Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  “What a mess that was,” Mary said, when she and I talked in New York. “You were a hollow person. How do you write a novel if you don’t know who you are?”

  The book was not a total loss. I’ve cannibalized it regularly for things I’ve written since. But its failure was to me the most dramatic proof of how everything was destined to go south. It was a while before I recovered my confidence. What Mary sees as the evidence of a spiritual emptiness is Exhibit A in what Bo Bryan recalls as the void in my professional prospects.

  “I remember your house on the Cape,” he said, “the first time I walked into it, how it was mainly finished on the outside with the interior still raw, bare plywood and rough dry-wall. Maybe the house was a metaphor for your career at that stage. Your first book had created a shelter, put a roof over your head and secure walls around you—the house that Snowblind built, as Maryanne described it—and nothing on the inside was finished.”

  My sister Terry remembers the writer who started the book, and says his disappearance was merely temporary. “I would say you were a different person during that time, somewhat humor-less, angrier, frightened in a posttraumatic sort of way, and searching for answers. But once you hit bottom—maybe you just got sick of being with yourself—you climbed back up in a remarkable way.” She views the dramatic changes as transitory rather than life altering. “You didn’t need to learn to appreciate being alive. You appreciated that long before the accident.”

  I don’t know if I can say how the crash changed me, or whether the changes were for the better or the worse. To believe that I was ever entirely carefree is to dream myself into a fantasy. At some point I went from being whoever I was to whoever I am today. The crash is the biographical before and after, but it doesn’t in any way define me. It never did. It’s part of my story. Would change have come eventually anyway? Does changing so instantly come with a cost? Trying to imagine what might have been is as superlatively sad a prospect as John Greenleaf Whittier famously proclaimed. More than aromatic of old poetry, it smacks of science fiction. How might things have been different had I driven rather than flown to New York that weekend? How analytical can you be?

  In the end, you can’t really think of yourself as anything but lucky. You just ring it up to circumstance, no more consequential than being caught in the rain. Wrong place, wrong time, just one more interruption of your day.

  “Such a random thing to have happened in such a random place,” is how Jonathan Ealy put it.

  “After a while,” Terry recalls, “the only reminder of the accident was the waterbed, so eventually it had to go, too.”

  Time to get on with life.

  And that seems to be what everyone did, as far as I was able to learn—Suzanne, Paul, Brian, Jon—each in his or her own way. Brian, before saying good-bye that day in front of the Brewster Store, told me he felt “no sense of loss.” In his survival he saw a “responsibility to value the life you have, to do something with it,” he said, to be mindful of “how lucky you are.”

  “I think we’re built to get over things,” Kevin Roberts said, the day he and I sat at the beach.

  And the opportunity to get over things was ample in the case of the crash. Reminding me that she was a student back then, Suzanne pointed out, “Kids have time.”

  “I’ve always been glad that it happened when I was nineteen,” Jon told me. “If I’d been older and the same thing happened, I’m sure it would have had a much different impact. At that age I was so used to getting hit playing football, and fooling with adrenaline, that it was just something that happens, you know. My experience was not nearly as horrifying as that of a lot of the others. I was not hurt so badly that I couldn’t help out. You always wonder what would happen if, and that was one less thing I had to wonder about at that point. ‘It happened and now I know how it goes.’ ”

  Certainly, one cannot overlook youth as a factor in the way things eventually played out. In assessing nothing but the survival rate, one has to take account of the fact that the passengers were all relatively young.

  (It is harder to know how to account for the fact that of the three passengers treated and released—far less seriously injured than those of us admitted to the hospital—two, Jon and Brian, were not wearing their seat belts, and the other, Suzanne, was belted to a seat that did not remain attached to the airplane. Equally odds-defying is the reality that with three more projectiles loose to fly about the cabin, those who remained in their seats were not more severely injured.)

  That most went on to high achievement is probably a function of geography. Families with second homes on the Cape, with children they can afford to fly in, are clearly prosperous if not rich, and prosperous families typically send their kids to college. Of the seven people aboard that night who had not yet started careers, three were in college already, one was in medical school, and the other three summered in Chatham. Jon, before taking his current job, worked as a litigator and corporate lawyer, and if Bob Phillips is right about one of the Chatham sisters, that makes two lawyers and two doctors out of the seven, added to Brian—money being what he does for a living—and Suzanne, who put paid to a career in Manhattan to raise children after marrying a businessman who probably earns more than all of them.

  Air New England, with more than 600 employees, some 175 of them pilots, went out of business in October 1981, being unable to weather deregulation of the industry. One of the last of the stand-alone regional airlines, it is gone but not forgotten. Its history is preserved in a plaque that hangs on a wall of the passenger terminal at Barnstable Municipal Airport celebrating the memory of George Parmenter—a reminder to people like me, I guess, that we grade pilots on a pretty tough curve, the aviation community letting us know that if ballplayers were held to a similar standard, there’d be no Hall of Fame.

  It would be overly convenient to my story and somewhat melodramatic to suggest that all my life I had been searching for a home. My family might have been transient, but because of the family we were, we never lacked a sense of belonging, never lacked for the comfort and safety that the best of homes provides. And that hasn’t changed to this day. Nor can I say that at the time of the crash, I lacked entirely for a sense of community.

  It’s true that as a child and into my early adulthood, I was a visitor wherever I lived. It always took a while to fit in, even in a place like Boston, the city in which I was born, where my parents before me had also been born, and where all my relatives lived. My accent was wrong when I returned there as a twelve-year-old, and by the time the local accent was once again my own, I was once again on my way, speaking in a manner that would make me an outsider when I arrived at the next port of call. (A couple of years after finishing college I was fired from a Boston newspaper job, and although my employment was terminated for reasons other than the one I was given, I couldn’t argue with the city editor when he told me the paper was letting me go because I didn’t “know the city.” By then I knew Washington better.)

  But all of that changed when I got to New York.

  At the time, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was twenty-five years old, I was passing through town, and I missed my connecting flight north. By the time I got around to rebooking travel, twenty-two years had gone by. I arrived there a young man in a hurry, unable, like many people my age, to distinguish the difference between movement and action. Fearless and full of possibility, I had no plan to speak of, and there was something about the city that said, “I’ve been waiting here just for you.”

  Showing up in Manhattan was like walking the flight deck of a carrier. Everyone, it seemed, was from somewhere else, even most of the natives; those who’d been born in the outer boroughs seemed to lay no greater claim to the island than I did. Manhattan is like the navy that way. There is no such thing as an outsider. Yet for all but the truly wealthy of the people I would get to know there, as firmly connected as we felt to New York, there was always the underlying knowledge of the attachment’s being in one way temporary
. As long as we were young or at least single, we didn’t think too hard about the inevitable onset of . . . well . . . let’s call it civilian life. My New York friends know what I’m talking about. Many continue to work there, but the number of friends and acquaintances of mine who maintained residency there after they married and started families would fall short of the number of people necessary to field a baseball team. As people departed the city in the interest of putting down roots, the sense of community didn’t evaporate, but it became increasingly difficult to discern.

  My purchase of property on the Cape was in vague response to their departure and in anticipation more clearly of the day when a one-bedroom apartment, with no closets to speak of and no room for a desk, was going to be of limited utility. As nice as it was—I had the advantage of both house and apartment for the following fifteen years—it was never going to have an attic. Without the house, I would continue through life, as I had done up to then, divesting myself of memory, of everything that didn’t fit in a suitcase or on the shelf of an apartment, however cool, in the heart of Greenwich Village. I can’t say I was looking for a home, but on the brink of my thirty-third birthday, the firstborn son of a sailor, I had decidedly charted a course in search of something that looked like permanence. And here on the Cape, not far from land’s end, is where I came ashore.

  The channel that winds through the salt marsh below the house is like an ancient, eternally accurate clock, the hands of which have been sweeping for ages and will continue to sweep long after I’m gone. Reading the movement of the water, as the channel fills and empties, holding it in, now letting it go, you can almost hear the heaving of the moon, breathing in and out. Twice a month come the spring, or swollen, tides, when the sea at flood runs all the way in, overflowing the channel, inundating the marsh. The house sits bayside then. I can switch off the lights, and the full moon, reflected by the water, will cast its glow through the windows, throwing off enough illumination to read by. When the moon is new and out of sight, lingering on the other side of the planet, the stars on nights when the heavens are clear work their own brand of magic in its absence.

  Twelve-foot tides are common here at the farthest reaches of the Cape. And they’ll go out on you as fast as they come in, ebbing as dramatically as they rise. Navigation can be tricky. When you hear about mass strandings on Cape Cod Bay, the beaching of fifty pilot whales or a dozen white-sided dolphins, marine mammals misreading the migrational charts imprinted in their cellular memory, misreading them or obeying them—maybe getting their magnetic signals crossed—confused, insistent, determined to die, refusing to reverse course . . . When you look at the pictures and see them thrashing, suffocating in the dune grass, lying dead across a dry expanse of sea lavender and high spartina . . . That’s where I live. That’s my backyard on a bad day.

  At those times when the water is lazy and restricts itself to the channel, coyotes prowl the estuary. They swim as well as the whitetail deer that sometimes appear in the morning, grazing on the wooded banks of the floodplain. On a good day, an entertaining day, great blue herons outnumber the gulls. They stand out there like lawn ornaments, crouching at the edge of the channel, or in it when the tide is low, excellent fishermen, a study in patience, ignoring the burrowing fiddler crabs that scurry at their feet. I watched one of them stalking the marsh one day take a black snake out of the cordgrass. Stretched upright in the vegetation, striking from a height of four feet, it came down on the snake like a javelin. The snake was as long as the bird was tall, and during the fight, it disappeared without ever touching the ground. We get snowy egrets and ospreys, redtails and a lot of marsh hawks, in addition to the songbirds we feed. On ice floes deposited in the winter, harp seals have come in to bask.

  The largest animal ever to come within reach of the house was a killer whale. It showed up one day when the weather was nice, and it got hung up in the outer channel. An orca, a meat eater, black and white, the six-ton apex predator you see living out captivity in marine parks, spyhopping and jumping through hoops—it took a few people in a couple of boats over an hour as the tide was receding to herd it back into the bay. There was an outbreak of speculation, dismissed by local biologists, that this characteristically intelligent hunter, a member of the dolphin family, had gotten loose from the navy, which is known to have experimented with training them. A day or so after escaping the marsh, the whale showed up in Provincetown Harbor, accepting snacks thrown by various locals from the end of MacMillan Pier. It hung around there for a couple of days, then headed out into the Atlantic, never to be seen again, leaving town, no doubt, like most visitors—not that they don’t return—with the easily won understanding that a little of Provincetown goes a long way.

  The cadence of activity on the salt marsh provides a natural ebb and flow to the rhythm of my daily life. Here, the rise and fall of the tide are how the passage of time is measured. And here, twice a day, in defiance of the proverb, time and tide will wait. Twice a day everything hesitates. The clock appears to stop. The tide rushing in, before turning, momentarily pauses. The sea is immobilized between cycles. The moon appears to be holding its breath. And in that brief interval before exhalation, the water stands still, impossibly, as motionless and perfect as glass. Amid the activity there is a moment of equipoise, an instant of perfect balance.

  “Emotion recollected in tranquility.” It comes down to us from Wordsworth. It’s from his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. It stipulates a necessary distance between the experience of an event and any reasonable attempt to interpret it. In the immediate upheaval of the senses, the experience defies meaningful expression. Wordsworth was speaking as a poet, not a homicide detective. The distance he was talking about was probably measured in hours. He may have let things cook for as long as a couple of days. It could have been weeks. Or longer. I’m not sure. Thirty years, I think, he would have found a bit extreme. But few poets were more eloquent than Wordsworth on the utility of an instrument that only time can supply—memory—its agency to an author being as indispensable as color to a painter.

  Enough time has passed since the night of the crash to invite reasonable interpretation. And in contemplation of the events of that night, what I can say—the best and the worst of it—is that I’ve struck a kind of balance with them. I’ve attained a sort of equilibrium. I wouldn’t describe it as harmony. Call it an accord. Let’s say I’ve arrived at equipoise.

  Within a century of its European settlement, the Cape, its thriving precolonial forests lush with heavy stands of timber, had been stripped of its vegetation. The pine, post oak, American beech, yellow birch, black birch, American holly, hickory, American chestnut, and coastal basswood were gone, and the clearing gave way to so much topsoil loss that Cape Cod, as early as the end of the eighteenth century, was reduced to the sand dunes and salty air that Patti Page would fall in love with 150 years later. By 1850 it was an ecosystem that biologists describe as depauperate, lacking in both the number and variety of species it once supported. The thin surface of the fragile moraine, already vulnerable to wind erosion, now impoverished of nutrients, resisted cultivation, and with the end of the Civil War and the opening of the West to farming, agriculture was largely abandoned, allowing the pioneer species we see today, the pitch pine and the scrub oak, to colonize the abandoned fields. The second-growth forest took hold—more undergrowth, less biodiversity—reaching its peak at about the time Patti Page was topping the charts. In the 1950s, more woodland covered the Cape than at any time since the 1700s.

  The trees of the Cape, when the colonists came, were harvested for housing, shipbuilding, and fuel. And one tree that grew in abundance back then was harvested almost exclusively for cash, a tree that had been a staple of trade since before the settlers arrived. It was not religious or political freedom that had enticed the earliest Englishmen to drop anchor on the edge of the primeval forest. It was a tree that had first drawn them here, explorers like Bartholomew Gosnold, the man who is credited with giving Cape Cod its
name, and the adventurers who followed him, the first of them sailing under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. They came for a tree, the product of which was as highly prized by Europeans as the spices of the Indies and the incense of Arabia.

  They came for the sassafras.

  The root and bark of the sassafras, a member of the laurel family, are the source of an essential oil that was used as a fragrance in perfumes and soaps, as a flavoring in candy and root beer, and as the extract necessary, by definition, to the infusion of sassafras tea. Its leaves were dried to make filé powder, the seasoning and thickening agent used when okra was out of season in the preparation of gumbo. But of greatest importance to Europeans in the Age of Discovery were the curative properties sassafras was believed to possess. It was widely used in medicines. Sassafras was considered a wonder drug, an elixir with the power to ward off numerous maladies and cure a variety of others, including venereal disease. One of the first European imports from the New World, sassafras was also one of the more valuable. By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was exceeded as a colonial export to Europe only by tobacco.

  “This is one of the only places where sassafras grows in the camp.”

  The wilderness out of which firefighters carried me that night is still wilderness today, a forest that remains the property of the Boy Scouts, and Bill Monroe, president of the local council, has just led me to the heart of it. Monroe doesn’t know it for a fact, he says, but guesses that, at something like a mile square, it is the largest piece of privately owned undeveloped property on the Cape.