I grew up in a family that was doctor-averse. 

They weren’t anti-vax, anti-science, ideological weirdos. But it was complicated.

Depression-era frugality led to most of  my parents’  “I’ve seen worse” responses to childhood lacerations and stomach viruses experienced by me and my three siblings. But my parents’ aversion to paying for medical treatment also was colored by my father’s DVM degree: My father’s license to treat mammals extended to his children. The fact that we all reached maturity is a testament not just to the public health advances that gave us school vaccinations and fluoride in our toothpaste. Surviving to the age of legal voting was due to the gallon jar of veterinary-grade tetracycline on the kitchen counter and the fact that antibiotic resistance hadn’t yet been invented. Childhood accidents received the same DIY treatment. My youngest brother, fading back to catch a football, once sliced open his head on an electrical box. My father mended that gash on our kitchen table, with my brother stoically trading local anesthesia for efficiency. 

My family, of hardy pioneer stock, accepted that children living on a farm would bash or slice themselves open with some regularity, and that the gaping wounds would usually heal themselves, perhaps with help from a needle plucked from the autoclave in my dad’s clinic. When I was in high school, I belatedly noticed a gash hidden below my ankle joint, received when a rusty barn door blew open. By the time I paid it any attention, it was making rather a spectacle of itself. I couldn’t get a good look at it, but it must have been unappealing, because my mother drove me to the local osteopath for stitches. For the only time in our lives. Sincere Dr. Fast tried to make sense of the mangled, half-healed tissue presented to him. As he ripped up the scabbed-over bits with a scalpel to put in fresh sutures, Dr. Fast queried my mother, “Has she been away at school?” No, returned my mother mildly. “Has she been on a trip?” Ah, now she saw where this was going. No, she said firmly. “She’s eaten three meals a day at my table.” The entire family has been living with that god-awful, vultures-are-circling, “Snows of Kilimanjaro” piece of weeping flesh for most of a week. Your point?

My family’s cost-effective system worked fabulously, even for me and my unfortunate ankle, until it met a virus rarely discussed by people living in countries with plumbing and air conditioning and credit cards. The Mayo Clinic recommends, “Make sure your own vaccinations are current.” Trust the Minnesota folks on this one, friends, or you’ll be part of your state’s epidemiological statistics, and not in the good way. As evidence, I submit the following tale.

Before I started my sophomore year of college, my cousin Candy took me for an outing to fancy Quail Springs Mall in Edmond, the white-people Oklahoma City suburb. Outings with Candy, the shopping savant, can be exhausting even for those in fighting trim. This time, however, I wasn’t just tired. My throat hurt in a way I didn’t know throats could hurt. Consequently, my requests escalated from, “Can we leave in half an hour?” to “How about we pull into that emergency room in Kingfisher and visit my brother the pharmacist?”

There’s no waiting in line in Kingfisher Memorial Hospital, and you get service from the same doctor who attended your delivery. The very doctor who knows all about the family tetracycline treatments and has warned my parents, “When they start barking, don’t bring them to me.” Dr. McIntyre swabbed my throat, prescribed antibiotics, and pledged to call when the culture came back. 

Now begins the part of this anti-doctor story belonging to my mother. She and my father both had a less-is-more approach to health care, but my mother’s relationship to medicine was, well, complicated. Her response to my health predicament started with doctor shaming. My mother was incensed that I had walked into an emergency room, her point being that if you are walking, by definition you are not an emergency. Despite my profligacy, I was a miserable study in infectious diseases until the antibiotics kicked in. Life was fine until the prescription ran out while I was at sorority rush and that sore throat returned. The university was all about avoiding liability, so some responsible adult took me to the campus infirmary. I was functional again.  

But where were those lab results? When I drove back to Kingfisher to get the rest of the story, Dr. McIntyre explained why the results had taken longer than expected. He had sent my sample to the state lab for a do-over, because he didn’t believe that I actually had (wait for it) diphtheria. Which I did. Which meant that I got upgraded to diphtheria-level antibiotics. Believe the science. God wants you to take these meds.

Couple of things will be happening pretty quickly about now. I call my cousin Candy to tell her what I’ve exposed her to. She and her mother will be simultaneously horrified (“You slept in the same bed!”) and compassionate (“She must have outgrown her immunization. Or something.”) No one would have presumed that my parents would have raised an unvaccinated child, so no one said out loud the most likely explanation of my condition. It takes five DTaP shots for children to achieve full protection against diphtheria. I probably hadn’t been to the doctor five times in my entire life. Birth order is everything, and parents cut some corners for the fourth child.

When I walked up the steps of my mother’s house with my new prescription, my mother and I were both furious. She was predictably angry because I’d gone to the doctor, again, rather than reasonably take care of myself. This time, my self-righteous teenaged self returned fire with weapons-grade guilt. “Get my rest? Take care of myself?” Here, I’m ashamed that I inserted some versions of “Ha!” or “Oh yeah?” into this exchange. I was 19 years old and insufferable. Then I delivered the punchline: “I’ve got diphtheria!” Cruel as it seems now, I walked on and didn’t wait for her reaction. Because here’s what we both knew: At ages 8 and 9, my mother and her sister Iris contracted diphtheria, and her sister died. 

My virus-ridden teen-aged self opened a door to family psychodrama that had been shut since 1929. Other than a single photograph hanging in my grandmother’s front bedroom, Aunt Iris had disappeared into the ether. I never heard my grandmother speak of her. Iris and my mother were Irish twins; she was my mother’s constant companion. Yet my mother was the girl that lived, and she and my grandmother seemed silently to agree that some mistake had been made. Best not to speak of it. In this environment of omerta, it took me ages to discover the origins of the nickname I heard my mother called at my grandmother’s house. As a child, I couldn’t fathom why my mother’s own family couldn’t pronounce her name correctly–”Kathleen.” Instead, they called her the name as Iris pronounced it when my mother was a baby: “Kappy-tu,” shortened to “Kappy.” Each time her parents or four younger brothers said my mother’s name, Iris’s word was in their mouths. 

As a bored child, I once sat at the kitchen table doing some summer activity while my mother washed dishes, her back to me, as we chatted about her childhood home. Her father loved her mother so much he built her a new house when none of the other farmers were taking care of their wives so well. Her house had an electric generator in its basement, very fancy. “Did you have a cistern?” I asked. Our farmhouse has one, and I thought every well-appointed home should have such an ingenious rainwater collection system. Oddly, my mother didn’t answer. I thought she didn’t hear me, so I repeated my question. “Did you have a cistern?” Now I turned to look at her unmoving back. She didn’t look at me, and I must have asked again, prompting her to finally say, without turning around, “Yes, but she died when she was very young.” “Oh no, I said cistern, for your water!” But that conversation was over, and would, it appeared, stay closed indefinitely. After I contracted diphtheria, I finished my course of antibiotics with no comparisons made to that earlier, deadlier outbreak in the fancy house with the electric generator.

I had just one other conversation with my mother about diphtheria, but it cast my childhood’s lack of doctors in an entirely different light. During a long layover in the Atlanta airport, I had my mother to myself, with very few distractions. In her own home or mine, she would have been cleaning, folding, cooking. But in that time before cell phones, all we could do was talk. She told me about living on the Army base in New Jersey, and her friends in the Women’s Army Corps. She described the days when my brothers and I were born. And she told me about her sister.

A family in her country neighborhood was sick, so my grandmother carried them food. My mother and her sister stayed at the gate of the family’s yard while her mother delivered the basket to their door. Some time after this visit, the girls became sick. The doctor came to the house and looked down their throats, covered with the leathery patches that diphtheria creates. Patches can grow large enough to restrict breathing, so a doctor would want to remove them. Iris later developed something like pneumonia. When her parents took Iris to the hospital, my mother’s Grandmother O’Hern came to stay with the remaining sick child, telling my mother that doctors would make her sister better. My mother, eight years old, told her grandmother, “No. She’s not coming back.”

When my Uncle Gayle came to my mother’s funeral, I told him the food delivery story. His response was “Jesus Christ.” Gayle seemed to confirm my suspicions about the origin of my mother’s conflict with her own mother. Try as she might, my mother was only ever going to look like an accusation. She was the presence that pointed to her sister’s absence. No one would have been cruel enough to blame my grandmother Nora Cain for the death of her child, but they wouldn’t have needed to: She was already there.

My mother’s most revealing detail in the Atlanta airport arose from stories about her World War II military service at Fort Dix. I got a funny story about a New York City plastic surgeon who offered to reshape her robust Irish nose to her heart’s desire. A free nose! But she declined; it was her father’s nose, too, and she wanted to keep it. In discussing Army health care, she mentioned the vaccinations she got when she arrived. But wait, I interrupted. Didn’t you already have those? Didn’t doctors come to your school to vaccinate students? Yes, they did, my mother agreed. But she waited in the bathroom until the doctors were gone. 

If I had taken a bite from my airport Cinnabon, I would have missed this new information. Apparently doctors terrified my mother so much that she hid in bathrooms to avoid them. In this context, my family’s avoidance of medicine wasn’t just about frugality, although, sure, we were cheap. It was about trauma. Doctors scrape little girls’ throats with scalpels to help them breathe. And when they come to your house, your sister dies. Why would you want any of that?  

As a child, I thought my parents embraced the same anti-medicine stance. On reflection, I see that my father had a triage system going, sorting out what conditions needed immediate attention and what could wait. My oldest brother got his tonsils removed; my youngest got attention before his appendix burst. My father spent a week in the hospital while various doctors figured out his prostate issues. My mother, however, lost her trust in doctors when she was eight years old, and she never got it back. Consequently, doctors were not her first call when she experienced the onset of a sudden inexplicable, debilitating neck pain. She put herself to bed and stayed there until a family friend finally drove her to a small regional hospital, where rural healthcare failed her a final time. Women’s heart attacks don’t look like men’s heart attacks. So the hospital sent her home, where she died the next day.

During that layover in the Atlanta airport, my mother revealed the fear around which she had organized her life: Doctors can cause us the greatest pain because we encounter them when we are most vulnerable. At the age when my own children were managing strep throat with tasty pink Amoxicillin and popsicle therapy, my mother was facing down the loss of her sister, her survivor’s guilt, and a growing awareness that her own mother’s grief would make her life more complicated. My mother could have adopted any number of self-destructive coping strategies at this point; of the choices available to her, blaming her doctors seems like an absolutely genius solution. My mother never overcame that fear, but she tamped it down hard. And she compensated for her fear with a courageous, demanding ferocity that looked like love. Because it was.

February 16, 2021, 32nd and Speedway streets, Austin, Texas

A year into a global pandemic, I’ve developed an anger management problem. 

It’s not my feral, uncut hair, or the strange substitutions that Randall’s makes in my grocery order. My god, half a million of my fellow citizens no longer have the luxury of caring about their hair and groceries.

It’s the weather, and when it becomes an “act of God.”

After Winter Storm Uri–we’re naming winter storms now?–I am constitutionally unable to speak rationally about power grids, the Texas Public Utility Commission, or Republicans who blame my 5-day power outage on wind turbines. During limited talk-to-other-people-time during Zoom calls or socially distanced pandemic chats, I lapse into rants that are the equivalent of TALKING IN ALL CAPS about my pure and sincere loathing of the Texas senator who flew to Cancun while our stoic Buff Orpington, Barred Rock, and Silver-Laced Wyandotte took refuge from freezing temps and laid eggs in our bathtub.

I’m from Oklahoma, so I know some weather. I’ve watched as the wind made a 20-foot barn door pitch like a ship at sea, sweeping my brother off his feet as he attempted to latch it down. I’ve hunkered in another brother’s storm cellar, heartily wishing I had picked up my baby’s diaper bag before dodging an inland hurricane. I’ve been frightened, humbled, and chastened by weather events, but incandescent rage hasn’t been my take-away, until now. 

Being enraged by the events surrounding Texas’ winter storm is not the way I was raised up. My family was of the play-dominoes-until-the-water-goes-down school of crisis management. But a central family narrative was built around a cataclysmic weather event, an act of god that was a source of awe and drama, the perfect pairing of climactic and climatic. I didn’t experience this event, but I’ve always known how it moved the people caught up in it, because they took the trouble to tell me. Time and again, relatives and countrymen would recall where they were in 1957 when the salty brown waters of the Cimarron River rolled up fences, unmoored bridges, and made the people of my county stop while rain and heartbreak said their piece. The drought of the South Plains broke in the spring of that year, perfectly timed to amplify the loss of my impossibly handsome 36-year-old uncle, inexplicably dead of a heart attack, with the sky weeping tears for his family.

The front page headlines of my hometown paper on May 16 juxtaposed the two events that subsequently reshaped Western Oklahoma generally and my family specifically. Above the fold: “Savage Rain and Hail Storm Hits Hennessey; Heavy Damage Seen.” Below the fold, the headline reads “Kelly Hobbs Dies in Midland, Texas.” For the heartbreak to properly resonate, know this about Dean Kelly Hobbs: he was the heart’s darling of his family. This was a family with no shortage of material to work with: my father, thoughtful, handsome, responsible. A lovely younger sister who rewarded her brothers’ antics with an astoundingly enormous laugh. But Kelly was their beating, bleeding heart, the beautiful child and gorgeous man who delighted and endeared just by drawing breath. 

Kelly died before I was born, but his lore persisted. I once spent an afternoon listening to a pal of Kelly’s named Beaman, who arrived unannounced at my mother’s table, then regaled me with stories about his friend, who by that time was 40 years dead. As an oil company landman in 1950s West Texas, Kelly would arrive in Midland regularly before weekends and file his paperwork with oil company secretaries. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. One Friday, he arrived with groceries at the house of a girlfriend, let himself in, and started supper. Several women shared this house, and they came home at the end of the workday. Multiple women entered the house, and apparently none of them were alarmed by the man in their kitchen. When the entire household was present, an awkward truth unfurled itself: the woman of Kelly’s acquaintance had moved to another house. By then dinner was ready, so they all sat down to eat.

Women made it their life’s ambition to marry my uncle. According to Beaman, Kelly’s boss watched a banker’s daughter focus on him with laser-like intensity. Addressing her persistence, the boss instructed Kelly to meet him in the oil company’s map room, where the glory of West Texas real estate was neatly marked with land owners’ names and pins for extant oil wells. Kelly’s boss pointed out the heiress’s extensive land holdings, and then observed, “I haven’t even shown you what her daddy owns.”

But like the hero of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Kelly was not only charming and beautiful, he was also careless. In 1955, he married the executive secretary of a Denver oil man, and his life got complicated. He filed for divorce, but stress, and perhaps a blood clot from a minor car accident, left him dead on May 11, 1957.

The hometown weekly newspaper came out five days after Kelly’s death. The articles provide a timeline for the day’s events: 

• 10 am funeral service at Methodist church
• 1:30 pm -3:30 pm–a 2.31 inch rainfall
• 3:30 pm-4:30 pm–rain stops
• 4:30 pm-8 pm–8.74 more inches of rain

The day unfolded thusly: after the Methodist funeral, family and friends drove to the town cemetery, where they brought my uncle home, shoulder-high, under cloudy skies. Before 1:30, many family members drove to the Hobbs ranch house, on the Cimarron River, with Kelly’s parents. I’ve never gotten a definitive headcount of visitors, but the small 4-bedroom house appears to have been packed. By the time they got there, it had begun to rain. 

The crowd would have been crammed in the farmhouse from 1:30 to 3:30, during the first downpour. When the rain let up, some of the crowd said their goodbyes and headed back to town. The Briix cousins remember making it 3 miles, to the Firestone farm, where the road disappeared underwater. Teenaged Harvey Firestone was home alone and told them they couldn’t come in. The Briixes laughed and told him they couldn’t leave. Because by now had begun the Wagnerian deluge. The sky opened, and the rain farmers had awaited for seven years finally arrived. 

As reported by the U.S. Geological Survey:

The storm of May 15-16 occurred over an extensive area in western and Central Oklahoma, generally north of the Cimarron River. The largest amount of precipitation reported at a Weather Bureau station was 13.07 inches at Hennessey. The maximum amount of precipitation found in a “bucket” survey for the storm was 20 inches, 5 miles southwest of Hennessey, and occurred in the 11 hour period from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Three miles northeast of this observation, 19.9 inches was measured in a large stock tank.

The site of the 20-inch “bucket” survey was approximately my grandparents’ north pasture, and anyone who hadn’t left already wasn’t going anywhere for days. Those who didn’t make it out in time included my parents, who had left their three boys back home with friends; my Aunt Barbara and her husband; Great Aunt Bobbie and blind Uncle Ralph; gorgeous cousin Carol with her new baby, Andrea, and most likely Carol’s parents; lovely cousin Margaret, with her second husband, Landrum; and apparently Beaman. I’m confident this list is incomplete–let’s say 15 people miserable people were stuck in a farmhouse with one bathroom. They retrieved all the canned food my granny had stored in her cellar. They used dishtowels as diapers for baby Andrea. People slept in the hay loft or in their cars. Uncle Ralph, whose blindness allowed him to distinguish some light from darkness, said “good morning” when awakened in his sedan’s back seat. He later confessed to have greeted a mule.

Relatives stayed in a damp, crowded farmhouse for most of a week. Yet the stories they told me were not about irritation, annoyance, or impatience. Instead, they marveled at their companionship, and they wondered at the sheer volume of water from a river more than a mile away, which turned the house into an island. Almost an island: water coming in the back door turned a north bedroom into lakefront property. Beaman described how Margaret’s new husband vigorously bailed water from the bedroom into the yard for a time. His industry was met by my grandfather’s mild observation: “Landrum, where do you think that water is going?”

The watery house, which had only recently acquired electricity and telephone service, maintained most of its limited infrastructure. The country telephone cooperative could connect to near neighbors, but not to the exchange in town. Consequently, my parents couldn’t report their predicament to the families at the county seat who were minding their three boys. Because of this communication snafu, my father’s cousins living all the way in California heard alarming news reports that my parents were missing, presumed dead. Because only dead parents would abandon their three children.

The rest of the county came looking for the family surrounded by the river. Soon, Carol’s husband, the banker, made arrangements with Irvin Bollenbach, the local crop duster; as the small plane flew over the house, Carol held up baby Andrea in the yard to confirm that she was, indeed, accounted for. When waters receded enough for the plane to land on the country road, my mother was the first person flown out. No one told me stories about how the rest of the family climbed back into their cars, or helped my granny put the house to rights, or chose their parting words. It had been a Methodist shiva, with family sitting five days, instead of seven. 

In the flood of 1957, countrymen both rich and not-so-much were wet, inconvenienced, and poorer for the cost of new roofs for their houses and fences for their farms. But everyone in the county was humbled when a vast, brown river rolled across the sandhills. No one could entirely buy themselves out of this particular inconvenience: the banker’s baby wore dishcloth diapers, and her mother was grateful for them. 

My current weather-related foul mood burns so brightly because the inconveniences of Winter Storm Uri were so unevenly distributed. The eat-the-poor stories just wrote themselves as lights burned in downtown highrises, while poor people froze to death in their cars. The tales of neighbors helping neighbors were of course heart-warming–I was particularly moved by the tale of a local musician who figured out how to fix tankless water heaters, repairing all the frozen units on his street, then posting a YouTube video for the rest of us. But the helpful neighbors only highlight the cold truth of this capitalist teachable moment: you better take care of your neighbors, because that’s all the help they’re going to get.

The 2021 winter storm that left me cold and inconvenienced for five days has also left me pissed off for the foreseeable future, since the state of Texas seems determined to shrug off its administrative and regulatory fuck-up. If enough Texans say, “hey that wasn’t so bad, but I’d better buy a backup generator,” then the problem of maintaining a power grid won’t much cut into energy companies’ profits. By contrast, I’m pretty sure that when the crop duster scooped up folks out of the Cimarron River floodwaters in 1957, the clever Bollenbach family wasn’t plotting to monetize an overpriced flood evacuation service. 

The flood my family experienced was a force-majeure, an act of God that a state government couldn’t mitigate, other than by directing its citizenry to higher ground. In contrast, the five cold days of February 2021 were an act of capitalism, a deliberate choice to forgo meaningful energy regulation because it cost too much. The wet, grieving people in my grandparents’ house carried that event with them for the rest of their lives; it’s probable, then, that my sincere loathing of Governor Abbott’s incompetence–or indifference– will last a while longer.

In the perfect world I aspire to inhabit, forward-thinking parents welcome their darling infants into the world with more than just educational toys and organic crib bedding. In this fantasy world, parents would prepare their wee spawn for future success with a briefing book bringing infants up to date on what they missed prior to their lives on this planet. Kind of a “You Are Here” map for the family’s fun facts and emotional history. For example: We own a loveseat that would look at home in a New Orleans whorehouse; it came from great-grandmother Mimi and the re-upholstery wasn’t entirely successful. Or perhaps: There’s an empty green glass prescription bottle in the refrigerator with my grandfather’s name on it. I got it out of my mother’s refrigerator, and I don’t know why she put it there. When I’m dead, precious ones, it’s all yours. Or maybe: My father and his brother wrote regular letters home during their service in World War II, and their mother saved them in a duffle under the stairs. I never saw her unzip the bag, I imagine for fear of misplacing all that concentrated love and worry.

The most important intel in this imaginary book would be a robust section that, if studied, could replace years of therapy and various chemical palliatives. I’m imagining a kind of primer documenting parents’ joys and traumas, both the ones the parents acknowledge and the ones they’ve purposefully tamped down. Every computer program to come out of Silicon Wherever has a README file providing software installation guidelines, operating instructions, and troubleshooting suggestions. In this perfect world of my imagining, mothers and/or fathers would be bound by the laws of god and nature to provide children with a README file for their well-meaning but fucked-up parents.

In the real world we all live in, offspring effectively spend their lives compiling a virtual README of the unutterable joys and heartaches making up their parents’ internal software; the personal histories that formed the endearing quirks and less loveable eccentricities of their parental units. Even highly motivated children, however, recognize that they’ve started too late; the providers of egg and sperm led rich, quirky lives before they dreamed of baby-hosting, and baby is never going to know the half of it. It’s like trying to figure out the truth of the Rashomon mystery with only the bandit’s point of view, rather than also including the raped woman, the dead samurai, or that sketchy woodcutter.

A lawyer in Fort Worth recently sent me a README file for my dad; she had gathered the materials to document the military service of her grandfather, an Army Air Corps pilot. My father seldom spoke of his wartime experience except to praise his favorite crew members, but his family knew damn well that he flew 50 missions out of North Africa in 1943 and was lucky to survive. We also knew that, after he finished his combat missions, he crashed his plane in Cornwall just before Christmas, and that half the people in the plane died. He didn’t talk about that crash until near the end of his life. He recounted to one of my brothers having one of those near-death experiences where you twirl down a beam of light and have a conversation with other-worldly beings. In his recounting, he landed at a table with professors he had met during his single year at the University of Oklahoma. When they asked him, “What are you doing here?”, he responded, “I finished my 50 missions.” My aunt recounted the element of the story known more generally in our family, recalled as a curiosity rather than a tragedy: when he awoke at a military hospital, our dad told the attending nurse, “You must be an angel.” He assumed he was dead.

The term PTSD hadn’t been invented when I was a child, but my family had a pretty good idea what it meant. Public-facing Dad adored good stories and rewarded them with a magnificent, whooping laugh. He tirelessly served on innumerable committees and boards in the small town he loved. When his favorite cafe waitress was sick in bed, he left bags of groceries at her doorstep. But private, family dad could be detached, emotionally distant, and sometimes inexplicably angry. He never removed the keys from his pickup, and when conversations turned awkward or uncomfortable, he had other business to take care of. Talking to our dad was unsatisfying, when, in his head, he was flying one of his 50 missions. One brother and I got a glimpse of the pre-pilot, pre-dad person we never met when, after his death, his favorite cousin described their regular phone calls. “I always said, ‘I love you, Charles,’ before I hung up, and he always said, ‘I love you, Winogene.’” My brother and I stared at each other, dumbfounded, before my brother walked outside to weep. When Winogene, equally dumbfounded, asked what had just happened, I told her, “Winogene, my dad would be buried and dug up again before he said ‘I love you’ to us.”

So a Fort Worth lawyer has gone to the trouble to not only construct her own README file, but, generously, to share it with me. Her grandfather was the co-pilot who didn’t die on that plane flying out of RAF St. Mawgan, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator which, because God has a sense of humor, was named “Ole Faithful.” I already had seen much of what she shared. An accident report describing engines that inexplicably failed. A weather report indicating light rain at 2:29 a.m. takeoff. A list of the dead high-ranking intelligence officers who were being ferried to a D-Day planning meeting. Seeing it gathered in one place, though, gave this intel a different impact. A plane that crashed a mile and a half from takeoff. Engines that revved too loudly and then suddenly stopped. And new to me were details about the Fort Worth lawyer’s recent trip to the Cornwall crash site.

One of the images that she shared struck me as particularly terrifying in its normalcy. It seemed inhuman that an Air Corps pilot who had finished 50 combat missions, had recently sent a V-Mail Christmas card to his mother, and had just observed his 24th birthday, would find heartbreak in a field so domestic and verdant. As part of her robust documentation, the Fort Worth lawyer photographed the field where Ole Faithful fell to earth at 2:32 am. It’s green and cute as hell, the epitome of what the John of Gaunt character meant by, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,”

OK, so it wouldn’t have been green in December, but it still would have been sweet. If you’re trying to land a plane with only half its engines working and none of its flight instruments, the field’s flatness has a lot of appeal. Looking at this image, I was confident this particular pilot could still bring it home: He could land a plane without engines. I know this fact because my dad once described this experience as part of a stapled-together compilation for a Methodist Lenten study. His description recounts his last training school flight, when his instructor cut the plane’s engines somewhere over West Texas, told him to take the plane to xyz feet, and to hold it. Dad, about to fail flight school, reviewed the instrument panel. It told him: nothing for you here. Then a still small voice, like the one God used in his revelation to Elijah, told him, “There’s something you can do with your feet.” And damn. He could guide his plane with foot-operated flaps. Which he did. Just before he was about to fly into a farmer’s fence, the instructor turned the engines back on and said, “You pulled that one out of your hat.” Congratulations, you just won a free trip to Benghazi.

Landing a plane in a flat field, with no engines or instruments, at 2:32 am, might have been do-able. Buried in the newly shared intel, though, was the final impediment. Cornwall is famous for its hedges. Some of these intricate piles of rocks are 6,000 years old and date to the Bronze Age. Rich in wildlife and vital to erosion control, a picturesque Cornish hedge will shear the belly from a Consolidated B24 Liberator and leave it a pile of scrap metal.

If one were to go to a place once called Trewissick Farm in a village called Colan, one could apparently find pieces of Ole Faithful buried in a hedge, presumably still helping with erosion control and providing habitat for Cornish wildlife. I can provide directions, because a lawyer in Fort Worth gave me Google Earth coordinates.

So there’s my documentation. My fact-finding and troubleshooting, neatly organized by longitude and latitude. Add in a few more blurry War Department accident report photos and you’ve got a complete package. The next 50 years of guilt and grief don’t fit so easily into my README.

On Christmas morning in 1993, my new husband and I piled into a cold pickup truck to feed cattle with my father. Because he was fond of his son-in-law, my father always gave him his best material. So we were scarcely out of the driveway when he began with a cheerful observation: “Fifty years ago today, I woke up in a luxury hotel in England.”  Do tell, we encouraged. “Of course, they were using it for a hospital then.” That’s all I remember of his story from that morning. On reflection I think, sweet Jesus, this was every Christmas to him. 

My father’s favorite cousin, his childhood playmate with an infectious sense of humor, got the “I love you” telephone sign-off from my dad. The signature salutation I remember from him was, “Goodbye for now.” On reflection, the hope that he tucked into the “for now” is maybe all I should have needed. Sure, a conventionally adorable daddy would have come across with an “I love you,” just to meet expectations. The less conventional daddies, however, might be preoccupied with negotiating a safe landing.

README files are good for as far as they go; the real project fail, I think, happens when we put all our hopes and dreams into compiling the comprehensive record. One more factoid, one more data point, we think, and then we’ll understand those parents/children/significant others. Then we’ll know they love us. 

For fuck’s sake. They’ve crashed into hedges at 135 miles an hour. They’re loving us the best they can.