to Tucson, where it’s already dark by the time I find a hotel off the interstate.
Before I settle in for bed, I leave a message on Blythe’s Facebook wall. A week from now, she’ll respond, and ask me to get in touch when I’m back in Seattle, unaware that my return home feels as distant to me as my father’s Cold War childhood.
- Or did they?
- Rampant theorizing tends to happen in information vacuums—I distinctly remember theories blaming 9/11 on Palestine in the early hours.
- To this day, I can’t shake the belief that the mass-murderers behind this act had a sick sense of humor about their job.
- I do not like Los Angeles.
- Perhaps Something About Airplanes would have been more appropriate.
- Despite the fact that she had, at my request, purchased me an mp3 player for my birthday nearly seven years earlier.