Only four were awake on the night of the Dupont disaster, but even by their own accounts they could hardly have been called witnesses. It happened in dead silence. The fog had crept quietly in the heat and settled thick onto our sleeping houses. There was no air traffic control back then, only a loose rigging of wires that ricocheted radio signals across the Atlantic, just offshore of the Cape. The few who stood sentinel in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy did so only by causal circumstance.
The first was Officer John H. Wainwright. He manned the radios at the police station three nights a week. I can still imagine him lit by the fluorescence of that dusty, single-floor station adjoining the firehouse that contained the island’s single truck, an old beater Ford with a siren like a squall. I can see him slumped, frumpy as he was in the years to follow, dry biscuits scattered across the desk. He’s somewhere between conscious thought and the florid rapidity of dreams when the Coast Guard comes over the radio to begin search and rescue.
Growing up, we entertained ourselves with ‘treasure hunts’ for pieces of the fuselage on the North Coast. Though it had been a decade, we felt as though the discovery of a piece of gnarled wood or steel was plausible. The island was a two-hour ferry odyssey from the mainland, but things still washed up onshore. In my own lifetime, several buoys were spat from the sea, so large they needed helicopters to dislodge them from the sand. Vessels, too, would run aground if left in the harbour for too long. In the October nor’easters they’d snap from their moorings like brittle twigs. My father called their owners amateurs; I called these ordeals bad luck. Loading the boats onto their trailers, collapsing their masts, and coiling their briny ropes into neat piles for winter was dreary and unsettling to me. Boats were meant to be in the water. They shouldn’t be removed at the first sign of trouble. But my father, a lobster fisherman, had the last word on the issue.
It felt reasonable – likely, even – that a small chunk of the Cessna’s body might wash ashore among the more minute objects: the sand-scraped bottles and fishhooks and driftwood that we would happen upon while traipsing up and down the shore. We knew any piece we might find would be small because our local drunk, Teddy Armstrong, said the plane was “smashed into a million pieces.” Since he was one of the few who were awake that night, he was the closest we could get to a trustworthy source.
It remains unclear where exactly Teddy was when the accident happened. He was stumbling somewhere along the wharf when Officer Wainwright raised his head. Teddy spent the following weeks recounting to any soul who’d listen that he’d heard it happen. The sound was like thunder, out past the cobblestones and across the harbour. Eventually, he overcame our doubts. His unabating love for brandy never stood in the way of his claim to an intimate, innate knowledge of the island; he was born here and he died here. So most of us felt that he probably knew something, or at least knew more than those of us who slept through it soundly.
Teddy’s mysterious coordinates, too, were not good enough reason to dismiss his testimony. What is not immediately apparent to the non-native islander is that ‘the island’ did not end where the waves swallowed the shore. There were no clearly delineated borders or ‘city limits.’ Island, town, and surrounding waters — the harbour, the sound, the points —were all synonymous. Each one was inextricably part of the others. The tragedy was sewn into the land of the island in a way that had little to do with the ground on which we stood on. None of them were buried here; their bodies were recovered and then returned to Connecticut. This was a fact I discovered much later, probably a decade afterwards, when I was old enough to consider the material, corporeal consequences of the crash. But everyone knew the story.
I never dared to mention our ‘treasure hunts’ to my father, hinting only vaguely at beach-walks. This wasn’t because he knew the victims — none of us did, in fact. They were summer visitors, flying east from the mainland for a summer holiday. The obituaries said that Jack Dupont was a lawyer. His wife, Harriet, was the daughter of a well-respected politician from Newton. They had gone to Groton and Yale and Smith and fallen in love in Boston and married and moved to Greenwich. There would be children and grandchildren and the future was very bright until August of 1983.
My father was never the same after the accident. I was still a child that night, but I have known this my whole life. My father went out to the docks, as usual, coffee in his thermos. The air was warm and the traps were full; he stayed out for longer than he normally would. The darkness settled. He kept heading North.
I’ve been out there enough to know that it must have been silent save for the waves lapping against the hull of Sedona, my father’s thirty-two-foot vessel, decades older than me.When the fog crept in like it did that evening it meant everything was still, a rarity for an island wracked by wind. The silence would have gone the instant my father radioed the coast guard, just like how the spell broke minutes later in Wainright’s office, when the Coast Guard began the search. Maybe it was a comfort for my father to hear Frank on the other end of the line. Maybe he was already too distraught.
I appreciated Frank’s faith in my father’s claim that something critical had occurred. Sometimes people would radio in, disoriented, seeing things that weren’t really there. This was especially true on the thickest, foggiest summer nights, when ocean blended into sky. But Frank was seasoned; he knew how to tell hysterics from reality and even through the crackle of the radio he must have known my father had seen something unusual.
It’s strange to consider that even though my father came the closest to bearing witness, like Teddy, Frank, and Wainright he had only really watched the aftermath. When he saw the sky light up white they were already dead. But he would tell it in a different way. It was only when he’d drunk enough whiskey to kill a dog and was pulled into the past: the sky becoming bright, beams of light refracting through the fog; a gunshot when the nose hit the water; everything dimming to a red glow; silence.
Last winter, a forty-four-foot sperm whale washed up on the north shore on the path on which we used to search for treasure. My neighbour Ruth rang with the news early at dawn and we drove out to see it, a mountain sucked and swallowed by waves frothy and black with blood. I parked my pickup on the dune and there it was, diminished by the endless landscape of the Atlantic. This beach was usually vacant, save for the sandpipers and the mounds of seaweed. Now a crowd had gathered in the early morning to see the corpse. It was a sad, startling sight.
When I was falling asleep that night I thought about the Duponts for the first time in a while. They were young, younger than I was when I was laying in bed thinking about what happened and our morbid fascination in childhood with collecting the pieces. We never did find anything in our morbid treasure hunts, any relics of their lives or that moment, which was unsurprising to most but dismaying to us. Instead, we left for college on the mainland or fished in the same waters that swallowed the plane. The town built an air traffic control tower and it came with a beacon on top, like a lighthouse that pulsed with a fluorescent beam of light. Soon we forgot about the darkness.
Local marine experts think the whale died from ‘consumption of oceanic debris,’ which made me imagine the bits of fuselage on the ocean floor. Melting into sleep, I thought of how many times death had washed ashore. In my dreams my father trawls up and down in the fog until dawn breaks, searching for survivors. In the dawn the ocean is clear and wide, and no one is there. Everything ends in a beam of light.