It was Mikayla who came up with a way of getting around my persistent block in talking about the pilot when she suggested very gently that I take a look at his blog, which took its name from his call sign. A call sign, in this case, meant everything to me—it was a handle that was at once deeply personal but also one step removed from how his family might have thought of him. With a call sign, I could touch lightly around the idea of who he was and what it felt like to meet him only after his death. I could read his posts and hear a voice in his writing that was simultaneously familiar and strange in its technical expertise and deeply romantic in its descriptions of flying. I could read the outpouring of grief in the comments left and feel like the weight of all that sorrow was somehow buoying me and shaping all of my unspoken panic and shock and sickness into something that made a little more sense. This is awful, it said. This is awful, but this is what happened.
Holding on to a call sign first and then using it to pull myself slowly and tentatively closer to learning about the man whose death I witnessed allowed me to tread lightly around the fear I had grown up with, that one day I would find out very impersonally, on the news most likely, that my father’s rig had caught fire and that he was never coming home. It allowed me to hold my breath and edge just past the nearly identical fear that I now found myself married to.
It was important for me to read this man’s words and the comments of the scores of people who wrote in to his blog because it gave me back my faith in words, that even though they didn’t have the power to hold a plane aloft or weaken the wind or move the fuel needles up a bit, maybe they could map the terrain of grief that surrounded the crash and help us all feel a little less lost in the middle of it. I also took great comfort in the skill and elegance of the pilot’s sentences and the fact that I could lever myself up out of my sleepless bed and bring them up on my screen even in the middle of the night, even after it had finally begun to sink in that he was really gone. Finally, reading his words gave me some kind of hope that if I just kept looking, maybe I could find my own words again, and maybe if I were careful, and honest, and respectful, I could build some kind of small memorial to this other writer out of the moment our lives intersected, and how that moment changed my life forever.
The more I learned about the crash—and that was very little, since it was under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the process is very slow and methodical—the more it seemed like nothing could have been done to prevent it and I struggled to put a name to how I felt about it. The pilot’s skills were second to none. The controllers had done nothing wrong. The jet had not malfunctioned. The weather—the weather—had simply changed too suddenly, and the pilot had been unable to land at Fallon and was rerouted to Reno, but then the airfield at Reno had closed before he’d gotten there so he’d had to turn back around and try to make it back to Fallon. The visibility and winds at Fallon had been too poor for his first approach at the main runway so he’d tried to turn around and land on the other one. And that was where I had picked him up, whipping into that last desperate turn.
It baffled and angered me to think that for all the technology and all the knowledge and all the countless hours of studying and briefing and debriefing that went into these flights, and despite the fact that we were whole oceans away from where the real danger, the actual war, was taking place, something as simple as the weather, something as old and elemental as wind and ice, could still screw everything up and send a man into the ground. And ultimately there wasn’t a single thing we could do about it.
That is either the most comforting or the most upsetting thing in the world and I still don’t know which to call it.
The NTSB posts accident reports on its website, everything from aviation accidents to hazardous materials mishaps, vehicle crashes, marine accidents, and train wrecks. To a certain kind of person in a certain frame of mind, these reports can actually be deeply comforting. To me, the aviation reports are especially soothing because even though they are graphic encounters with seemingly infinite variations on my worst nightmare, their mechanical language and fanatical attention to dissecting every last possible detail, and then issuing a flurry of forcefully and specifically worded warnings and recommendations, has much the same effect as hearing those words sputtered back in the steam of a shower from a student pilot learning them by heart.
I realized that even if there were no bold declarations of warning or definitive statements coming from the crash I saw, I could still look back at the early days of Ross’s journey through flight school and truly understand where all those other cautionary lessons keeping him safe came from and how expensive they were to learn, and from that I could extrapolate an intense feeling of gratitude and reverence for all the altered lives and stories beneath those terse, all-capped words.
Finally, seeing the crash was a jolting reminder that Ross and I still had time. I was depressed and we were both exhausted, things between us were not good, but we were both still alive with one healthy son and another on the way. Sometimes it takes looking at the ultimate bottom line to realize that the place you happen to be stuck isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.
CHAPTER 21