I’m
ashamed. Actually, it’s the fault of Jesse Kornbuth and Robert Sabbag.
“One June night in 1979, Sabbag had the extreme bad luck to be flying with a pilot who should not have been at the controls. Two miles from the Hyannis airport, the pilot made a tragic decision and pushed the commuter plane under the fog,” writes Sabbag’s friend, Kornbluth.
“The plane hit the trees at 123 knots.
It lost its wings as it crashed. They were sheared off, taking the fuel tanks
with them, as the plane slammed through the forest. In an explosion of tearing
sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting thick stands of oak
and pine for a distance of three hundred feet.... The seatbelt held up. Nothing
else did. I hit the belt with such force that I took the seat forward with me,
ripping it right out of the fuselage,” writes Sabbag.
From the first detail Sabbag pulls you in. Irrevocably.
Kornbluth
explains, “The plane was in a forest that was hard to reach from a road --- not
that anyone at the airport, two-and-a-half miles away, knew where it was. The
pilot was dead, several passengers were trapped. Sabbag had a broken pelvis and
couldn't walk. Oh, and there was a good chance the wreck would catch on fire,“
Kornbluth explains.
30 years later Sabbat hunts up the other passengers, recounts his harrowing experience and how he lost his dry sense of humor, his courage – even his ability to imagine.
I can get irritatingly preachy here about the power of being vividly specific. Regrettably, I’ve never lived up to that advice as magnificently as Sabbat. He writes like someone you’d want to get to know better.
When Stephen King was asked how he managed to writer bestsellers, he responded, “I cut out all the boring stuff.”
Life is too short to be bland, to speak in generalizations. To avoid saying one’s truth. Sabbat inspires me to follow my own advice. To divulge the meaningful specifics sooner. Gulp.
