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Density Altitude
Ten years ago my
husband and I crashed an airplane. It was Friday July 22nd,
1994, and we’d taken off from the north end of Lake Washington to fly over
Seattle, circle the Space Needle, and spot sea lions in Elliot Bay.
J. loved to fly because it gave him respite from his high-pressure, high-stress
job as a high-tech CEO. He wanted me to fly with him because it was fun
and because I’d asked him to spend more time with me. When we lined up to
land, the lake from altitude looked like a teeming Petri dish—sailors,
jet-skiers, swimmers, and sunbathers swarming near the shore—but we
descended. Our time was up in the rented Cessna and I wanted to get home
to the kids. But then a white speedboat cut through the touchdown point.
J. shook his
head. I think he said “Shit.” He was forced to make snap
decision: to fly over the boat, set down closer in, and risk slamming
into the shore, or to pull up and go around. He yanked on the yoke.
The plane’s nose tilted up. But
we were flying through butter—too slow, too low. The plane headed
straight for the steep hillside by the lake.
In 1994, J. was a brilliant,
self-possessed type in his late thirties, conventionally and boyishly handsome,
with a strong jaw and wary green eyes. He was full of suppressed
energy. When he laughed hard, he threw his head back and opened his mouth
wide. He knew the physics of flying like he knew the lingo of his trade—the
rules of lift and acceleration were as familiar to him as the algorithms and
syntax of software. Like others of his ilk—young high-tech lions—he was
intelligent, agile, skillful, and cunning but not fully empathic. He was
instinctive about power and authority. An older man who delivered a serious
slight elicited a languid retreat; a child who spilled milk at the dinner table
provoked a verbal swipe.
At the time of the crash, these qualities of
his had led him to success in two software startups. In the first company
he’d served as vice-president of Engineering. The stock from that venture
had netted several million dollars. After a year off, he decided to start
another company, and in 1994 we were well into the upward climb of that
company’s life cycle. Our million shares of stock had been valued at
first at a nickel a share. Now the stock was valued at several dollars a
share—on paper at least.
If you had looked up “successful young
American couple of the Nineties” in the dictionary, you would have found
us. We were happy. Work, marriage, children—all of it
exceeded our dreams.
The plane mushed toward a lakefront
restaurant. The engine screamed at maximum revs. A tall wall of
windows loomed larger and larger. J. heaved on the yoke.
Tendons bulged in his neck. We were going to crash.
A fissure opened in me that exposed
long-buried memories, dreams, and thoughts. Inside the cleft was a dead
spot, a mile-high singularity from which I could look down at myself in that
plane. I became a minuscule participant in the rushing-around of life,
the molecules of sky and water and earth, the mammals and insects and microbes,
the light and heat and sound. It was as if there was a frame around the whole
busy mess of life, and the frame was heaven or art or physics or God, and God
didn’t care what happened to me because we all live and we all die. It’s
only a matter of time, and time is irrelevant to God. And in that moment
my life began to matter to me. I became as precious to myself as a
kidnapped child found alive after many days under ground.
J. and I had grown up in the same small
town. We had been together since high school. Our lives had taken
parallel courses for years—we’d both graduated from the University of
Washington and worked in the software industry. (I was technical writer
and he was a programmer.) Now, eighteen years into our marriage, our
roles diverged. I quit working when we had our first child in 1988.
I studied creative writing and wrote poetry between outings to parks, loads of
laundry, and trips to the grocery store. I was along for the wild
ride that was the Go-Go Nineties, but the family was my priority. Family
was important to him too, but it didn’t come first. He was the public
face of a public high-tech company, the founding CEO. Shareholders,
customers, and employees were his responsibility, and he was driven by
duty.
In my role as
chief nurturer, I encouraged J.’s flying hobby. It had the combination of
intellectual challenge and physical risk that could distract him for at least
the time it took to take off in a plane and land it safely.
Our plane crash was caused by a thing
called, in aviation parlance, density altitude. Density altitude is a calculation
to help pilots compensate for the fact that air is not consistently
dense. Air density affects the amount of lift available to make an
airplane ascend. The way it’s supposed to work is that the airplane
powers forward, the air flows under and over the wings, and the plane
rises.
Lower air density
means less lift and less engine power. A lot less.
There were 21,380
aircraft accidents between 1989 and 1999. Weather was a contributing or
causal factor in nearly 5,000 of them. Most of the 5,000 weather-related
accidents had to do with wind, but density altitude was a factor in nearly
1,000 of them.
The density
altitude calculation is affected by the weight of the aircraft and its power,
as well as the air temperature, the humidity, and the altitude. We were
at sea level, but the airplane was underpowered, and the pontoons had taken on
sea water when we’d briefly touched down in Elliot Bay,
increasing our weight. And it was hot. Around 90 degrees. If
J. had figured all this out ahead of time, he’d have known that once he
committed to that landing on the busy lake, he would not be able to pull up and
go around. It would be impossible to gain enough altitude to clear that
restaurant, much less the steeply rising terrain across the road.
But it was a
gorgeous day. We were flying.
Density altitude
is a trap. It is a giant sheet of flypaper, an enormous spider web, the
colossal hand of God.
We lived on the
breaking edge of the Nineties high-tech tidal wave. The company’s stock
price climbed steadily. New product releases thrust the customer base
into the millions. Localizers were hired to translate the software for
overseas markets, and sales offices were set up in Dublin
and Tokyo. J. traveled often to Europe and the Far East, while I stayed
home and took care of the house and the kids. Every quarter stock
analysts watched the company’s performance and reported on it. They
expected sales and profits to grow by a certain percentage quarter by quarter,
year after year. It
was as if the shareholders and analysts were predators who
fed constantly but were never sated.
And somehow the
company and its executives managed to meet the growth goals year after year, as
ridiculous as they seemed. J.’s anxiety increased every three months as
the quarter deadline approached. And his anxiety grew quarter by
quarter. After several years of this, I began to understand that, even if
he wanted to, he couldn’t go on like that. There was no end to it.
Running a growing
software company in the Nineties was like taking off in a small plane and
realizing that the throttle’s stuck open and the elevator and rudder are frozen
in position for a steep climb. You go until you run out of fuel or
air. Either way you’ll end up falling out of the sky.
I loved J.
He had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp intellect that kept me challenged,
and we shared our lives intensely and deeply, the way only people who grow up
together can. We had come from the same desert town, we knew all the same
people, we loved each other’s families, and now we had children together.
I expected that one day in 2050 we’d die together, lying side by side in our
bed.
I admired his
work, too. His company’s software was clever and clean, with a beautiful
look and feel. It helped people do their work, and it provided
well-paying, interesting jobs for thousands of people.
But I didn’t like
what was happening in the stock market. Everyone knew it was a game, that
stock valuations didn’t have much to do with real value. Even so,
everyone wanted to play. You could get rich. We were getting
rich.
Still, there was fear in the air. It felt as if we
were flying in a jerry-built plane. I was always waiting for the engine
to sputter, the flaps to freeze, the wings to tear off. I was always
waiting for the crash.
When a small plane takes off correctly, it
pops up like a buoyant stick in a still pond. In our plane, the engine
whined, maxed out. Instead of ascending steeply and steadily, we labored
on a flattened curve toward the restaurant windows. I saw the diners,
their forks and knives as they ate. I saw their eyes widen as they looked
up from their meals. I watched them pause, point, and gesticulate.
I watched a man dive head first under a table like a Hollywood stunt man.
I thought “We’re done. Damn.” Just that. But as the plane
drew near the glass, the nose tilted skyward and the pontoons cleared the
roof’s edge and the plane stalled and fell front-down onto the downward-sloping
shed roof like a seesaw on its fulcrum.
I thought, “Damn, maybe we’re going to make
it after all.”
Psychiatrists ask plane crash survivors if they are
suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD—the syndrome
that used to be associated only with war veterans—symptoms like anxiety,
nightmares, flashbacks, substance abuse, violent outbursts, self-mutilation,
and suicide.
In 1999, a study
questioned the conventional wisdom that all trauma victims suffer from
PTSD. The study said, essentially, that plane crash survivors are “better
off psychologically than their non-crash airplane traveler counterparts.”
The researchers, Gary Capobianco of Old Dominion University and Thanos Patellis
of the College Board in New York, had managed to question 15 airplane crash
survivors and compare their answers to air travelers who had never been in a
crash. They found that the plane crash survivors experienced less
emotional distress in their daily lives than the control group.
What is the
up-side of catastrophe? The question reminds me of the apocalyptic movies
that are so popular these days. Could it be that we love the idea
of wiping out everything—all our mistakes and betrayals and tragedies and
disappointments—and starting over? Having another chance to fly right?
Once the plane
cleared the edge of the restaurant’s shed roof, it stalled. It bounced
and slid down along the roof. For a moment the road was a dark blur below
us. The treed hillside loomed in front of us. I remember the ground
drifting toward me as if I were a rider on a quaint old Ferris Wheel. The
pontoons hit the road and buckled. There was some jostling. Not
much. I hit the back of my head against the curved cockpit wall (an eager
young ER doctor later insisted that I needed one stitch), and then there was
another bump. A car traveling south on Bothell Way collided
with the plane.
People ran over
from the sides of the road.
Some guy said,
“Stay put, help is coming!”
I said, “I’m
getting out of here.”
We unhooked our
harnesses. I remember thinking “What if the plane catches fire?” and then
shoving the door open and scrambling out.
The newspaper
account quoted a bystander who said I was “shaken.” I don’t remember
feeling shaken. I do remember feeling chastened and grateful to be alive,
especially after I knew all the facts: that the plane’s pontoons had
scraped off the restaurant’s satellite dish, and then the tail of the plane had
caught the 7,500-volt power lines that ran along Bothell Way, slowing us down
enough to keep us from slamming into the hillside across the road.
When it was over,
somehow everyone had escaped serious injury, even the elderly couple in the car
that crashed into the wrecked plane.
For days after the crash, I told my mother and my
best friend that nothing was wrong, but I spent hours cleaning cupboards,
closets, storerooms, and drawers. I sorted dishes and silverware, linens
and towels, clothing and toys, needles and thread, photographs and
mementos. I needed to touch familiar objects and put them in order.
It was as if I was a southbound waterfowl looking for a safe, still pond in
which to land, rest, feed, and nest.
Joseph Stiglitz, the former chairman of
Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, has a new book out about the
Roaring Nineties. He says that high stock prices made some people into
millionaires overnight, but they also fed an “irrational exuberance” (Alan
Greenspan’s phrase). Billions were poured into crazy high-tech
ideas when we should have invested those billions into our country’s
dilapidated infrastructure and failing school systems.
Unlike some of the dot-coms, J.’s company
produced both a good product and solid profits every quarter. Still, we
all knew that the stock-market feeding frenzy was not real. It was not
sustainable.
We were about to run out of runway.
There was no way we could gain enough altitude to miss the steeply rising
terrain ahead.
Flying mattered
to J., and he was not the kind of person to give up after a scare. He
wanted to keep flying, he wanted me to join him, and I didn’t want to run away
from a challenge or let him down. A week after the crash, I decide to get
back on the horse; I booked a flying lesson at Boeing Field.
Bryan, the flight
instructor, was a beautiful man in his mid-twenties. He had dark wavy
hair, George Clooney eyebrows, and a knowing and sympathetic smile. Bryan
had booked a rental plane from an agency on the field. Rental planes are
usually small and beat up, and the plane Bryan had rented, an old Cessna 152,
was no exception. It looked like the plane I’d crashed in, except that it
was older and smaller and had wheels instead of pontoons. I stood
on the field during the pre-flight check and examined the plane. The
struts that connected the high wing to the cockpit seemed as slender and
fragile as curtain rods.
We took
off. I felt a little nervous, but it wasn’t bad. We flew around for
a while, and then Bryan talked on the radio and got clearance to land.
He lined the plane up and asked me to take the controls.
I tried to keep
the plane on the glide slope, but I got dizzy. It was as if my head
decided to stay at altitude while my body continued to descend with the
plane. My bowels filled with wet cement. My stomach sprouted
writhing worms. I told Bryan he’d have to land the plane, and
he took over.
I could not keep
my lunch down. I tried to vomit out the window, but I was not completely
successful.
My body’s
reaction shocked me. I had thought I was fine. It turned out that
my body understood the nature of a brush with death even if my mind didn’t.
Life went
on through the mid Nineties and into the late Nineties. Our kids grew, we
built homes, we traveled. J. still got sick with anxiety every
quarter. I understood when he said that public-company CEOs don’t just
quit. If they do, the stock price can tank. He started looking for
someone to take over, but nobody on the management team was ready for that
challenge, and looking for a CEO outside the company would scare the
markets. By 1998, though, I knew he had to get out. By 1999 even he
knew it.
Microsoft was
buying companies, and a conversation with Microsoft began, followed by a
year-long, excruciating negotiation. Microsoft was tough. It took
months to agree in principle on the sale, and many more months to settle on a
value ratio for the stock swap. The offer was announced, weeks passed,
and the deadline for SEC review approached. On the day before the
deadline, the SEC decided to review the deal. Three more months of legal
wrangling followed, during which the stress and pressure increased. I
didn’t think I could stand it a second longer by the time the $1.26 billion
sale was finally approved on January 7, 2000.
After the plane crash, I wanted to spend
more time with people I loved. I wanted to touch them, listen to
them. I wanted to make pot roast and play with the children. I
cosseted myself as if I was a Victorian invalid, always contented in my
sickroom, but happiest when receiving visitors. I could not bear the idea
of dying forlorn and forgotten. On the other hand, my husband craved new
experience—travel, music, food, drink, and especially people. He pushed
himself out as if he was a rookie astronaut, impatient for the launch, happiest
when walking on the moon. He could not bear the thought of dying without
having lived. I drew in; he flew out.
J. and I weren’t
divorced until the end of 2001, but our 24-year marriage was dead by the time
the company was sold January 2000. I know this because I remember J.
giving an interview on the occasion of the sale of the company. The
interviewer asked him about the plane crash (I’m not sure why), and he gave an account
of it—all of it—in nearly as much detail as I’ve given here. In his
description, however, I was not mentioned once. It was as if he’d had no
passenger at all.
But no, it was
worse than that. It was as if we had never met in Kaiser’s Market when we
were seventeen, or fallen in love, or married, or had two children together. He
talked only of himself, his feelings, and what he’d learned.
By January 2000, he had moved on, even if he didn’t move
out for another six months.
A few weeks ago I was visiting my friend Robin,
a former Seattleite who now lives in Los Angeles. Robin happened to have
some other friends over that night, who I’ll call John and Mary. John, a
handsome, fit guy in his fifties who reminded me of my ex-husband, was a former
Navy pilot who landed jets on aircraft carriers. Now John and Mary enjoy
flying their small plane into remote mountain strips to camp and
fish. John was talking about how careful he is when taking off from
the high-altitude grass strips. He said visibility and density altitude
are important factors, and if there’s any doubt at all, he doesn’t go. He
waits for better conditions.
I said, by way of making conversation, “I
know something about density altitude.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I was in a crash because of density
altitude.”
He leaned forward: the hungry look of a
pilot who loves to talk aviation. “What happened?”
I began to tell the story of the
crash. He interrupted in the middle of the story and finished it for
me. He knew all about the accident. In fact, he knew more than I
did. He turned out to be one of those pilots who digest, memorize, and
analyze all the accident reports in the FAA bulletins and NTSB missives—a
conscientious pilot; an aviation wonk.
“If those power lines hadn’t caught the
tail, the plane would have crashed into the hot tub shop and exploded.
You’d be dead right now.”
Even ten years out, I shivered. It was
as if the tunnel of my time on earth opened for a moment into a grassy, sunny
clearing; I glimpsed what might have been missing from the world if I had died
in that crash.
Now I think of the crash as a
touchstone. Before the crash, I believed I was busy building a life, a
home, and a family. After the crash, I understood that I was busy preparing
to die. Catastrophe and calamity arise in any life—mine included, but I
don’t fear it quite like I used to.
Occasionally I ask a friend who’s a pilot to
take me up in his small plane. If conditions are right, I ask if we can
fly low enough to see the trees on the mountains, the boats on the oceans, the
houses in the towns, and the cars on the roads. A low-altitude aerial
view has a magic all its own, a kick and a delight, an angle on life that’s
otherwise unattainable.
Linda Breneman
Email: Linda Breneman
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