On "The Man in the Water" and the value of writers

A parable in a plane crash.

Why bother? Why bother doing any of this anymore—writing, publishing, storytelling, advocating, thinking? Trying?

In an age when despair seems geologic in its immutability, on a planet that no longer seems remotely interested in what we have to offer, why?

Walk with me. I want to tell you a story.

*

Forty-three years and seventeen days ago, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737 carrying 79 people, crashed just after takeoff from Washington National Airport. It fell into the icebound Potomac, hitting the 14th Street Bridge on its way.

The plane hit the bridge at 4:01 pm, too early for your typical DC rush hour. Alas, however, this wasn’t an ordinary Wednesday. Like the January we’ve all just endured, this one was miserable, and a particularly nasty snowstorm had just rolled into town. Federal workers trying to escape had left work early and were now trapped, helpless, in traffic.

Seventy-eight people died that day—74 on the plane, four in their cars. Miraculously, however, six passengers survived the initial crash, most of them bobbing in the tail section of the plane.

*

Flight 90 crashed three years before I was born, but its ghosts, like many, still haunt the city.

Take “Skutniks,” for example, the DC press corps’ term for those everyday Americans the President invites to his State of the Union address every year. The tradition dates back to January of 1982, when Ronald Reagan invited Lenny Skutnik, a low-level employee of the Congressional Budget Office, as his guest of honor. Watching Flight 90 rescue efforts from the shore of the Potomac, Skutnik had jumped into the freezing water to save Priscilla Tirado, a survivor blinded by jet fuel.

Another Flight 90 artifact is The Arland Williams, Jr. Bridge, which is now technically the name for the 14th Street’s northbound section.

We’re going to have to work up to talking about Arland Williams, though, because I can never do that for long without weeping, and there are some things I want to tell you in complete sentences first.

*

I thought of Flight 90, as many Washingtonians did, two nights ago. When the flight from Wichita went down, I expected there would be at least a few survivors—at least a glimmer of hope—because that’s how things went the last time this happened, and, well, history does leave its cognitive biases on the mind.

Other people seem to have felt the same way. Countless would-be heroes rushed to the shore Wednesday night, ready to save what they could.

This time, however, there was nothing whatsoever to save.

What a metaphor, huh?

*

I know I shouldn’t react to the fact that the President blamed Wednesday’s crash on DEI. I know this is precisely the sort of bullshit to which I’m supposed to stop reacting. I know I’m supposed to keep calm and stay focused on the really scary stuff, the better to conserve my energy for “doing something” about it, although God only knows what there is TO do.

It’s just—I can’t. Not yet. I can’t let go of the pain; I can’t stop feeling every slap to the face. I just can’t.

What you need to understand is that Washington, DC isn’t just where I live. To put it rather dramatically, the city is piled high with the bones of my ancestors, generations of whom have lived here since the mid-19th century. This is personal to me.

One of my great-great grandfathers built huge swaths of the city’s row houses, possibly with the financial backing of another, unrelated great-great grandfather. Both of them are now buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.

I got married in the National Cathedral, standing on stones laid above foundational pits where my grandmother, a fellow National Cathedral School alum, used to smoke with her friends in the Class of 1946. My grandmother is also now buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.

I was a bit too much of a goody-goody to smoke anywhere as a teen, let alone on Cathedral grounds. Instead, my friends and I used to go to Gravelly Point Park at night to eat junk food and watch planes land. We’d shovel raw cookie dough down as 737s and CRJ-700s soared 100 feet over our heads, the air snapping like ribbons around us after they passed. It was all very thrilling and—even more important for an early-2000s teen—rAnDoM.

As I type this, Gravelly Point is a staging ground for divers hauling children’s body parts out of the river.

What a metaphor, huh?

*

I love the woods here. I love exploring. I live on the banks of the Potomac now—in Arlington, right where planes bank right for the final time on their River Visual Approach into DCA.

If you wanted, though, I could take you over to Carderock and show you the Patriot missile launcher hidden there, aimed at the flight path just in case a pilot decides to go rogue. I could take you to rotting trolley tracks from the Chatauqua era. I could take you to the ruins of abortive bridges and 18th-century sheep pastures.

I could take you to the secret clearing where I dig relics up from the ground: buttons from the French and Indian War; fastidious little whittlings from bored Union soldiers; projectile points from the people who lived in this place millennia before my Bavarian-burgher ancestors ever laid a brick.

Like I said: I love DC. I’ve loved it all my life. And every day, I wonder when it’s going to be time—for my children’s sake—to leave.

*

Okay, I might as well tell you about Arland Williams, Jr. now.

He was so endearingly basic, so boring. That’s the first thing I love about him: he was more mayonnaise than Miracle Whip.

A divorced dad of two, his idea of a good vacation involved five days of sensible motor-home camping in the Great Smoky Mountains. He was from Mattoon, Illinois. His high school nickname was “Chub.”

Looks-wise, Arland Williams was….how do I put this. He wasn’t bad! He looked like a standard 46-year-old dad from 1982—which is to say, a presentable 71-year-old today. Women liked him just fine. Had he lived into the era of social media, he would have been one of those guys who just posts pictures of barbecue, accompanied by captions like “I am barbecuing.”

Arland Williams was a midlevel bank examiner for the Federal Reserve. When not working, his favorite hobby was talking about work.

His personality did not have many salient features. The one exception was this: he was terrified of open water. All of his girlfriends mentioned this in interviews. It was a notable outlier for an otherwise low-key guy who had graduated from The Citadel.

Maybe he was just prophetic.

*

He was one of the six survivors in the tail section. He was tangled in the wreckage of his seat, his head perilously close to the water. In driving snow. In near-freezing water. Surrounded by chunks of ice.

The sun was going down. Misery and terror surrounded him: Priscilla Tirado screaming and screaming, blinded by jet fuel, her husband and baby lost in the water beneath; Joe Stiley, holding her upright; Stiley’s coworker, Nikki Felch, severely injured nearby; Kelly Duncan, clinging to the tail; Bert Hamilton, treading water. They had broken arms, broken legs. They were moments from fatal hypothermia.

After twenty interminable minutes, a helicopter showed up. Threading themselves perilously between the sides of the 14th Street Bridge, the crew tossed out a rope line and life ring. They pulled Bert Hamilton to shore first before going back for the people stuck to the tail.

Down went the rope. Arland Williams caught it.

He passed it, gently, to Kelly Duncan.

Minutes later, the helicopter came back. Down went two ropes; Arland Williams caught one.

He passed it, gently, to Joe Stiley and Priscilla Tirado.

The last three survivors made their way to shore. At some point, Tirado lost her grip, sending everyone on shore into a tizzy; Lenny Skutnik dove in to save her.

When all that commotion died down, everyone turned back to look at the tail. The wreckage had shifted. Arland’s head and hands weren’t visible anymore.

He had kids. He had a fiancée. He had the Great Smoky Mountains to go back to. He had barbecue. He was afraid. He passed the rope anyway.

Of the seventy-four people who died on the plane, Arland Williams was the only one who drowned.

*

Whenever I feel like reducing myself to pudding, I reread “The Man in the Water,” an essay Roger Rosenblatt wrote about Arland Williams twelve days after he died. The media hadn’t figured out Williams’ name yet at that point; he was just an anonymous hero.

“The Man in the Water” is the single most beautiful essay I’ve ever read. “The Man in the Water” is why I’m telling you all this. “The Man in the Water” is why you cannot stop writing.

Come here and worship with me, all of you:

At some moment in the water he must have realized that he would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgment he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in the world move away from him, and he deliberately let it happen.

Yet there was something else about the man that kept our thoughts on him, and which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was there, in the essential, classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, one supposes, on faith.

Since it was he who lost the fight, we ought to come again to the conclusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the reverse, and it takes the act of the man in the water to remind us of our true feelings in this matter. …Everyone feels the possibility in himself. That is the abiding wonder of the story. That is why we would not let go of it. If the man in the water gave a lifeline to the people gasping for survival, he was likewise giving a lifeline to those who observed him.

The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. ‘Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature,’ said Emerson. Exactly. So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.

And that is a power of nature, too.

The despair is geologic, but so are you.

*

I don’t drive over the Arland Williams, Jr. Bridge every day, but whenever I do, it’s for something nice, something hopeful. On my way up to New York to visit editors, it’s how I get to Union Station. It’s how I get to Capitol Hill Books to pick up first editions and Congressional Cemetery to harvest American chestnuts.

Every time I drive over it—every single time—I think of Arland Williams in the water. I think of him handing me the rope. I think of him, and I take his hand, and I smile.