The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (26 page)

Around 8:00
A.M.
, Burdick, Watson, and Greene began the trek to the crash site. Watson was hoping the crew would not find any more body parts.

 

Click.
The front of the plane had burned hottest, and Burdick and Watson found the first skulls. The teenagers—wearing gloves, boots taped at the shins to keep the dust out, and bandanas and ripped-up T-shirts as makeshift masks—backed away so a photographer could take a photo of the remains.

Click.
The two collected bones and put them in bags.

There were remains near the middle of the plane. Some looked mummified. Burdick and Watson stopped seeing them as humans. The intense smell of death permeated the site.

Click.
The pair lifted one body out of a seat. It broke apart in their hands.

Click.
There was another body at the back of the plane, face down, with an arm stuck above its head, as if it were reaching out, trying to escape the danger. Watson situated himself over the body and tried to figure out how to put it into the black bag. He turned the body over and pushed the arm down. The body belched trapped air in his face.

A few feet away, Greene said prayers as he ushered the bags down the mountain. He made sure the remains didn't bounce on the way to the ambulances. Just because their souls had gone to heaven, Greene thought, didn't mean that these hadn't been people a day earlier.

 

Nine. That's how many people survived the crash. There were 31 dead, including the head coach, the athletic director, the state representative and his wife, the boosters, the plane's captain, the student equipment manager. Taylor. Reeves. Those two made it out after the crash, but their injuries were too severe. Reeves's wife left the maternity ward so she could be with her husband, who eventually died. In all, 13 children were orphaned.

Not long after the accident, the investigations and finger-pointing began. No one wanted to be responsible for the tragedy. The plane's owner told the NTSB he wasn't running the show—the plane was chartered by the university and the school should have taken more precautions, should have had sole authority over the flight. The university disagreed, but the agreement didn't spell out who was in charge of the flight. The man who'd made the agreement died on the plane.

Skipper lived. The first officer told the NTSB that the school was in charge. He testified that he was taking the shortest route to Logan, that the decision to change flight plans wasn't part of a sightseeing trip. It didn't matter anyway, he said, because his pilot was calling the shots. The dead captain had put that plane into the ground. An "act of God," Skipper called the crash.

In the end, Skipper would be punished: he was forced to temporarily give up his pilot's license, and Golden Eagle Aviation lost its air-taxi certificate. The pilot-leasing business went belly-up.

The team took a vote nine days after the crash and decided they'd play the next six games with freshmen and reserves. They called it the Second Season. And so, 22 days after they lost their head coach and 14 starters, the Shockers took the field at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas. The crowd rose to its feet, and the fans stomped and clapped and cheered for their opponents. Arkansas won the game 62–0.

The Shockers would play a few more games before another news story swept them from the front pages of even their own newspapers. On November 14, 1970, a plane carrying Marshall University's football team went down in West Virginia and killed all 75 people aboard.

 

August 23, 2010. The rain has just passed overhead, casting cool, gray clouds over Mt. Trelease. John Putt squirms into his pack—the litter, the massive piece of metal that unfolds into a stretcher—as he stands along a road at the mountain's base. The pack is crammed with 400 feet of bagged climbing rope, brake plates, and other gear. All told, the metal contraption extends a foot above his head and weighs more than 80 pounds. He'll need none of this equipment today, but he needs to feel all of it.

Fifty feet.

He scrambles up this mountain because it is what he does now to chase the ghosts from his mind. And when he goes up now and the memories still don't go away, he returns. Again and again. Five times up Mt. Trelease. And when those memories still haunt him, he returns once more, this time with 80 pounds strapped to his back because that weight is both his punishment and his redemption.

One hundred feet.

Coward.
That's what he'd thought of himself for nearly 40 years after the crash. On that night in October 1970, he froze and he failed his teammates. And he failed those folks from Wichita State, even when there was no one alive for him to fail.

One hundred and fifty feet.

Friend.
That's what the people from Wichita State call John Putt when they ask if he can take families to the site these days. That's what they call him when a dead player's niece stands among that debris and shakes Putt's hand and tells him that he must have been a brave boy to go up that night.
Twelve years old.
Putt does not respond. But in helping these people, he knows he is helping himself, and perhaps giving final comfort to those who died on that plane almost a half-century ago.

Two hundred feet.

But until he no longer feels as if he's let himself and others down, he will climb. He will climb until those ghosts no longer follow him back down that mountain. So on days like this, when cool air sweeps through the valley and clouds shadow the sun from the pine trees below, Putt will climb and he will suck for air and sweat will run down his face.

Two hundred and fifty feet. There is still a ways to go.

He stops along a trail and leans against a tree. Putt takes off his glasses. His eyes are red and teary. He wipes them and looks up that mountain. And then he starts to climb again, hoping that one day when he comes down, he will feel a peace he hasn't felt in 40 years.

FROM THE NEW YORKER

Y
OU MOVE YOUR CANOE
through open water a fly cast away from a patch of lily pads. You cast just shy of the edge of the pads—inches off the edge of the pads. A chain pickerel is a lone ambush hunter. Its body resembles a barracuda's and has evolved to similar purpose. Territorial, concealed in the vegetation, it hovers; and not much but its pectoral fins are in motion. Endlessly patient, it waits for prey to come by—frogs, crayfish, newts, turtles, and smaller fish, including its own young. Long, tubular, with its pelvic fins set far back like the wings of some jets, it can accelerate like a bullet.

You lay a kiwi muddler out there—best white or yellow. In the water, it appears to be a minnow. Strip in line, more line, more line. In a swirl as audible as it is visible, the lake seems to explode. You need at least a 12-pound leader, because this fish has teeth like concertina wire. I tried a braided steel tippet once, of a type made for fish of this family, but casting it was clunky and I gave it up in favor of monofilament thick enough to win the contest between the scissoring teeth and the time it takes to net the fish. I've been doing this for more than 30 years, always in October in New Hampshire with my friend George Hackl, whose wife owns an undeveloped island in Lake Winnipesaukee. Chain pickerel are sluggish and indifferent in the warmer months. In the cold dawns and the cold dusks of October, they hit like hammers, some days on the surface, some days below it, a mass idiosyncrasy that is not well understood.

Thoreau understood—more than most, anyway—this "swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes ... stately, ruminant ... lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon ... still, circumspect ... motionless as a jewel set in water." He said he had "caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth," and he noted that "sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle."

Men who pass us on the lake in bass boats, sitting on their elevated seats and sweeping the water with spinning gear, are less impressed. They think of chain pickerel as trash, call them names like "slime darts," and actually laugh when we tell them what we are fishing for. They also tend to thank us. They want bass in their nets, not pickerel, and pickerel can not only outrace bass to their lures but also wreck the lures with their teeth. We are out there neither to trash them nor to admire them but to catch them for breakfast. A sauteed young pickerel is more delicious than most fish. The paradox of pickerel fishing is that a pickerel's culinary quality is in inverse proportion to its size. The big ones taste like kiln-dried basswood, and are also full of bones. The Y-shaped, intermuscular bones of the very young ones go down soft. Pickerel grow like bamboo. Ichthyologists have watched them grow an inch in two days.

As far as I know, my father never fished for chain pickerel. When I was three years old, he was the medical doctor at a summer camp on the Baie de Chaleur, and he fished for salmon in the Restigouche with his bamboo rod. He fished with grasshoppers in a Vermont gorge, and angleworms in Buzzards Bay, taking me with him when I was six, seven, eight. And across the same years we went trout fishing in New Jersey streams. On Opening Day, in April, we would get up in the pitch dark in order to be standing beside a stream at the break of dawn. One time, as dawn broke, we discovered that the stream was frozen over. On the way home, he let me "drive." I sat in his lap and steered—seat belts an innovation not yet innovated. These are my fondest memories of my father, his best way of being close, and I therefore regret all the more that my childhood love of fishing fell away in my teenage years, and stayed away, in favor of organized sports and other preoccupations.

The dormant angler in me remained dormant until he woke up in Arctic Alaska for the purpose of eating grayling, salmon, and char. After that, I took fishing gear on other canoe trips—down the Allagash, down the St. John—but seldom used it until the October of my 48th year, camping with the Hackls on the New Hampshire island, watching the colors fall into the water, and looking around for things to do.

Sometimes when chain pickerel are hovering high they see your moving fly from a distance, and come for it, come right toward you, etching on the surface a rippling wake, like a torpedo. It takes just one such scene to arouse you forever. Across an open channel from the New Hampshire island lay a quarter-mile of sharply edged lily pads, and soon we were calling it not a patch but The Patch. We scouted the lily pads of other bays, and fished every one of them, but always came back to The Patch. It was the home shore, running from a sedge fen off the tip of a neighboring island and along a white-pine forest on the mainland to the near side of another island. Our wives—Ann and Yolanda, each the other's oldest friend—were absolutely uninterested in pickerel except with their toast and coffee, but from year to year George and I grew better at fishing for them, each of us standing up and casting from his own canoe, anchored or drifting, sense of balance as yet uneroded. At the end of the seventh October, after Yolanda and I had driven home to New Jersey, we came up the driveway and the telephone inside the house was ringing as we approached the door. My brother was calling to tell me that my father was in a Baltimore County hospital, having suffered a debilitating stroke.

 

His room had a south-facing window. My mother, in a flood of light, 87, looked even smaller than she was, and space was limited around her, with me, my brother, my sister, and a young doctor together beside the bed. I was startled by the candor of the doctor. He said the patient did not have many days to live, and he described cerebral events in language only the patient, among those present, was equipped to understand. But the patient did not understand: "He can't comprehend anything, his eyes follow nothing, he is finished," the doctor said, and we should prepare ourselves.

Wordlessly, I said to him, "You fucking bastard." My father may not have been comprehending, but my mother was right there before him, and his words, like everything else in those hours, were falling upon her and dripping away like rain. Nor did he stop. There was more of the same, until he finally excused himself to continue on his rounds.

During our second day there, my mother, brother, and sister went off at one point, and I was alone for an hour in the room with my father. Eyes wide open in a fixed stare at the ceiling, he lay motionless. I wondered what to do. I wasn't about to pick up a book and read. I looked out the window for a time, at Baltimore, spilling over its beltway. I looked back at him. Spontaneously, I began to talk. In my unplanned, unprepared way, I wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on filling it, to no apparent purpose but, I suppose, a form of self-protection. I told him where I had been—up in New England on the lake in the canoe, casting—and that the fishing had gone well despite the cold. One day, there had been an inch of ice on the water bucket in the morning. My fingers were red as I paddled and cast. Water, coming off the fly line as I stripped it in, froze in the guides that hold the line close to the rod, and so jammed the line that it was uncastable; so I went up the rod from bottom to top punching out little disks of ice with my thumb until I could make another cast and watch a fresh torpedo come out of the vegetation.

I went on in this manner, impulsively blurting out everything I could think of about the species, now and again making comparisons and asking him questions—did he remember the sand sharks off Sias Point? the rainbows of Ripton? the bullhead he gutted beside Stony Brook that flipped out of his hand and, completely gutless, swam away?—to which I expected no answers, and got none.

 

With those minutely oscillating fins, a pickerel treads water in much the way that a hummingbird treads air. If the pickerel bursts forth to go after prey, it returns to the place it started from, with or without the prey. If a pickerel swirls for your fly and misses, it goes back to the exact spot from which it struck. You can return half an hour later and it will be there. You can return at the end of the day and it will be there. You can go back next year and it will be there.