At the scene of an accident, it's not a good sign when the frenetic pace slows, firefighters begin lifting off their helmets, paramedics draw farther away. The plane, bent in wrong directions like a broken bone, was laying where it had crumpled and came to rest against the side of a storage shed.
I was standing in tall grass between Jeff and a rusted out washing machine when a fireman approached us. "It just dropped out of the sky," he said with a combination of astonishment and exhaustion.
His voice dropped off. "They've passed," he said.
We don't respond to accident calls often. I don't know how to succinctly explain it - other papers like to publish accident photos from time to time, and it always gives me a bad taste in my mouth. It's just not nice.
The plane crash was different. There was no debating whether or not we were going to respond, no looking up addresses while questioning if it was worth our time to drive out there. A plane crash. I sprang up, haphazardly predicting what I needed to bring to the scene like gathering possessions to rescue from my burning home. Jeff was already out the door. Nate the intern trailed behind.
We drove like maniacs across town, and it seemed like everyone with a police scanner was headed in the same direction. I called my dad. "They're trapped," he said, relaying what he heard on the scanner. "They've started CPR."
We parked behind the VFW Hall and a man in a station wagon was telling a guy with a baby stroller that he had seen the whole thing. "Go talk to him!" I yelled to Nate, struggling to keep up with Jeff.
I felt blindly pulled like a magnet toward the accident scene, ignoring fences and driveways. Jeff led us the long way along the road, scolding me for trespassing. "That's private property," he yelled behind him.
As we approached the scene, a sheriff with a white handlebar mustache and brown uniform was pulling police tape across our path. My stomach dropped.
The sheriff looked up and saw us. "Did you get a good picture yet, Jeff?" he asked, lifting the police tape so we could go under. "I know you won't get in the way."
As we approached the scene, the reporter part of my brain started to take over, filing away facts and details, making lists. The red barn and red fire truck standing stark against that clear blue summer sky, calm and still. The plane, looking fake like a movie prop, wrong in the scene before us. Firemen swarming everywhere. The jaws of life.
Jeff, with a surprising knowledge of airplanes, relayed technical details to me as we stood several yards away. "That's an ultralight," he said of the plane in front of us. "You're more secure in a Ferris Wheel." We stood back, trying to decipher what was going on in the scene before us, trying to make sense of all the people and objects that had converged in this ordinary trucking yard. The only thing that was obvious, the thing that later played through my head over and over, was the moment when all of the emergency people gave up, slowed down, and stepped back.
Back at the office, my adrenaline still pumping, I flew into reporter overdrive. I got on the phone and called every person I could think of who would have information, an ultimately useless task as the tragedy was still new. No one knew anything, least of all me, and I had no idea what to do next.
I didn't go to journalism school, but I don't think there's standard procedure for handling a tragedy. I put off writing the front page article until a few days later, forcing myself to talk to those involved, forcing myself to go over the events one more time. As a reporter, I have always felt that my responsibility has been to make things make sense, and more than my grief over the event itself, more than my disbelief, more than the images playing over and over in my head, I think what bothers me more than anything right now is an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. I can't make this make sense. I can give you the facts. I can describe what happened at the scene. I can provide photos. I can find things out. But I can't make them make sense. I just can't.
Additional photos from the scene are linked from my Flickr earlier in this blog. A full write-up of the story will be available in this week's Reedsburg Independent, on newsstands Wednesday and in subscriber mailboxes on Thursday.
