Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  There is nothing primeval about the forest. The under-story is waist-deep in places, an expanse of bramble, bull brier, wild blueberry, and low-growing laurel that makes walking a straight line impossible. Thrashing through it, here and there, in various parts of the camp, you come across the remnants, now overgrown, of the stone walls that stood over a century ago when the land was given to pasture, evidence of the agriculture that flourished here before the second-growth forest reclaimed the territory.

  Such a random thing to have happened in such a random place.

  It was across this dense, inhospitable terrain that Suzanne fought her way in the dark before coming upon a trail that night. This is the rough scrub we pushed through moving clear of the wreck, the same underbrush through which firefighters bushwhacked a path to reach us, then carried us out. It is possible that those firefighters, forcing their way into the forest, created the path Monroe and I followed to get here.

  “This trail did not exist” back then, says Monroe, who grew up in Centerville and has been hiking these woods since his youth, when he himself was a Boy Scout.

  An emergency dispatcher for the Barnstable Fire Department’s Centerville-Osterville District, Monroe, forty-seven, the father of three boys who also passed their scouting days here, is spending this weekday in late July the way he frequently spends his day off, taking care of business around the camp. His running across me today, if unexpected, was not unanticipated. Monroe is a veritable picture of the Scout motto, “Be Prepared.” From the sturdy soles of his hiking boots to the peak of the baseball cap projected over the lenses of his sunglasses, he is outfitted for a day of orienteering. Around his neck is a red bandana, and circling his waist, cinching the khaki cargo shorts into which his T-shirt is tucked, is a wide leather belt stenciled with the words “2005 National Scout Jamboree.” It’s a good bet that in at least one of his pockets is a decent magnetic compass.

  I was driving home from asking questions at the Yarmouth Fire Department when, without having planned to do so, I skipped the on-ramp to the Mid-Cape Highway and found my way to the camp entrance. I didn’t know what I’d run into. Maybe I’d come away with a name, I thought, someone to contact who held some institutional memory of the place. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival, I was introduced to a man by the name of Ed Matthews. Known to the scouts as Uncle Ed, Matthews, who today operates the camp trading post, was a provisional scoutmaster the year of the crash. He was one of two or three people in camp that night, which fell at the end of a staff week preceding the start of programs.

  “We heard the plane coming over, [but] we heard them all the time,” he told me.

  Matthews, with what he wanted me to know were “forty-three years at this camp,” had not much to tell me about the crash, but his memory of it seemed clear enough. His reason for having so little to say was probably implicit in the first thing he said when I mentioned it.

  “It was a sad thing,” he told me, looking away.

  I thanked him after spending a few minutes with him, and let him get on with his work. I was standing in the tiny administration building, leaving my number with the helpful woman who’d greeted me as I entered the camp, when Bill Monroe happened to walk in. He and I were introduced, I told him what I was looking for, and Monroe said, “Follow me.”

  The slope where the sassafras grows is maybe a half a mile from where the trail ended in 1979. The camp has undergone changes since then. To get where Monroe and I are now standing is a hike of no more than a few minutes from what today is the camp athletic field.

  “My first recollection of the crash was the newspaper,” Monroe is telling me, and he says he remembers asking himself, Where is that? That’s the worst place they could’ve come down.

  Monroe was nineteen years old that year. For the three years preceding that summer, he had been on the camp staff, but by 1979, having started college and working summers to pay his way through, he was coming by just once a week to say hi.

  “I don’t think it really affected the program that summer,” Monroe says, scouring the slope, “because it was this [remote] part of the camp. This part was used back then for long-range hikes, orienteering class . . .”

  Whatever curiosity he had as a teenager did not extend to the presence of the fuselage that for several days lay cordoned off in the woods.

  “I didn’t,” he answers, when I ask if he hiked out to see the wreck. “Actually, for whatever reason, I stayed away. I think I had an uneasy feeling. I remember talking to another kid who was on the staff who hiked in from the other side and came upon it.”

  The sassafras is growing on the edge of a stretch of narrow pines just below the top of what is known as Prospect Hill. The pines, and the oaks intermixed with them, are smaller, clearly younger than the range of trees sloping away on either side of them. The sassafras is about the same age.

  “This is what comes in after you disturb this ground,” he says. “Scrub pine. That’s the first thing that grows back in. It’s the first thing that seems to be able to take root.”

  After you disturb this ground.

  “This is the spot where I have always been led to believe the fuselage lay,” he says.

  Bob Phillips mentioned this place.

  He mentioned it to me at the ballgame and to Monroe sometime before that. While out on the trail with scouts one day, he had come upon this spot. Growing on its border is a tree whose trunk is stripped of its bark in a large, deep, circular scar about fifteen feet off the ground. Catching sight of the damaged tree, Phillips at the time had remarked to himself, as he later told Monroe, “That’s probably from the plane crash.”

  Having been here that night as a firefighter, the night the trail had first been cut, Phillips would have been in a position to know.

  “I can’t think what else would have caused it,” Monroe says, seeing it now for the first time. “Up that high . . . It was never in a place where a Boy Scout with a hatchet could have cut it. That’s something large that . . .”

  He pauses for several seconds.

  “That’s something large,” he says, “that cut that tree.”

  With regularity, all the time we’ve been out here, the roar of incoming aircraft has punctuated the conversation. They’ve been erupting in on us overhead, airplanes skimming the tree-tops, so low you can count the rivets, drowning out our words, vectored in on final approach to runway 24 at Barnstable, two and a half miles to the southwest.

  What scoutmasters announce as airplane breaks, around campfires or during class, are a frequent occurrence in the camp. They are observed with regularity, whenever a plane comes over. “If a guy just keeps talking,” Monroe explains, “you’ve lost thirty seconds of whatever it was he was saying.” Such breaks, he tells me, were common when he himself was a scout. “You’d hear it coming, and he’d say, ‘Plane break!’ and he’d fold his arms and he’d wait for it to go by and then continue as if nothing ever happened. The eerie thing of it is, as a kid, being in camp on a foggy day, you couldn’t see anything, but you could hear it. The ceiling comes in very, very low.”

  I can imagine the ceiling coming in as he says it.

  I remember lying here twenty-eight years ago. I remember being unable to see anything. I can remember how, here in the night, in the stillness of the forest, the eldest of the three sisters slipped in and out of consciousness, screaming, how she screamed when the power to the emergency light died and the doorway of the downed airplane, the only source of illumination, went dark, how at that moment, the impenetrable, fog-shrouded night went from bewildering to immaculate black.

  Once we’d escaped the airplane, terror gave way to a certain sense of relief, but it never really departed the field. I remember lying still, adrenaline pumping, wondering if they knew we were down. It wasn’t a question of whether they’d find us, but how long it would take them to do it, and how many of us would be alive when they did. How many would be alive when dawn broke? Here we lay twenty-eight years ago, we lay here for ove
r an hour, though it seemed longer than that. I remember little of how the time passed. And the things I remember are among those things I continually have to remind myself to forget.

  Quite a thing, as someone said, for a summer evening on the Cape.

  Monroe and I are making our way back to the trail when he tells me about the stories. Here, on foggy nights, he says, in the dark shadows around flickering campfires, one of the ghost stories that animate the bedtime hours is the mysterious tale of a plane that crashed, vanishing one midnight long ago, deep in the deserted forest.

  Monroe is careful to add that he cannot attest to the details.

  “I’ve been told that people tell the story, but haven’t heard it told.”

  I try to imagine how the story is told, wonder what it would be like to hear it. I wonder if it changes in the retelling. It has been passed down as part of the folklore, and summer-to-summer, turning in on itself, it has entered the realm of the apocryphal. Here, where they happened, the events of that night are enveloped in the mist of legend. Here, on this ground that has been disturbed, the sassafras, beginning its rebirth on the Cape, stands in witness to a strange reciprocity. This place that haunts our memory is now the shadowland of a children’s fairy tale, and we upon whom its horrors were visited are the ghosts by which it is haunted.

  I first heard mention of the stories before I met Monroe, when I stopped by the camp some months earlier, curious as to whether it was still in use and, if so, whether those who used it had any knowledge of the crash. The season had ended, and I was talking to the young ranger in residence, an Eagle Scout attending the community college. He looked to be just out of his teens. And he was as curious as I.

  “They say one night, a long time ago, a girl walked down through here who crashed in a plane. Is that the one?” he asked.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “It’s a story they tell.”

  “It’s a true story.”

  “It really happened?”

  In the half a lifetime that had passed, it was a question I sometimes asked myself.

  Yes, I told him. The girl and everything. Just like they tell it in the story.

  “Once upon a time,” I said.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have written this book without the cooperation of the numerous people whose names appear in its pages. I thank them for their generosity and for the time and effort they dedicated to helping me tell the story, with special thanks to the members of my family and to those survivors of the crash who came forward to help me reconstruct the incident and the events surrounding it. My fellow survivors, in leading me to an understanding of its aftermath, were as courageous in sharing their personal stories as they were in risking their lives to save others on the night of the tragedy. I am especially grateful to Suzanne Mourad. Her unqualified offer of help at the outset made the undertaking possible, and her advice and encouragement along the way were instrumental in my following the story to the end. For their cooperation, their support, their help in the preparation of the manuscript, or for other personal and professional contributions to the success of the project, I am indebted to: Jessica Almon, Alan Bowles, Marjorie Braman, Jamie Byng, Beverly Callistini, Patrick Cavanaugh, Norma Holmes, Gip Hoppe, John Kalell, Robert LaPointe, Russ Maguire, Jay Mandel, Marianne McCaffery, Anjali Mecklai, Tim Miller, Sara Nelson, Elizabeth Parker, Ed Ramey, Eric Rayman, Jim Regan, Sandie Riley, Jamie Saul, Elizabeth Sheinkman, Randall Sherman, Danny Silverman, Gary Stimeling, Susan Stinson, Steve Sullivan, and Charles M. Young. Special acknowledgment for their efforts is due Vincent Amicosante, who showed up at the game early and stayed late, and tireless Philip Richardson, who, in typical fashion, played his best hand when the stakes got really interesting.

  This book in all the important ways really belongs to Jennifer Walsh. She has been steering me in its direction for more than a decade. I didn’t know I needed to tell the story until she made it impossible not to. Her belief in it and her patience were an expression of a belief in me that, from the day she agreed to represent me, has motivated my belief in myself, and this book, more than any other, was her way of making me prove it. Among the blessings she conferred on the book was her placing it in the hands of as fine an editor as a writer could hope to work with. I have been fortunate to collaborate with many excellent editors over the years; if my luck holds out, there will be others, and all of them will be Wendy Wolf. Writing a book is difficult under the best of conditions. Writing a book like this one is like writing every word in the dark. The only thing more extravagant than the degree to which she improved it is the manner in which she made every aspect of bringing it to light enjoyable. Delivering the book would have been a more daunting and far more doubtful prospect were it not for the help of Jeff Blanchard, the one friend I trusted to read the manuscript in the course of its being written. As talented an editor as he is a writer and reporter, he was a consistent source of enthusiasm, wisdom and professional guidance. He followed the progress of the book from its inception, always there to push it in the right direction, inexhaustible in providing advice on how to push it further. Were it not for Patricia Riley, to whom this book is dedicated, there would have been little to dignify the effort.