A Day on the Mountainside

Years ago, when I was a young man in my twenties, there was a terrible plane crash not far from where I grew up. It was in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Mt Weather. Mt Weather had been hollowed out all the way down to create some super secret installation to protect the government in case the Russians attacked. Aunt Maidie's son Randolph worked way down inside it as a fireman. There were firestations and stores and everything down there. He told us later that the night the plane went down the area was hit by the worst storm he had ever heard. He worked so far underground that they never heard the weather, but he said they heard that storm.

Somewhere in the storm the crew of a passenger jet with nearly 100 people on board got confused and, flying too low, flew straight into the side of the mountain at full speed. There were no survivors.

Months later I was driving around the mountains with my cousins. They suddenly said stop the car, this is where the plane crashed. We got out and looked up the ridge on one side of the road. The was a huge rock jutting up out of the ground. They told me that the plane had actually come to a halt when it hit that rock. Then I turned back and looked down slop across the road. All the trees were there, reaching up to the sky, except for one spot directly in line with the rock. Every tree was sheared off as if with a buzz saw.

The belly of the plane most have been about where my head was as I stood in the middle of the road. Now I love the mountains in this part of Virginia. They are always beautiful no matter how ugly the weather. They speak to me about my birth and my life. But not that day, not in that spot. There was a wicked electric feel to the place that made my skin crawl. I am convinced I would have known that something horrible had happened there if I were blindfolded. We quietly left and never went back.