Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  “The copilot was on the downhill side, lying in a puddle of aircraft fuel. I was kneeling in a good three inches of it trying to get a big-bore IV started. He had serious fractures, he was barely conscious. I probably did a ten on him.”

  Pete Norgeot retired from the Yarmouth Fire Department in 1982. He was on duty the night of the crash, filling in on an overtime shift, when the call came in to the station that the plane had dropped off radar. Saving the life of the copilot, the most seriously injured survivor, fell to Norgeot as the senior paramedic in the department.

  Sturdy, bespectacled, sixty-six, one of those unpretentious, quietly competent men that Cape Cod produces in abundance, Norgeot has been interjecting himself between other people and disaster for almost half a century now. He worked for twenty years as a firefighter, and today he operates Northcape Towing out of Sesuit Harbor in Dennis. If your boat breaks down or you run it aground anywhere on Cape Cod Bay, you can be pretty sure it’s Norgeot you see when you see help heaving your way.

  I found Pete Norgeot on a clear, calm, almost windless day in the middle of July aboard his twenty-nine-foot Seabird, which was tied up at the end of the fuel dock at Sesuit Harbor’s Northside Marina. He and his grandson, Luke Berube, had just come in after pulling a boat off the Brewster flats. The air was warm, the humidity was low, the water was a postcard blue, and in the unfiltered late-morning sunlight, boats motored in and out of the harbor on an ebbing nine-foot, new-moon tide that had peaked an hour before.

  We were seated in the cabin, behind the Seabird’s center console, looking back across twenty-eight years.

  “A fire would have been catastrophic,” he told me, recalling the night of the crash.

  The danger of it was ever present, he remembered, and the fear of it gripped everyone in the woods, most notably the young firefighter with “three or four inches of aircraft fuel” pooling around his bunker gear who was holding the Wheat lamp by the light of which Norgeot was working.

  “The battery was low, the light was dim, and the kid was shaking so badly . . . let’s say he was aware of his surroundings. . . . I’m trying to get a large-bore needle into a small vein . . .”

  The dancing beam of the utility light in the unsteady grip of the nervous firefighter was Norgeot’s only source of illumination.

  “It was so damn foggy you couldn’t see your hand in front of you,” he said.

  And when he said it, he meant it literally. But he must have felt that, as a cliché, the expression lacked the appropriate force—though I needed no reminding how foggy it was that night. Thinking about it again, he offered a more straightforward observation, hoping it would help me understand what he had been up against.

  “I could not see both ends of the plane—that’s how foggy it was.”

  Yeah, that’ll do it, I thought.

  Inserting a ten-gauge intravenous needle into the forearm of the copilot, Norgeot, issuing the standard instructions, calmed the young firefighter down. “Let’s get him packaged and get him the hell out of here,” he said, neither he nor the youngster being unmindful of the fact that once their patient was in “packaging”—fitted with a neck brace and strapped to a backboard—they would be going out with him.

  Why the airplane didn’t ignite will forever be open to speculation. Firemen and pilots point to the chemistry of fuel because it is what they know. What none of us knows is the rest of it. Call it luck, karma, predestination. Call it the irresistibility of grace. Experience tells me that you cannot discount the possibility that the coin will just come up heads. Two and a half weeks before the crash in Hyannis, an identical airplane, a Down East Airlines De Havilland Twin Otter, crashed in Rockland, Maine. It didn’t burn either. Same airplane, pretty much the same circumstances. There were eighteen passengers aboard when it crashed, and seventeen of them were killed.

  The victims of the Rockland crash died of impact trauma. Instantly. They hit the trees at eighty-five knots, which was below the speed at which we hit by about fifty miles per hour, but the distance they traveled before coming to a stop was only sixteen feet. As noted in the government crash report, the aircraft fuselage came to rest in a near-vertical position. It is estimated that the passengers pulled forty g’s for two tenths of a second. “Impact velocity changes of this magnitude,” to quote the report, “are marginally survivable.”

  G-forces were of little consequence to the one survivor of the Hyannis crash whose velocity didn’t change right away. The passenger Jon, who was ejected from the aircraft, likened the experience to that of a bodysurfer coming up after catching a wave and “getting tumbled around” by another. It was the second thing to which he compared it, telling me first, when I reached him by phone in Alaska, “It was exactly the same feeling as when you’re back to pass and you get hit from behind by a linebacker you didn’t see coming.”

  At the time of the crash Jonathan Ealy, today the chief operating officer of an environmental and engineering company in Anchorage, had just completed his first year at Harvard, where he was quarterback of the freshman football team. A Los Angeles native, he had been recruited out of the International School of Brussels, where his father was an executive with ITT, the American telecommunications conglomerate whose holdings included, among other things, the company that had published my book. He was traveling to the Cape from Belgium to visit his Harvard roommate, a wide receiver with whom he had been recruited out of high school and whose family owned a house in Osterville. In the crash, in addition to cracking a bone in his nose, he “busted a couple of small floater ribs.”

  “I was a quarterback for just a year,” he told me. “The crash and the fact that I was small and slow and not all that great kind of cut into that career. I would have been a fourth stringer warming up on the sidelines with the varsity, and the crash kind of helped me make up my mind.”

  That he survived the crash with no serious injuries, especially surviving the way he did, defies an explanation, but that didn’t stop the NTSB’s investigators from offering him one:

  “The theory they came up with is that the fuselage actually expands when it hits . . . and what happened is the thing went onto its belly and sort of flopped open, and when it whacked into the tree it closed back up again. . . . What they told me—and of course I was nineteen and they were telling me whatever I wanted to hear—they told me if I spent my whole life playing pool I couldn’t have made that shot.”

  He said that “being a very slow football player,” he liked to tell his friends: “It was the only time I ever hit a hole on time in my life.”

  He tumbled across the ground, rolled into a tree trunk—“That’s where I broke my ribs and my nose”—and came to his feet with twigs embedded in his flesh, “sticking out of the palms of my hands and out of my shoulders. The biggest one was just a little bit thinner around than a pencil, right in the palm of my hand.” He figured he must have picked it up trying to break his fall. “I’d never seen anything like it. I had to pull them out, and it really hurt a lot at the end of the evening. More than the broken ribs.”

  Up all night drinking the night before, with the help of friends in Brussels, Jon had remained awake on the flight from Europe, warding off sleep in the belief that doing so would counteract the effects of jet lag. He had been turned around in his seat talking to Brian, trying to stay awake, when the plane crashed. It was why he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.

  Facing away from the plane when it came to rest, he stood up “railing,” he said, shouting at no one in particular: “How could you do this, I’m so tired!”

  He then turned to face the aircraft. “I was by myself, outside the plane . . . it was so misty, and for some reason, I thought we were in a swamp.” He saw the copilot draped through an opening in the side of the cockpit and rushed to get him out.

  “He was sort of helping me, but his leg was completely shattered. I was pulling him by the shoulders.” He was able to extricate the copilot from the wreck but was unable to move him far from the pla
ne. “He was a huge guy, and I was really afraid to move him. Every time I moved him, it hurt him, and hurt him worse, and after a while he just started going into shock. He was in really bad shape.”

  Jon would spend the next hour and a half attending to the critically injured crewman, leaving him for only a few minutes at a time—in the first instance, to check on the rest of us.

  “You told me to go back over and help him,” he said, reminding me that it was then that he and I talked about tying off the copilot’s leg. “The first thing I did was think about a tourniquet, and I used his necktie.”

  Jon, after that, reentered the plane twice at the copilot’s request, initially searching for a first-aid kit, which he was unable to find in the wreckage. “The lights were still on . . . I walked up the aisle, and there’s stuff, everyone’s personal stuff, strewn all over the place. I remember a tennis racket, in particular, hanging out of an overhead . . . This is really weird, I’m alone on this crashed airplane with everyone’s stuff. . . .”

  The second time Jon climbed back aboard the airplane it was dark.

  “He was hurt, and it was a long time for him to be hurt,” he said of the copilot, “and when the lights went out, he really kind of freaked out, and that’s when he sent me back in. He said, ‘Get the flashlight.’ I mean, the flashlight isn’t going to do anything, we’re not going anywhere. . . . He couldn’t get it out of his head. I went back in and that’s when it was pitch-black in that plane.”

  Not being able to see anything, which was eerie enough, was made that much more frightening by what he had seen on his previous visit: “There seemed to be fifteen miles of exposed wires,” he told me, “things that looked like they could short out and cause a spark. . . . That’s the part that scared the crap out of me. . . . I don’t know about you guys, but I was covered in fuel. . . . That’s when I started thinking, I should really try to move this guy.”

  Jon, administering to the copilot, was in more immediate danger than the rest of us.

  “You were up a little rise and away from the plane,” he remembered, “and I kept thinking you guys would probably be OK where you were if a fire started. I was literally three feet from the plane. Every time I tried to move him, first off it hurt him like hell and second off I was afraid I was going to . . . I had no idea whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing with the tourniquet. . . .”

  The copilot’s injuries were life-threatening and Jon feared that moving him might kill him, so three feet from the plane is where he remained until Pete Norgeot arrived.

  A very good friend of mine, when she and I were first getting to know each other, asked me one afternoon over coffee if any of my siblings were girls. Perhaps it was the way she phrased the question, perhaps I just got tongue-tied, probably it was a combination of both, but halfway through my response, the answer achieved a kind of immortality.

  “My sister,” I replied, “. . . is a girl.”

  My friend and I still get a laugh out of it.

  I have two sisters, and both of them are girls. Elaine is the eldest and Terry the youngest of the five children in the family. Elaine was the girl who, when she was fourteen and I was eleven, taught me how to dance. Terry was the girl who, while keeping me company the week after I was released from the hospital that summer, taught me how to walk. I have two brothers, Mike and Bill, both of them younger than I.

  Of the five of us, only Terry and I, who were born fourteen years apart, were born in the same state. Until my last year of college, we were all property of the U.S. Navy. My father, who enlisted out of high school and served as a hospital corpsman during the Second World War, retired as a captain the year I turned twenty-one. He served thirty-two years in the navy, and we kids put in varying portions of his time in service with him. Elaine and I carried military ID cards straight through to our adulthood. And in all those years that we spent in the navy, the longest we lived in any one house was maybe three of them.

  Elaine sees our military upbringing as laying the groundwork for my immediate response to the crash, my apparent disinclination to grant it any significance. Two weeks after I spoke to Paul Boepple, a man similarly disinclined, a survivor content to describe himself as just one more “lucky bastard,” I sat down with my sisters to talk about it. That we had never talked about it before, neither in its direct aftermath nor in the succeeding twenty-eight years, had not struck me as unusual until then, and is probably best explained by the conversation itself, which took place on a Sunday, outside Boston, in the backyard of the house Elaine has occupied since five years before the accident happened.

  According to Elaine, our being uprooted with every tour of duty resulted in a certain kind of dexterity. “We were so used to stopping one thing and starting another,” she said, and the pattern was established so early in our lives that we developed “skill at letting things go.” Military kids, in all the services, tend to be like that, she said. What they all share is measurable by its absence.

  “We don’t have continuity.”

  Or we don’t experience continuity the way other people do. For children in the habit of “letting things go and moving on,” argues Elaine, the burden of continuity is inevitably displaced. “You have to carry it within yourself.”

  Terry, the only child in the family who spent her formative years as a civilian, was in a position to view the characteristic objectively.

  “You never get used to investing that much in other people,” she said.

  Later in life, when romantic entanglements became complicated, others would sometimes identify this to me as being “emotionally unavailable.”

  We did invest in one another. The devotion and loyalty that exist among all the members of the family are as unconditional as the love that continues to unite us. Whether that has anything to do with being a military family is open to question.

  “You don’t depend on the friendships that sustain others,” Terry said.

  But it’s not as though, growing up, such kids are incapable of close friendships. According to Elaine, we form very close bonds: “We form close bonds and we break them.”

  Contending that “military kids don’t carry baggage,” Elaine was referring to the virtual sort, but what she said is also true in a literal sense. Not until I grew up and lived on my own did I possess much of what might be described as a tangible or material heritage: There was never a lot of memorabilia. We as a family never held on to the kinds of things that other people typically keep in an attic. All but the essentials got thrown out in anticipation of the next move. And so the lack of continuity in our childhood was intensified by a missing history, certainly a history of the kind that you could physically sift through. The house I was building when the plane crashed was emblematic of a constancy I’d never enjoyed.

  The boxes and the random assortment of old property that have piled up in the basement of the house may be viewed, by those who look for meaning in such things, as a response to my vagabond upbringing, but I think what is more telling is that I never know what’s down there until I run across it by accident. Try as I might to hold on to the past—and there are those who find me quite sentimental—the evidence that I ever enjoyed one is not something I could lay hands on in a hurry. My failure to incorporate history into my everyday comings and goings has proved sweeping. My haphazard collecting of memories gives the appearance of being nothing more than some service I render my biographers.

  So as not to appear entirely shameless in offering what I believe to be an excellent example of this, let me explain how the book business works, or tries to, at its best.

  A first author, by tradition—a custom in force when I started out and, I think, still respected today—is seldom slammed by critics. He is reviewed favorably, or he is ignored. Book-review editors, when dealing with beginners, tend to proceed on the advice of their mothers, the etiquette endlessly drummed into them when they were children: “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.”
As a consequence, first authors in large part are insulated against bad reviews, and I unquestionably was one of them. The poor reviews Snowblind received were few. That they were published at all was probably explained by the outpouring of positive attention showered on the book, which was nothing short of phenomenal.

  There is no writer alive who would not have wanted to be me then. The book was embraced critically by publications and people I’d admired for years. In great number. The press the book received, the reviews, the letters and tributes from distinguished authors I’d never met, were enough to fill several boxes. Mary, for my birthday that year, bought me an expensive leather portfolio in which to organize and display all the material. And that portfolio today is where it has always been—stashed, unutilized, in one of those boxes, none of which I’d be able to locate in a pinch.

  Memorabilia? I’ve been all over the world, I’ve made hundreds of friends, and I’ve bought maybe three rolls of film in my life. The clippings I collected after the plane crash are still stashed in a blue plastic bag labeled PATIENTS BELONGINGS. Incorporate the past? I can’t even file it.

  Patricia—I call her my girlfriend, but that doesn’t really explain it . . . I like to tell people we’re dating, but she’s been living here for fourteen years—Pat likes to say, “Time is a river.” And in all the years she’s been saying it, I’ve never really given much thought to its meaning. Doing so of late, I wondered who said it first. It’s attributed to Marcus Aurelius—Meditations, book 4—and the great Roman emperor and stoic philosopher wasn’t kidding when he added, “and strong is its current.”

  In the immediate aftermath of the crash, my neglecting to grant it any significance, at least on a conscious level, came as no surprise to my brothers and sisters. My readiness to get up and move on was a characteristic we all had in common. Able to jettison by necessity, however reluctantly, the things and the people we loved, we became that much more readily able to throw overboard the things that threatened to drag us down, things like painful experiences and memories. Dumping them was as natural in its own way as offloading those things that merely slowed us down: the scrapbooks, photos, and unsaved treasures that offered uninterrupted connection to our past. Putting the past behind, developing an ability to distance ourselves from the things that didn’t love us back, was a necessary survival mechanism when the five of us were kids. And proficiency came swift—proficiency and speed. After a while, it was as quick as cutting an anchor line.