It was too much to ask, this tantalizing trauma on familiar ground. It was an unusual event, people spiraling to their death at 250 miles an hour. I had to know what the earth looked like. What had changed? Was it crushed? Were trees twisted, and bent to the ground? Or, was there a great hole that opened up and swallowed the plane and then returned to normal? I imagined the twisted skeleton of metal, enveloped by the forest vines already twisted through the windshield like a lost pyramid in the jungle.
It was surprisingly easy to find. Right where I thought it would be, from having seen a map in the paper. I was surprised the dot on the map was where I imagined it to be in real life, although the description was wrong. It was neither in a swamp or a gully.
I followed the trail toward the Dennis property. The woods were peculiarly silent and densely green. Surely the cloud cover had distorted the lighting. The ferns were still majestic, and this favorite habitat of mature forest and undergrowth was still an emerald pool at the tired end of summer. I swam easily through the density of green on the wide trail which is part logging road and part colonial highway, an early toll road.
When I reached the big junction where one old trail goes to the right toward route 44 and the other goes to the left toward the Dennis house, there was a peculiar smell in the air. It was only brief. Perhaps the wind brought the scent of a dead animal. My nose is very sensitive. I use my sense of smell to navigate the world. In my little country house, I mask the scent of tiny dead things with spice cookies and potpourri, herbs and incense. I especially like the clean scent of myrrh. But in the woods subtle smells jump at me, like a rotting mushroom, or a dead mouse on the forest floor.
This smell however briefly it passed my nostrils, left a tingling in my spine. I became aware of a pit opening in my stomach. The smell faded quickly, and with it the pit in my stomach. I went on, taking the trail to the left, and walking slower.
A couple of hundred yards up the trail, I saw a white fiberglass rudder. It was the tip of the tail of the plane. A couple of hundred feet further, I could see where a truck or tractor had driven through the woods recently. The ferns were crushed, and saplings cut. Only a few hundred feet into the woods I could see the remains of the crash.
I looked at the trees. Only one tree was disturbed as the plane hit it and knocked it into a 45-degree angle. It was scraped and bruised, the inner bark exposed and raw. There were only one or two limbs knocked off surrounding trees. The area was littered with debris. There were torn wet maps and tiny twisted pieces of metal. I found cracked glass covered instruments from the disintegrated panel. There were shreds of floor carpeting and vinyl seat covers. It seemed that anything larger than a book had either been carried away or had crumpled into millions of pieces from the impact of the crash. I opened the torn vinyl log book. It was a maintenance journal and schematic of the plane. I took a stick and poked in the main pile of debris that had been lightly covered with soil. Everything was soggy from the rain in the last few weeks. Beneath the leaves were twisted metal pieces of aluminum, painted olive green and, so misshapen, it was impossible to tell what parts they had been. They were inter-mingled with shredded white fiberglass.
I found a curtain which must have separated the cock-pit from the passenger seats, or perhaps a window curtain to shield the pilot from the sun. Digging further, I unearthed a pair of men’s underpants which were buried in the pile. I let out a nervous laugh, wondering if there were any body parts attached. It was a nervous cover-up, that laugh, not a taking lightly of the death I was mining from the soil. I put together the event in vivid pictures in my mind. The plane twisting and turning and crashing. The bodies torn and crushed…the blood.
It smelled of death. Not unlike the stench of slaughtering chickens, when blood gets in the soil, a cocktail of death in the air, blood in the soil, and the mildew of rain- soaked debris. I remembered the stench for a long time afterward. It was patterned in my brain. Little neurotransmitters continued to carve the vivid message in my nostrils even while I picked at my dinner and told my husband about the expedition. I feared it would follow me in my dreams for days, perhaps years, that smell of blood, death and tragedy in the soil of the woods I knew so well.
I brought one little treasure with me. It was the bill of sale for the plane. It was a piper, sold to Frank Silva, the pilot who plunged into the earth in Ragged Hill Woods.
On the way out, another wave of the odor hit me. Stronger, this was the scent of body parts strewn in the woods. I noticed some more plane parts. It looked as though it had exploded into millions of pieces which were showered throughout the woods. My mind was busy conjecturing how it happened, and why. I wondered what forces were involved in a decision for four souls to leave the planet all at once. How were they intertwined in Karmic law, and what special tasks in their spiritual lives were left unfinished? How many other lives would be affected by their untimely death?
It’s been more than thirty years since that crash. Yet the scene is still vivid in my mind. I did not know the people who died, but I knew that place in the woods so well, I thought I felt the Earth quiver the night the plane plunged to the ground. I can still smell the sweetness of the hay-scented ferns, and the aroma of death, an odd woodland cocktail which has never left my memory. This is what happens when you understand the sense of a place. Every tree, the rocks in the stone wall, and the worn paths whisper the song of those who have passed through an invisible veil into history. Only the grass, the ferns, the trees and the I will remember the crash.