38. Flight

I remember the dreadful, sickening feeling  when we were about fifty feet above the runway and the aircraft’s tail dropped down  more than I’d ever experienced during a takeoff, like when the Ferris Wheel stopped and you were tipped backwards, your feet swinging up to the level of your face and your stomach lurching in fright.  The plane rolled to the left, throwing me up against the side of the cabin.  Through  the window of the 20 passenger commuter aircraft, I saw the small buildings along the runway disappear upwards as the plane continued to roll.  The heavy curtain between the passengers and the crew was open and I saw the captain struggling with the plane, his arms shoving back and forth.  The co-pilot was partly out of his seat, reaching for buttons and switches over the head of the captain.  Then came the sound of the landing gear rising up into the body of the craft, reducing the plane's drag.  When that didn’t help, the pilot cut the power and slammed the airplane back down on the snow covered runway.   Pieces of the propellers went flying and we slid along on the snow nicely for about two seconds.  I thought that in a few minutes we’d be sitting around a small bar back at the airport sipping free drinks and congratulating each other for surviving a plane crash.   Just then we ran out of runway and the plane flew off the edge of a cliff that sits at the edge of the airport.  We were moving pretty fast and I felt lift in the wings as we shot out into the air again.  I looked out the window.  God Damn!  We were still pretty high and still flying, but now without power or control.  The snowy field below looked soft and inviting, but I knew it would not be so.   We never got a chance to make another belly landing.   At thirty feet above the ground  we crashed  through the poles of the down range air navigation setup.  The impact ripped off the wings and sent us plummeting downward.  Flight 29 slammed into the earth and broke apart.  I remember a moment of silence as I sat in shock and saw the fuselage broken open on one side of the cabin.  I  could see into the cockpit and it was a mass of blood.  The copilot’s head somehow separated itself from the gore and turned toward me in a macabre slow motion as his mouth began to open.  Then,  WHUMP!  The air exploded in a sheet of flame.  All around me was fire, enveloping me, burning me.    At that moment I realized this was the end.  I was about to die.  The dreaded moment was here.  Still in my twenties with my life barely begun,  I  was being fried in this snowy field as if I was sitting in a backyard cooker.  In minutes I’d be nothing but a grease stain in a blackened and burned out wreck sitting on a beautiful hillside of tender white snow.  Along with the terror came an intense sadness as I admitted my life was over, a realization I would have never imagined would be part of my death.  For some reason I saw myself as a little boy, maybe the son I never had.  And I longed for him, yearned for him.

The flames subsided momentarily after the initial explosion gasoline vapors.  The burning aviation fuel now spread quickly through the plane, shooting fire down the aisle like a roaring dragon.   “Get Out!  Get Out!” screamed in my head.  I didn’t even try to save the old man.  As I jumped up he reached out to me from his seat one row up and across the aisle.  He couldn’t move and he didn’t realize he was simply belted in.  It was only a few  steps to the man and I could have quickly snapped off his belt and pulled him out after me.   But the flames were all around us and everything in my being was shouting, “Get Out!  Get Out!”   I left him there, struggling.  In my memory the scene rolls out like a video tape, and I believe I saw it that way as I lived through it.  I watched, but was not in control.   But it was not someone else who was responsible.  You never know what you’ll do in a panic.  I headed toward the back door of the plane.  Something was in my way on the floor in the aisle.   My feet  marched right over  the body of a woman, first stepping on her leg, then her stomach and then her face as she held her hand up to me for help. I did not stop.  Oh, God, Oh God, I was so terrified.  And it hurt so.  My face and hands and ears, all burning.  And then I was outside the plane.  I was running, running, running.  I slowed down to grab snow from the grass to  rub on my face and hands.  Running, falling, running up the hill.  Gasping for breath, I dropped down next to a soldier in uniform as he lay on the ground.  He was conscious.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I screamed at him.  “It’ll explode!”

He pointed to his leg.  The pants were torn all the way up to his hip and the jagged end of a  bone stuck out from the meat of his thigh.

“I can’t,”  he said.

I looked away and sprang to my feet. I left him and kept running.  Running.  I wanted to see my parents again.  I wanted to hug my little brother.  I wanted to breathe deep and to savor food and drink.   I wanted to watch a sunset and sit by the ocean and see a woman smile again.  I wanted to see the son I didn’t have.  I wanted to live!

On the steps of a farmhouse a bewildered looking man in with his coat sleeve torn off  sat with his head in his hands.  I ran past him and through the front door as a woman  wearing an apron ran up to me and began to slap a wet dish towel at my shoulders and back.

“Sink,” I shouted, “I need a sink.”

She led me through a bedroom at the back of the house into a small bathroom and turned the cold water faucet on for me.  I sat on the edge of the tub and let the cool water run over my hands.  I tried to keep from crying, but God Damn! it hurt.

When the ambulances filled up, they threw the rest of us into airport limos.  Next to me was the soldier and I was glad he had somehow made it off the hill, no thanks to me.

“Something’s burning!” I said.

“Your hair … your coat,” said the soldier.

But all I could feel were my hands, burned awful.  With my hands wrapped in the wet dish towel from the farm house and my fingers barely working, I managed to get the window rolled down in the limo.  As the driver sped us to a local emergency room, I stuck my hands out the window hoping the air rushing by would cool them and stop the awful pain.

When we pulled up to the ER's sliding doors, an orderly tried to put me in a wheel chair, but I shouldered him aside and walked in by myself.  I immediately asked for pain medication.  The young woman refused me and said they wanted a skull x-ray first.  In moments I was on a stretcher and a nurse was cutting my pants off as I tried to get up and leave.  That’s all I remember until a few days later.  And then  days of lying in pain.

37. Evil

When I fantasized about Sara, the  woman whose voice I met on the telephone, and the two of us going trout fishing in the Poconos, I had the face of a particular woman in mind.  Her name was Grace.  Amazing Grace, as I always think of her.  I met her in a small town near Scranton, Pennsylvania.  The name of the city and the hospital don’t matter. It happened a long time ago.  But before I arrived there, I was assigned to the lowest circle of Hell.

By the end of the 1970’s I‘d been shot at and beaten up a few times on my assignment in Kenya.  I even had a machete thrown at me, but I survived everything without a scratch.  I got very pissed at the guy who threw the machete and I ran after him.  I beat the crap out of him.  He was so emaciated; it was easy to knock him down.  Then I kicked him. Two, maybe three times.  Maybe more.   I heard something break, it must have been his rib.  Only later did I realize we were both experiencing hell.  He, from his beating, and me as I watched myself do something terrible that I would not have believed myself capable.   But I was able to amend my deed somewhat by bringing him back to the facility to have the nurse look at him.  She asked what had happened to the man. 

“Met the Enemy,” was all I said. 

You never know what you’ll do in combat or under fire. Not all evil is premeditated.  There’s a kind of evil that just happens, or so we think. 

The following year, on a snowy, foggy morning half a world away,  I stood waiting with my fellow passengers in the lobby of a small airport that might have been mistaken for a rural bus station.   Fifteen minutes later Flight 29 to Washington tried to climb up off the airport’s snow covered runway.   The plane hadn’t been de-iced.  It would be a short flight.


Looking for a different version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, I came across this. It ain't perfect, but performed in a subway, who could complain?

36. Back Up …

It was too damp and cold to go up on the roof this morning, but I went anyway. I put on a sweater and a nylon windbreaker and walked through the chapter house to the stairway that leads up the back wall of the building to the top portions of the house and the attic. I climbed the ladder in the attic, opened the trap door and swung my leg out and up over the roof peak. Sliding along the shingles toward the front edge of the building my jeans soaked up the moisture from the roof. By then I was thoroughly cold.

You know, I would have thought by this time in my life that nothing would bother me. I’m in relatively good health, but let’s face it; my name is coming around on the Grim Reaper’s Rolodex sooner than later. Given that, why sweat the little stuff?  Not like my Uncle Harry, whose last words on his deathbed were to wonder if he should put the snow tires on early this year.

Death is not a comfort unless you are in pain. Death is the ultimate disappointment, even if something good is coming afterward. And who knows for sure?

I don’t want to grow old and miserable and start losing my body parts, having them removed and treated like they are something awful, put in special red containers as if they are radioactive. Or lay forever on a bed waiting for a person whose language I can’t understand to come and let me move my bowels. So I pray for lightning. I figure I can take 14 milliseconds of being flash fried and then it will be all over. I used to say I’d sign up for double the cooking time if it would get me out of Purgatory. But it turns out I’ve been saved from Purgatory by a commission of bureaucrats at Central Headquarters in Rome. That’s a pretty neat trick for a committee. Maybe next they will vote to end world hunger. 

I don’t want to face what may be waiting for me on the other side of death's door. Dead relatives to whom I hardly waved goodbye as they were climbing on that Glory Train. I won’t be long, Mom … just going off to Africa for a while. The woman in the Kenyan village I denied asylum on the day before she was hacked up with a machete like a side of beef. And the man and woman I killed in Pennsylvania. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t! But I left them.  And they died.

I come up here on the peak half hoping to offer myself up as a lightning rod. Or maybe I’ll lean just a tiny bit too far out over the edge, lose my balance and take the Express down to the hereafter, the train that doesn’t stop at the suffering part of life’s ending. But then I see that snowy field in Pennsylvania and their hands raised, begging for help and I don’t want to go to the other side. I’m running, running … grabbing at the snow.  I want to live. My mind comes back to the present and I quickly lean back from the edge of the roof and stare up at the darkening sky. When the vertigo passes, I inch my way back down the peak, down the ladder and down the stairs.  Always backing down.

Hootie and the Blowfish - Running From An Angel

35. No Time Left

“Are you ready to talk yet?” I inquired of Terd as we both left the breakfast room on this cold and cloudy day. He made no effort to even acknowledge my speaking to him and I felt as Agnes must have when Terd was sarcastic with him.  I became angry, very angry, as we walked down the hall.   I rushed along trying to keep up with the man and when we came to a widened out part of the hallway, an alcove that contains a couch and chair,  I suddenly heaved into him with all my might so that he went flying sideways into the small space and plowed into the easy chair,  pushing it up against the wall.  He landed on his knees facing into the seat of the chair.  I landed on the couch on my back, quite winded.

“Are you all right, Jesse?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes, I am just fucking fine, thank you very much you big oaf,” I replied.

He didn’t even apologize.  He laughed quietly.  Then a serious look came over his face.

“Where will you go, Jesse?”  he asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“When they close this place down,” he said.

“I’ve got time to think about it, surely,” I said.

“Not much,” he replied.

34. Money For Nothing

Bouncer (Brother Bilhild of Thuringia) found our stash of beans seriously compromised by mice this morning.  We will probably not have enough now to get us through the winter.  Agnes says we'll get by somehow and I'm sure we will.  There are kind neighbors on the road up here.  Last year a fellow  drove  his pickup truck in the driveway with a good size deer in the back.   We converted all of it into a stew that lasted much of the winter.

Lance, the man who recently built his mansion on the point, brought a load of groceries around Christmas time and said all the neighbors had thrown in their spare food items, but the mix of cans and fresh stuff was so balanced that I think it may have been bought at once and it probably came  entirely from Lance’s pocket.  He stayed for a cup of coffee and I told him I thought it was very nice of him to bring the food.  He said he thought it was very nice of us to live in poverty so that he could feel good helping us out.  That's an interesting insight, but Lance can find impoverished folks anywhere.

Lance appears to be in his fifties and although he built his home down the road on the overlook possibly ten years ago, he evidently has some history with the monastery.  I was surprised when he helped me put away the food that he seemed to know the layout of the pantry and kitchen.

“It’s almost as if you lived here,” I laughed.  “Were you once a Brother here before my time? 

“No,” he said.  “I’m just good at guessing where the food goes.”

“I’d remember you if you were here in the last thirty years,” I said.  “You would have had to have been here as a kid.”

The Brothers have discussed aid such as food stamps and cash assistance, but not in the context of 11 guys sitting on the side of the hill up here cashing welfare checks.  Rather, our quandary is whether we would individually accept help if we had to let the monastery go and each were to find himself living alone and penniless.   Obviously, the younger brothers would be expected to find jobs and work.  Us old guys would do the best we could.

33. Ink

I love ink.  Did I mention that?  As well as paper and every aspect of the graphic arts.  I have no idea where that comes from, but my father was a newspaper pressman.  How loud were those huge newspaper presses!  I’ll tell you a story later about my father bringing me to the newspaper when I was seven years old.  

It’s much quieter here in the cellar of Our Lady as that memory fades from my mind.  My attention returns to the task at hand, printing up more envelopes on donated stock than we’ll ever need.  Well … I did say it’s a hobby.   Other than my knee clicking as I pump the treadle, the only sound is the clink-clink made by the round ink disk at the top of the press as it rotates to evenly distribute the ink on the rollers after each impression.  Soon I’ll quickly flick a small blob of ink on the disk to renew the blackness of the print.  ( The small treadle press is a 1913 Damon & Peets 7x11 Favorite with a throw-off that I never use, preferring to stop the flywheel with my hand.)    These days I no longer stand at the press, but sit on a three foot stool as I lean over the feedboard.  I’m not as tall in the saddle as I’d like to be and I miss the gauge pins from time to time as I feed in the envelopes to be printed one by one.  If the press were a Chandler and Price, the platen would lay back more and make feeding easier.  And makeready work on an almost level platen would be a joy.  I worked a C&P after school as a teenager, printing a zillion raffle tickets in a tiny print shop in my hometown.

In the corner I can see the scrap test impressions from Sara’s wedding invitations.  If I were a Protestant I could have both a career as a pastor and a great sex life.  Let’s hear it for Martin Luther.

 But I have decided to leave all to God's direction.

Lutheran Men's Voice (LMV), Chennai,India

Sorry for the abrupt ending.

32. Dangerous

Terd surprises and scares me.  I tried to take him aside this morning to talk, but he refused.  At breakfast he sat mum and rigid, staring straight ahead as if he was asleep with his eyes open, or in hospital ward for catatonics.

Later, as I was sorting type in the cellar I heard footsteps and soon Agnes stood next to me at the type bench.

“I am so upset, Brother Abbot,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, “but you mustn’t worry.  Let me handle Brother Theresa.”

“How has this happened, Agnes?”  I cried.  “What the hell is going on here?”

 “Jesse,” said the abbot, “I can’t speak of what your Brother evidently hasn’t shared with you.  Let’s just say he is having a tough time lately.”

“Tough time?  I’d say so!  I’ll speak frankly, Agnes,” I said.  “It is unfair that whatever is going on between you and Terd should affect the rest of us.”

“Ordinarily, you’d be right about that,” said Agnes.

But he said no more.  He looked around the cellar as if it could use some picking up.  Then he turned and left, climbing back up the stairs.