Step by step, a chill as damp as ice melt seeped from his bones and through his flesh, then out of his brow, his scalp, the nape of his neck, the curve of his spine. The day was warm, but he was not.
Eventually he could see an end to the ranks of trees, an open space past the last of the white pines. Though the forest had begun to seem claustrophobic, he was now reluctant to forsake the crowding greenery for the revelation that lay beyond.
Shivering, he followed Barbara through the last trees into the bottom of a gently rising meadow. The clearing was three hundred yards wide from north to south—and twice that long from the east, where they had entered it, to the wooded crest at the west end.
The wreckage was gone, but the meadow felt haunted.
The previous winter’s melting snow and the heavy spring rains had spread a healing poultice of grass across the torn, burnt land. The grass and a scattering of yellow wildflowers, however, could not conceal the most terrible wound in the earth: a ragged-edged, ovate depression approximately ninety yards by sixty yards. This enormous crater lay uphill from them, in the northwest quadrant of the meadow.
“Impact point,” Barbara Christman said.
They set out side by side, walking toward the precise place where three-quarters of a million pounds had come screaming out of the night sky into the earth, but Joe quickly fell behind Barbara and then came to a stop altogether. His soul was as gouged as this field, ploughed by pain.
Barbara returned to Joe and, without a word, slipped her hand into his. He held tightly to her, and they set out again.
As they approached the impact point, he saw the fire-blackened trees along the north perimeter of the forest, which had served as backdrop to the crash-scene photograph in the Post. Some pines had been stripped bare of needles by the flames; their branches were charred stubs. A score of seared aspens, as brittle as charcoal, imprinted a stark geometry on the dismal sky.
They stopped at the eroded rim of the crater; the uneven floor below them was as deep as a two-story house in some places. Although patches of grass bristled from the sloping walls, it did not thrive on the bottom of the depression, where shattered slabs of grey stone shown through a thin skim of dirt and brown leaves deposited by the wind.
Barbara said, “It hit with enough force to blast away thousands of years of accumulated soil and still fracture the bedrock beneath.”
Even more shaken by the power of the crash than he had expected to be, Joe turned his attention to the sombre sky and struggled to breathe.
An eagle appeared out of the mountain mists to the west, flying eastward on a course as unwaveringly straight as a latitude line on a map. Silhouetted against the grey-white overcast, it was almost as dark as Poe’s raven, but as it passed under that portion of sky that was blue-black with a still-brewing storm, it appeared to grow as pale as a spirit.
Joe turned to watch the bird as it passed overhead and away.
“Flight 353,” Barbara said, “was tight on course and free of problems when it passed the Goodland navigational beacon, which is approximately a hundred and seventy air miles east of Colorado Springs. By the time it ended here, it was twenty-eight miles off course.”
Encouraging Joe to stay with her on a slow walk around the crater rim, Barbara Christman summarized the known details of the doomed 747 from its takeoff until its premature descent.
Out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Flight 353, bound for Los Angeles, ordinarily would have followed a more southerly corridor than the one it travelled that August evening. Due to thunderstorms throughout the South and tornado warnings in the southern Midwest, another route was considered. More important, the headwinds on the northerly corridor were considerably less severe than those on the southern; by taking the path of least resistance, flight time and fuel consumption could be substantially reduced. Consequently, the Nationwide flight-route planning manager assigned the aircraft to Jet Route 146.