Down Around Midnight (22 page)

So are the services of supporters like Bob Phillips, the man I was in Yarmouth to see. Phillips, fifty-five, an electronics technician, is employed by a local alarm company. He has been installing and servicing security systems for almost twenty years. For a dozen years before that, he worked for Datamarine International. For thirty years, while working full-time, he indulged what he referred to as a hobby, one for which he was paid on an as-needed basis, serving as a call firefighter in Yarmouth. He retired as a captain in 2005.

Among the numerous personnel who had put in duty the night of the plane crash—career, call, and volunteer personnel from Yarmouth and surrounding towns—Phillips had been singled out to me as having something more to offer than the others. For twenty years, on top of all his additional activities, he had been donating time to the Boy Scouts. He was currently a unit commissioner for Boy Scout Troop 50 in Yarmouth Port. Phillips was the only firefighter for whom the camp surrounding the site of the crash existed as anything more than a memory. The camp remained unvisited by all the others to whom I had talked; to them it was still and would always be a vast, inhospitable wilderness known only for the horrific rescue that had taken them there that night. To Phillips it was familiar territory, terrain he had covered since then and continued to cover in his work with the scouts. Any confusion I might have had about the wreck's location he would be in a position to correct.

We talked about it briefly. He corroborated what I'd been told. He alerted me to certain clues that existed in an area called Prospect Hill. When we finished with that, I showed him the photograph I'd shown William Smith, the picture of the unidentified paramedic checking me for injuries as I lay in the woods. I'd shown it to all the firefighters I'd managed to speak to, and so far nobody's guess as to his identity had proved accurate. Phillips wasn't able to help me there either, and with what I was learning about the deployment in question, I wasn't surprised.

At one point, according to the crash report, the Yarmouth Fire Department had forty-eight of its sixty-five-man firefighting force involved in the emergency. (Some fifty people, it was estimated, not all of them firefighters, were involved in the search itself.) And mutual aid was substantial. Fire departments from Hyannis, Dennis, Harwich, Barnstable, and West Barnstable provided fifteen additional men, and each department provided an ambulance.

“We needed the buses,” Phillips explained.

Yarmouth had only two.

We sat at a picnic table, talking, while Philips had something to eat. Fans were making their way to the parking lot. The sun was getting ready to set.

“The mosquitoes were hungry,” Phillips said, casting his thoughts back to the night of the search.

The mosquitoes and the gnats, feeding in swarms, closed in on the firefighters as they bushwhacked their way through the forest. All the firefighters I talked to mentioned it when they looked back on that night. They remembered it without my asking. For me and the other survivors, bugs were not a significant problem, not that any of us is able to recall. Maybe it was the absence of light. We lay in elemental, uncontaminated darkness, far from any source of illumination for the insects to home in on. Maybe the kerosene in which we were soaked acted as a repellant. Maybe it's just that we remember other things more.

Phillips, like other members of the search party, described what he found at the scene from a circumscribed point of view, a perspective that was necessarily limited by the professional demands of the emergency.

“You didn't wander much,” he said.

No firefighter working the crash site focused on more than one victim. I'd picked up on this fact while talking to Smith and Pete Norgeot, too. On the typical rescue, Phillips said, four men would usually be enough to carry a single stretcher. But evacuating the injured over the distance and terrain that he and the others faced on the night of the crash would call on the efforts of more. Once a firefighter arrived at the scene, his work was pretty much cut out for him.

“You started collecting people and keeping them.”

Phillips was one of “six or seven,” not counting the paramedic, who carried the eighteen-year-old sister out of the woods.

I did not ask him to describe her injuries and would not have expected him to share such information even if it were something he could recall. I explained to him that I had not talked to any of the sisters. I mentioned my call to Chatham.

He had a Chatham story, too.

Sometime in the early to mid nineties, he told me, he was doing annual off-season maintenance there on a residential alarm system his company had installed. He had serviced the account before, he said, and just as had happened on the previous visits, the name on the account struck him as familiar.

“The name bugged me. It stuck in my head. And I couldn't understand why.”

On this call, his third, he caught up with the caretaker of the unoccupied house.

“Where are these people from?” he asked.

“Michigan,” the caretaker replied.

It was the caretaker, not a relative, who'd been waiting for the girls at the airport. And this was still their house. Phillips told me that he and the caretaker talked for a couple of hours. Some fifteen years had passed since he had entered the woods looking for the girls. The three were grown women now.

“One's a lawyer,” Phillips told me. “One went into emergency medicine.”

“She's an MD,” I said, “a radiologist.”

I told him where she worked.

“Women are always harder,” I said, “they get married and change their names.”

But locating them had been easy enough.

Phillips told me that the Yarmouth Firefighters and Relief Association had taken a special interest in the girls, delivering gifts to them when they were hospitalized.

“We were sending stuff up,” he said, “on a fairly regular basis.”

It was not unusual for firemen, especially in the summer, he said, to be in and out of the hospital three or four times a day, and the local fire-and-rescue guys would stop between emergency runs, checking with the nurses they knew to see how the girls were doing.

Later, when I talked to Robert Jenney, the Yarmouth EMT who the night of the crash had argued outside the hospital with the Channel 5 reporter, he told me that the plight of the youngest sister was “the thing that got me most.” With her parents in Michigan when it happened, he said, “she had nobody,” and the firefighters responded to that. “Kids affect you more than anybody else. The guys fell in love with the little girl, and some of them stopped by to visit her.”

None of the firefighters I talked to was sufficiently familiar with the girls' medical conditions to tell me whether moving them had somehow made their condition worse.

Phillips and I talked until just before darkness set in.

“It's getting late,” Paula reminded her husband.

Everybody had left the ballpark, and it was time for him to go. If he had been home since leaving for work that day, it had been for only a few minutes. And whether baseball, the Boy Scouts, or something else, probably sooner rather than later, he would be volunteering more of his time. First, he'd be reporting to work, he told me, just as he had done after answering the call for the air crash twenty-eight years earlier. After spending all night in the woods, giving time to the one hobby for which he was paid, Phillips that Monday morning—to the astonishment of an employer who when Phillips walked in was following breaking news of the rescue—showed up at work on time.

Leaving the ballpark, walking to my car, thinking about what Phillips had told me, I had come as close as I was going to get to knowing what had become of the three sisters in whose fate I had intervened when they and I were a lot younger. I would never know the extent of the injuries they suffered or the extent to which their injuries might have been attributable to me.

I
never did find the paramedic who treated me. But I have little doubt that, had I been able to identify him, I'd have found him pretty close at hand.

“People on the Cape,” says Mary Ellen, who still works as a nurse at the hospital, “they really don't go very far.”

If this story has taught me anything, it certainly has taught me that. The circles here, when they close, turn in on themselves rather neatly, and often no farther away than the white pages. There I found the name of the copilot, or someone who shares his name. I wanted to believe it was he, and I had every reason to think so. At the time of the crash, he was identified as a resident of Vermont who had been with Air New England for only two months, but he was also said to have a local connection; he was the nephew of a selectman in the town of Sandwich. The story that the
Cape Cod Times
ran on the anniversary of the event reported that he was “flying again for Air New England,” and if what Suzanne had been told was true, he'd had even more cause than that to take up permanent residence on the Cape. When Suzanne walked into the airport that night, she noticed, amid the chaos, an airline employee, a ticket agent in the office behind the counter, sobbing. This distraught young woman, she was later told, was the copilot's fiancée.

“He was a really aggressive guy,” said Jonathan Ealy. “Helping him was sort of an odd thing . . . an odd combination of his being authoritative and emergency trained and sort of bossing me around, and his really hurting, really being in pain. At the beginning we were talking, he was lucid. By the end I was just trying to keep him awake, just making him respond to things and give me signals. His breathing was shallow, he was less lucid, he kind of got worse and worse, and I was talking to him, I was telling him stories and I was doing the freshman psychology self-hypnosis: ‘OK, we're on a beach . . .' And for ten or fifteen minutes I went into shock, I got real faint and I started shaking, and then I came back out of it again. I was hurting like hell after an hour and a half, and he was just in terrible pain, and I'm like, ‘Oh, don't die on me. . . .' He was having trouble breathing. I was contemplating helping him breathe and that was not my first choice of things to do. . . . The last half hour he was not with me.”

The copilot and I had never laid eyes on each other. To me he was just the memory of a voice in the fog, and his recollection of me had to be that much cloudier, if he remembered much about me at all. He would have had no way of knowing, as we shouted to each other in the night, which of the male passengers he was talking to. The exchange was brief and unpleasant. Our association didn't begin on very good terms. I would add that neither did it end that way, but in pondering the prospect of calling him—him, for some reason, more than the others—I realized that it didn't end at all. Our association was permanent. And if we never met each other again, that wouldn't change.

Memories and what we do with those memories, how they are physiologically encoded, inform an expanding branch of neuroscience, Elissa Koff tells me. Dr. Koff is the Margaret Hamm Professor of Psychology Emerita at Wellesley College, but to me she has always been, well, just Elissa. We have been acquainted for some thirty years now, and not until recently, when I explained to her what I was up to, did I have more than a vague idea of what she did for a living or how distinguished she was academically. In the Cape Cod equivalent of an over-the-back-fence conversation one summer evening, she and her husband, Ray, a physician, saved me hours of library research.

Traumatic events, “highly salient emotional events,” she tells me, are encoded differently from other events. They are processed by the autobiographical memory in a way that makes them unforgettable—literally. She explains the phenomenon as an evolutionary mechanism for survival. She offers the rudimentary example of a primitive human, availing himself of a particular watering hole, losing an appendage to the jaws of a predator—and remembering not to go back. Such memories are indelible, she says, inescapable “on a neurophysiological level,” because they are something you
must
remember in order to survive. The evolutionary viability of the species depends on the permanent processing of traumatic memories. We are supposed to remember bad things forever. It is how our brains are wired.

As a way of understanding posttraumatic stress disorder, the Koffs directed me to the work of neurobiologist James L. McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine, a pioneering researcher into the biochemical link between emotion and memory. According to McGaugh, it is the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, triggering the release of another hormone, norepinephrine, that reinforces the permanence of traumatic memories. He says that while the mechanism has only recently been the subject of scientific inquiry—he himself has been investigating it for about half a century—its effects have long been known.

In the past, he writes in his 2003 book
Memory and Emotion,
“before writing was used to keep historical records, other means had to be found to maintain records of important events. . . . To accomplish this, a young child about seven years old was selected, instructed to observe the proceedings carefully, and then thrown into a river. In this way, it was said, the memory of the event would be impressed on the child and the record of the event maintained for the child's lifetime.”

Roger Pitman, who views McGaugh as “the leading behavioral neuroscientist of our time,” is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School whose work on understanding PTSD the Koffs also commended to my attention. Pitman believes the disorder reinforces itself. “In the aftermath of a traumatic event,” he has said, “you tend to think more about it, and the more you think about it, the more likely you are to release further stress hormones, and the more likely they are to act to make the memory of that event even stronger.”