Twenty years ago, this story began in a New Jersey town called Morristown, where today will end.
I depart from Syracuse at noon, heading southbound on I-81 and attempting yet again to harmonize with Thom Yorke as I do so. As I leave Syracuse, I think about the one Lockerbie Scholar who did not.
I first heard about Andrew McClune from another 826 Seattle volunteer who attended Syracuse at the same time as him. As I heard the story, Andrew’s father killed himself in Lockerbie shortly before Andrew left for Syracuse, and months later, Andrew flung himself out of a window to do the same. When I asked Judy about this last year, though, she offered a major correction: He didn’t intentionally kill himself.
Andrew McClune got drunk and fell out of a window.
While the degree of tragedy is lessened by the increased degree of stupidity, either way, a young man lost his life. A boy who was supposed to return to Scotland with memories that would last a lifetime was instead shipped back in a casket, a cruel reversal of the tragedy that visited Lockerbie 15 years earlier.
Could Andrew’s death have been prevented? Probably. Definitely. The question is, what could have been done differently? There were no lies about bomb-sniffing dogs, no security procedures skipped in the name of expediency, no memos ignored.
Andrew was merely a kid trying too hard to enjoy himself, a crime we’ve all been guilty of at some point.
Around 2:30, I’m only miles away from my birth state. I’ve successfully skirted Scranton, home of our esteemed Vice President, Joe Biden, and the newly-formed Michael Scott Paper Company, and made my way to a town called Stroudsburg before my stomach finally calls for me to stop for a snack.
My stomach possesses brilliant timing.
I find a Dunkin’ Donuts off the highway and swiftly devour a chocolate frosted. On my way back to my car, I notice the store next door—the Almost Amish Quilt Shop—and I laugh to myself as I get into my car. Amish status always struck me as a binary thing: Either technology is the Devil, or technology is not the Devil.
If the Almost Amish Quilt Shop needs a new slogan, I will let them use the following free of charge: Almost Amish—Because technology is evil, but living without the Disney Channel is worse.
Ten miles into New Jersey, as I drive along I-80 through an unknown town, my car’s stereo envelops me in Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism. Five and a half years after I first heard this album, I’m amazed I still love it—by all rights, it should have long ago become one of those time-and-a-place albums that trigger some combination of pain and nostalgia1, but it remains one of my favorites. My feeling that I shouldn’t enjoy it any more arises almost entirely from the title track, a nearly eight-minute opus that features Ben Gibbard repeating the sentence “I need you so much closer” for half of its duration. When I first heard this album, I found those words painfully relatable. Over the years, those feelings dissipated, but my affection for the album has not, and along the way it earned a spot in my top five albums of the decade2.
Several songs past the title track, while I contemplate the rest of that list, the driver of the car beside me decides he would like his car to occupy the space mine already does.
I see his vehicle’s movement out of the periphery of my eye as it glides ever closer to mine. At first, I don’t react, convinced that he will notice me and abort his attempted maneuver, but he doesn’t, and as his car closes within inches of my own, I swerve from the middle lane to the unoccupied left lane to avoid a collision.
Or so the theory goes.
Reality, which is far less cooperative, finds my car on a trajectory that, if continued, would cross the left lane, the left shoulder, the grassy median, and into a collision with the trees in the median within seconds, so I jerk the wheel clockwise in an attempt to correct. Adrenaline kicks in and I overcompensate, slingshotting my car back across the interstate, spinning out of control at more than 60 miles per hour.
“Lockerbie, Scotland?” my uncle Steve asked rhetorically 12 days ago, remembering his initial reaction to the attack. “Where the hell is Lockerbie, Scotland?”
In my 25 years of life, only once have I believed my demise was imminent.
My freshman year of college, I redeemed some frequent flier miles to visit Memphis for the Beale Street Music Festival on the first weekend of May. I caught a late flight down on Thursday, which was scheduled to arrive at almost midnight, likely the last plane in before FedEx took over the airport runways overnight. Everything went smoothly for the first 1,600 miles or so of the flight, until turbulence kicked in over Arkansas. I had flown more than 100,000 miles at this point in my life, so turbulence was plenty familiar to me, but this was not an ordinary pocket of unstable air.
The plane bucked violently, rising and dropping suddenly and drastically, and for the first time and only time to date, I felt grateful for the presence of seat belts on planes. This turbulence continued for minutes, in the darkness of near-midnight. Outside the porthole window, I saw only blackness.
And I wondered what my father’s final moments of life were like.
The wind kept hold of the plane, throwing it around, and my mind jumped similarly, bouncing between two thoughts:
- What a strange coincidence it would be if my father and I both died onboard airplanes.
- I did not want a death certificate from Arkansas.
The latter thought won out and became more prominent in my mind. All I could think about was how I would die at 18, how my story would become “Born in New Jersey, died in Arkansas,” with no mentions of the few things I had done in life or the many things that I never would.
Then, the turbulence stopped.
“Lockerbie, Scotland? Where the hell is Lockerbie, Scotland?”
One day, you check your mail and find an envelope from an unknown source which contains two things: your future obituary, and a plane ticket.
You’re sure the obituary is yours, despite many details being redacted. It’s your place and date of birth, and while the date of death is mostly blacked out, you can kind of make out the year, and it doesn’t look like this one3. The whole obituary is vague enough that you can’t tell if it’s from next year or decades from now, but you’re almost 100% confident it’s not this year. In addition, the cause of death has been redacted4.
In other words, you don’t know when this obituary was written, but you’re certain it’s yours, and you’re confident that you will not die before the end of the year.
The puzzling thing—aside from this entire scenario, of course—is the place of death, a Canadian town you’ve never heard of. Google Maps tells you it’s a small town in the wilds of the Yukon Territory, several hours’ drive from the nearest airport, with a population of a few hundred people and several thousand caribou.
Weird, right?
Weirder still is the second item in the envelope: a round-trip plane ticket to that nearest airport, good for a weekend next month. Someone paperclipped a note to it, written in perfect calligraphy: “We’ll pick you up at the airport. The whole trip is on us. Hope to see you soon!”
Somehow, you’re certain this isn’t a prank.
So, you now know that, at some unknown time in the future, you’re going to die in a town that, until now, you didn’t know existed. Next month, you can visit this place for free, and your safety is functionally guaranteed. You can see the town, and meet the people, and perhaps even pet a caribou. Maybe you’ll like the town, maybe you won’t.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or even whether or not you go. One day, your final living moment will occur in this place.
Do you want to see the town where you die?
“Where the hell is Lockerbie, Scotland?”
I’m alive.
I’m not in any pain.
I should get out of the car.
After confirming my first and the second thoughts5, I turn off the car and climb out, scratching my arm on some brambles as I walk to survey the damage.
My car lies fifteen feet off of the right shoulder of the interstate, and skid marks trace its trajectory off the road, revealing that the car spun about 235 degrees clockwise. Somehow, I managed to careen across the entire width of I-80 in the mid-afternoon without hitting another vehicle. Even more amazingly, the brambles injured me more than the accident itself.
“Are you okay?” a middle-aged woman shouts at me as she walks from her minivan, stopped on the shoulder up the road.
“Yeah, I think so,” I reply, in a state of shock, but not the clinical kind.
“What happened?”
“Did you not see that guy?” I ask.
“Did he hit you?”
“No, he was about to, so I tried to avoid him, but I spun out,” I reply as I survey the skid marks, still stunned.
“Well, I’ve already called 911,” the woman says. “Do you want me to wait here with you?”
“If you don’t mind,” I affirm, and as she backs up her minivan, I take a look at my car to see what the damage is.
The back rear bumper features a brand new 18-inch dent where the car rammed into a tree, but apart from that, I don’t see any real damage. It strikes me how lucky I am that the car spun around—its design means the engine should implode with virtually any frontal impact. I may even be able to keep going, albeit with the dent making my car a less-than-pretty sight6.
I’m simultaneously relieved and disappointed by this thought. While my greatest fear was the possibility of a crash somewhere along the way that would halt this whole thing, now, I’m close to the end geographically, if not chronologically7. If my car dies here, I could rent a car for the last ten days, then fly home from Boston, saving me at least a week of driving. Maybe I’ll replace the car, maybe I won’t. I could probably get by on public transit and walking.
Another woman dashes towards me from where she parked her minivan a couple hundred feet up on the road.
“I saw the guy who did this,” she tells me. “He’s stopped just ahead of me up there. Do you want me to get his license plate number?”
“That would be great,” I reply, and she heads back to her car, only to return moments later and tell me that he drove away while we spoke.
Soon, the highway patrol arrives. The first patrolman is very nice and generally helpful, asking me a few questions including how fast I was going. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that, ever since I got this trip’s second speeding ticket back in Georgia, I’ve made a point of staying within five miles per hour of the speed limit, but in my current state, I can’t remember what the speed limit here is. I know it was 55 when I first crossed over from Pennsylvania, but can’t remember if it increased since then, so I tell the officer I believe I was going 60, but am not entirely sure of this.
A little while later, a second, less friendly patrolman pulls up and asks the same questions as the first. When I tell him I believe I was going 60, he calls me a liar. I tell him I’m not certain of this, and he tells me that if I was going that speed, I never would have had the accident that I did. What’s more, he threatens to write me a ticket for failure to control my vehicle—as there was no contact with another car, the responsibility for this lies entirely on me. Fortunately, the decision whether or not to cite me lies with the first officer, and he opts to not rub salt in the wound.
While I wait for the tow truck, I call my mom to tell her of the incident. She’s mildly panicked until I assure her that I am uninjured, the car appears intact, and things could be far, far worse. She offers to look online for a dealership where I can have the car towed, but I tell her I can find one on my phone just fine. Despite telling her that I don’t need any help, she suggests that I call our family friends in Morristown for assistance, even though I’ve told her several times I would rather not see them on this trip.
The tow truck arrives as I look up dealerships on my phone, and while Google loads my search results for a Morristown-area Chrysler dealership, I receive an email from my mom with a link to the same search.
After inspecting my car, the tow truck driver points out that the muffler partially detached from the undercarriage. When he drives the car out to an angle from which he can load it onto the bed of his truck, I see what he meant, and wonder about the practical repercussions of the damage.
We talk as we drive to the dealership, discussing the appeal of New York City and why I’m this far east in a car with Washington plates. When we reach Morristown, we discover that the dealer I located online does not have a body shop, and the staff there directs us to another one ten miles away in East Hanover. The body shop there closed minutes before we arrived, so I leave the car for them to look over tomorrow, and arrange for a rental. The woman helping me asks what kind of car I want, and I tell her that I neither know nor particularly care. All I need is something with enough trunk space for my luggage.
She assigns me a Chrysler Pacifica, a large white SUV with enough space for not only my suitcases, but a fully inflated bouncy house. Unfortunately, while it offers more cargo space than I could possibly desire, the stereo only has room for one CD at a time, and as I once more follow my GPS’s directions to the hotel where I have reservations for the next few nights, I discover this vehicle handles with all of the grace of a beached whale on LSD.
Until this moment, I never particularly believed in karma. But, as I come to grips with the monstrosity I’ll drive for at least the next few days, I remember how I mocked the Amish a few hours ago.
I’m still proud of that joke.
I selected my hotel, a Hyatt in what passes for Morristown’s downtown, for one practical reason and one irrational one. Practically speaking, it was an easy choice, because it was the only hotel in Morristown whose existence I knew of—more than two decades ago, when I believe it was called the Headquarters Plaza hotel, my mother’s parents stayed here. I can’t remember the occasion for certain, but logic tells me that it must have been in the immediate aftermath of my father’s death. My grandparents rarely travelled due to my grandfather’s health8.
This leads into the irrational reason for staying here. I remember standing in my grandparents’ room in this very building with my face pressed up against the window, staring straight down at the street. I remember feeling scared of the height9, wondering what would happen if the glass broke and I fell.
Here, at the age of five, I first contemplated my own demise.
Here, now, settled into my room, I try to replicate that experience, and discover I can’t. In my mind’s eye, the street appeared directly beneath the window, the hotel built straight up from the sidewalk, but my room sits back quite a bit from the road. It offers quite a view—from this height, I can see for several miles across the region I first called home—but not the one I remember.
As I leave the hotel in search of dinner, I stop and take in the blocky shape of the building, and realize that all four sides are set back a good distance. I could never have seen what I remember so vividly.
My mind has lied to me for two decades, and I wonder how much else I’ve gotten wrong.
- From the Greek nostos—return home—and algos, meaning pain. My pretentiousness is showing.
- As of this moment, the other four are, in no order, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, the Postal Service’s Give Up, the National’s Boxer, and Radiohead’s Kid A. See previous footnote.
- Which means this isn’t just your obituary, it’s a spoiler for your 4th of July parasailing trip. But that’s not the point. Stay focused here.
- So, don’t get too cocky about your parasailing skills.
- At least as much as the first can ever be confirmed.
- Again, I drive a Chrysler Sebring.
- Or literarily.
- In the summer of 1982, my mother’s father had a heart attack, and then a stroke while he was in the hospital. He lost the use of his right arm, and only had partial use of his right leg for the rest of his life.
- While I did not inherit my father’s crippling fear of heights, I do occasionally have a hard time with my location on the Z axis.