Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  The response I received to my Chatham call was, to my mind, a reasonable one, the stance I would expect an intelligent person to take, the natural human default mode. What did the man have to gain by cooperating with me? He was protecting not simply his own privacy but, more important, that of his daughters. And more was at stake than their privacy. There were emotional consequences to consider, too. I think I might have responded differently on the other side of the request, had one of his daughters called seeking information from me, but that didn’t enter my thinking then, and would not have changed my appraisal of things. He—and his daughters—had every right to decline.

  He could have been nicer about it. He could have thanked me for understanding. He could have wished me well. He could have feigned a small measure of regret in consideration of the bond that his daughters and I shared. He could have said something about the weather. He didn’t even give me a chance to say thank you. To apologize for any inconvenience I’d caused.

  Of all the things he could have said, he had chosen instead to insult me. And rather than come away disappointed, I came away angry and offended. What upset me most was his dismissal, the peremptory nature of it, as if he were slamming the door on some parasitic segment producer looking to juice the boss’s ratings. It was an implicit accusation of dishonesty against which I was unable to defend myself.

  The disappointment alone was bad enough. It was early in my efforts to reach out to people, the second phone call I made. What if everyone reacted this way? Oddly, the fact that he was so impolite made the disappointment easier to take. I consoled myself with the understanding that, if what I needed was important enough, I could get it whether he liked it or not. What he refused to give I could take. I could show up at his door with notebook in hand and coerce his cooperation. I could implicitly threaten him with the possibility that I might make his not cooperating the story, that with absolutely no grounds to do so, I might wonder in print what the family was hiding. I could have acted the part of the stereotypical journalist.

  Or I could honor the family’s privacy.

  The press in this country, however unworthy of its reputation for power, is something you challenge at your peril. Reporters, for better or worse, swing significant weight. The better the reporter, the more judicious he is in throwing that weight around. My own take on the advantages the institution bestows is a product of the training I received, not only as a young reporter, but as the son of a naval officer and the graduate of a public high school that predates by almost a century and a half the Declaration of Independence, a school that educated, before educating me, five of the people who signed it. Not that you can’t pick it up from a character like Spider-Man, but the sentiment is articulated best by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War, and it extends to my feelings about responsibility in general:

  “Of all the manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”

  In the end I chose not to contact any of the sisters directly. I located their mother in Michigan, and on the off chance that her ex-husband hadn’t talked to his daughters as he claimed, I wrote her a letter that explained what I was trying to do. I figured I owed the story that much.

  Pressing survivors of the crash to open up to me in the face of an expressed unwillingness was a move I viewed as inherently self-defeating. In effect, it was telling them how to respond to the question I was out to explore, the answer to which was given to me by their very unwillingness to do so. It ill served the story I hoped to tell, both in its defiance of logic and in a narrative sense as well.

  The third time I sat down with Suzanne, a year into our renewed acquaintance, I gave her the opportunity to explain her mother’s comment that “The first two years were the worst,” pushing the conversation in that direction without reference to the remark. And she answered just as she had the first time. She had put the crash behind her quickly, she said. And I was happy to leave it at that, appreciating that anything she might have told me in addressing the contradiction would have been anti-climactic to the contradiction itself. To my mind, what Mrs. Mourad had said was the better part of the story and the more telling part. And the same was true of the reaction I received from the father of the three sisters from Michigan. It revealed another, wholly individual response to the tragedy, which was illuminating on its own.

  The family’s business was no business of mine, a point reinforced by a conversation I had with Kevin Roberts shortly after reaching out to them. I told Kevin what I had run up against, and sharing my disappointment with him, I ventured my speculation on the reasons for the way I’d been treated.

  “Looking back on something like that can’t be easy for the parents,” I told him. “The crash was probably more traumatic for them than it was for their kids.”

  Said Kevin, a father himself: “I guarantee you it was.”

  And for parents in those circumstances, he added, the posttraumatic stress lingers longer. Brian McCann, when I talked to him, said much the same thing, speaking specifically about his family, expressing his belief that what could have happened, the alternative prospect, is always a greater preoccupation for others than it is for the victims themselves.

  Which may be worth considering in ultimately judging Mrs. Mourad’s comment. It may more accurately reflect parental trauma than anything Suzanne experienced.

  “Without my knowledge or my sister’s,” her brother, Pierre, told me, “my mom spoke with the dean of undergraduate housing at Rutgers, explained my sister’s situation, explained that my presence in the dorm would be of great support to my sister, and [the dean] arranged for me to get into her dorm—all this without Sue or I knowing about it for some time.”

  Securing a dormitory room at Rutgers was typically quite hard, especially for a senior, which is what Pierre was at the time.

  “I had wanted to stay in the dorms,” he said, “so had applied as a matter of course, knowing it would be difficult. Neither Sue nor I knew that, after I applied, my mom intervened to ensure that I could get not only on-campus housing, but into the very [co-ed] dorm in which Sue resided.”

  Pierre, as part of a college exchange program, had spent his junior year at Oregon State, and he did not learn of the crash until he returned home that summer. “Given that I arrived on the scene a week after the accident,” he said, “I was in the rather bizarre position of learning about that night and its aftermath sometimes years after the accident.” Recalling that Suzanne, as she had told me herself, experienced trouble sleeping at night after the crash—as was true of most of the rest of us—he pointed to no other obvious difficulties but remembers being instructed by his mother “not to initiate conversations with my sister about the accident. I mostly hung out in the background as a quiet presence. It was a privilege for me to be able to help my sister, of course.”

  According to Jonathan Ealy, not only did the crash have an effect on him that was different from its effect on his parents, but the crash affects him now in a way that is different from the way it affected him then.

  “Something I wouldn’t have anticipated,” he told me, “is that the emotions that go with it change over time. If you boil it down, it’s a random thing that actually happened on a random night to a random group of people, and I was one of them and you were one of them, and when you’re younger that’s it, it’s over on some level: ‘Here’s what happened, here’s what it felt like, the truth is the truth and that’s it.’ It was just something else that happened. When you’re young, things are just that literal. Over time, thinking about the same emotions and the same feelings . . . It’s so easy to think about them completely differently with age. . . . Then I was a kid. I now have kids. It’s the same way, I guess, as when you read a novel when you’re eighteen and you read a novel when you’re forty. It can mean a different thing to you.”

  The story of the air crash has changed not only in his reading of it but in his telling of it as well. In some ways, as with all such stories, it becomes easier to tell, he s
aid. “It’s almost like that grain of sand and there’s been enough time to sort of gloss it over like a pearl and make it smooth.” But the memories it conjures are complicated by the passage of time, and telling the story is made more difficult by the changes it must undergo. “It takes too long to tell as an adult.”

  The girls’ mother never responded to my letter.

  “You’ve got to be thinking, you’ve got to psyche yourself up for it. Otherwise you’re going to get hit in the head,” says former firefighter Bob Phillips, who was at home with his family that night when “they blew in a tone for the plane crash.”

  “It was a very long night,” his wife, Paula, remembers.

  And Phillips knew it was going to be long: “When you blow in all four stations . . .”

  I found Bob Phillips on a warm July evening on the first-base side of Red Wilson Field at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. He was sweating over the smoke of a large barbecue grill, wearing a long red apron and a conspicuous hat that on closer inspection revealed itself to be in the form of a cheeseburger. Of average height, blond, wearing distinctive half-glasses, Phillips was contributing his time to the Cape Cod Baseball League. He’d been volunteering for the past five or six years, working Yarmouth home games during the two-month season. Paula was pitching in at the nearby concession trailer.

  It was the top of the eighth, the town’s Red Sox were leading by six, the Backstop Grille was busy, and Phillips was going to be tied up for a while. Waiting for him to break free, I strolled over to stand by the visitors’ dugout, and watched the Sox go on to win it against the Orleans Cardinals, 9-1.

  The Cape League, established in 1885 and reorganized as the Cape Cod Baseball League in 1923, is America’s premier amateur baseball league. The ten-team invitational league, playing a schedule that runs from mid-June to mid-August, is host to the nation’s best college players. Fifteen percent of active players in Major League Baseball—about one in seven—are former Cape League players, and of active players who attended four-year colleges, more than one in every three played baseball here. Some two hundred former Cape League players are currently playing in the majors, and more than a thousand play in professional baseball overall.

  Athletes invited to play in the league are housed by local families, and many work part-time to pay for their room and board, seeking jobs in the community, as do most college students who spend their summers on the Cape. New Mexico governor and former presidential candidate Bill Richardson worked as a landscaper the summer he pitched for Cotuit. The University of Hartford’s Jeff Bagwell, who worked for the prevailing wage at the local Friendly’s restaurant when he played for the Chatham Athletics, signed a $96 million contract extension with the Houston Astros in 2001. But one need not look back even that far for an indication of the talent on view at the typical Cape League game. Jacoby Ellsbury, a student at Oregon State University, played for Falmouth in 2004. In the 2007 World Series, he started at center field for the Boston Red Sox, batting an extraordinary .438—the best among starters for either team—in their four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies.

  Ballplayers and their host families maintain contact over the years, and the continuity of those relationships makes for a special link between Cape Cod and the national pastime. The league serves as something of a hatchery for Major League Baseball, which has provided financial support since the 1960s. It is where young hitters swing wooden bats for the first time and where young pitchers start learning how to break them. It also allows for character screening before admission to the Show: He lived with upstanding citizens for a couple of months, he didn’t drink, he didn’t get high, he didn’t rape anybody—yeah, our money’s safe, we can sign him. So professional has the process become that the athletes today, like Olympians in the former Soviet Union, rather than shucking clams and mowing lawns to earn their keep, will more often be found conducting youth baseball clinics, providing instruction to local kids whose parents sign them up either to learn the game or advance their skills.

  Like the seashore itself, the league is one of Cape Cod’s unmatched treasures. There is no better place in the country to watch a baseball game than the terraced bank of grass that rises from the edge of the diamond at Eldredge Park in Orleans, the home field of the Lower Cape’s Cardinals. There, on a warm night, a few blocks from the ocean, you can nestle in beside the base path and cheer for future major-league all-stars—Barry Zito, Frank Thomas, Nomar Garciaparra, Mark Teixeira, Darin Erstad, Mike Lowell, just to name a few of those who are currently playing in the bigs—even talk with them if you want, during the game. And the baseball is free of charge.

  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 cir
cumscribed 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.