Really quiet like only the Antarctic can ever do. Motionless air negatively charged with the absence of heat. Sunlight over exposes to the point of grainy black and white 8 mm. Stand very still staring for memory. Minutes beyond what is healthy. Where else can you stand nose to nose with the burned out hulk of an aircrash frozen in time?

 
   Used to collect photos of aircrash. Old black and whites suited the aesthetic best. The first East to West trans Atlantic pilot crawling away from the wreak of her monoplane half buried in a foggy Canadian peat bog. The charred tail of a B-29 extruded from the skin of the building of Empire State. Dozens of VXE-6 Squadron's broken transport fuselages abandoned on the ice fields around McMurdo. Thousands of discrete items of information laid out in a tangled three dimensional skein of commercial disaster recovery. The patterns of shattered trees and plowed earth from two thousand feet up.

   My laptop comes up and I log in. The person to my left sneaks a glance at my desktop and shifts away from me in his seat. I ignore him. From across the aisle a head turns slightly and freezes. The woman offering me drinks smiles like a broken window. Unlike many frequent travelers, I have never been plagued by long dull conversations with seat mates.

   I told the people in my department up North that it was a token to ward off evil spirits. They raised their eyebrows and politely let it go. The folks in NY seemed to think I was trying to be a bad ass or making some kind of statement. I let that go. Everyone in Boston just knows I'm nuts. But I'm not morbid. I'm smiling as I write this.

   May I live long enough to decide how I want to die.

 
   Hollywood is quite fond of the aircrash. Oh, the colors. Used more often than not like a gratuitous visual epithet. MI-2, that horrible flix, did CFIT in scene one. Fight Club did it beautifully like a well placed semi colon. Only Angels Have Wings did it on foreign soil with Truth and The American way. Unbreakable did it in passing. Jeff Bridges did it like a documentary. At the edge of the limelight Cousteau documented its effects like tragedy.

 
   SPEAKER: "As I walked to the cockpit, I thought to myself, `Well, we have an emergency.' But when I opened the door, it was - To this day, it still gives me chills. It just stopped me cold. I felt my blood run cold, because it was just the feel of what was in the air, that it was not an emergency, it was the worst crisis possible. The captain said, 'We've lost all hydraulics. Secure the cabin and prepare the passengers.'"

   "I just simply blacked out, and I was out for the duration. I could still hear all of the metal noises and noises you've never heard in your life, as we catapulted down the runway."

         NOVA; Plane Crash; Broadcast Transcript; air date: February 17, 1999