Tonight marks the 50th anniversary of the crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 349, which hit Bucks Elbow Mountain above Crozet on October 30, 1959.
The aircraft was a DC-3 flying between Washington and Roanoke with stops in Charlottesville and Lynchburg. There were 27 people on board and only one survived. It's an amazing story. Hawes Spencer wrote a great, comprehensive article in the HOOK earlier this month. Check it out for all the details.
Todd and I have been aware of the crash for years, in part because we visit Mint Springs every summer with Field Camp and pass the memorial to the tragedy on our way in and out of the park. For the past few months he's been itching to hike up the mountain and look for the crash's location. Three weeks ago we finally did just that.
We had directions to the site, from a website Todd found, and we saved it to his BlackBerry for reference during our hike. The hike was challenging, nearly all straight up, along a path of orange blazes and pink ribbons. The directions were somewhat vague at times ("continue on 3/8 of a mile past the highest point of the trail...") and the topographic map was hardly detailed on the 2-inch screen.
For some reason we became convinced we had missed the debris field (the conclusive indication that you had reached your destination) and we spent over an hour retracing our steps, then went off the trail, snaking up and down a half mile swath of hillside, searching for clues. We finally came to our senses, rejoined the path, and continued on for another half hour or so until we walked right up to a large circular piece of engine.
It's a strange thing to walk amongst wreckage of a tragedy. Kind of a singular experience, really. In our country, car crashes and plane crashes are usually investigated and then cleaned up, with parts carried off for further study or to be recycled or stashed away in some sort of evidence warehouse. Usually the only enduring, visible sign of wreckage is a hand-crafted cross or other kind of memorial, left by survivors.
In the case of Flight 349, most of the plane was removed and salvageable metal was cut from the remaining section of the fuselage. But pieces remain. There are large pieces, like the huge section we decided was the base of the fuselage, and small pieces, like the scraps of blue vinyl that dotted the forest floor. There were no signs or crosses to memorialize the lost lives, but over time the debris had been carefully positioned along a couple hundred yards of uphill terrain.
I couldn't help but be reminded of Sally Mann, who famously explored the concept of death in her body of work What Remains. In the documentary film of the same name, she says:
The earth doesn't care where death occurs.
...It's the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or
taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful
and creates death's memory.
Because the land will not remember by itself but the artist will.
I love that last line, for it helped me pinpoint the impetus of one of my own landscape projects. I think her words ring true, that art gives life and significance to moments and memories and places. After all, the landscape is dynamic--continuously shifting amongst birth, death, regeneration. There is little place for memory on the land.
But standing on the steep slope of Bucks Elbow Mountain, picking my way carefully and silently through metal objects that were once melded together, that once bore the weight of engines and humans, and once flew through the sky at great speeds, I couldn't help but look around at the land and think of what the earth here had witnessed.
I looked at the tree tops and thought of the view from those heights.
I looked at the jutting rock formation just west of the debris field and thought of how long it had stood there, before and after a plane came to rest beside it.
I felt the pitch of the mountainside and the slip of the leaves underfoot.
I imagined the rescue workers struggling with the footing and the heavy loads.
I thought about how the mountain received the crashing plane under its foliage and then quietly held the broken pieces, and the one survivor, for several days before the crash site was discovered.
I thought about how loud it must have been at first, and then how silent.
These aren't easy thoughts. But these were my thoughts.
50 years ago or 50,000 years ago.
Then I reconnected with my husband, kissed him, and began the long, downhill hike to the place from where we'd come.
