Tempting Fate

The light plane, a trail of thick, black smoke streaking from its midsection, careened toward the ocean that August day and impacted with a thunderous crash, narrowly missing the crew of a passing lobster boat and alerting both islands to its demise. Flames bellowed atop the water, there was an explosion that lit up the late afternoon sky, and the factory whistle began a high pitched, chaotic wail. In just minutes, the smoky passage was alive with rescue boats - sirens blared for help, the factory women left their work, the men laying out salt fish in Aunt Lizzie's front yard shed their rubber aprons and gloves and ran for the breakwater in a dizzying rush. My grandmother, who had been washing the sunporch windows, threw down her long handled brush and yelled for me to call Elsie, the island's switchboard operator. Right now, child! Nana shouted, Tell her it's a plane crash!

By dusk, the pilot and his passenger had been pulled from the plane - remarkably both alive although badly injured - and the wreckage had sunk, leaving a greasy film of fuel on the water, patchy and still burning in some places. Smoke drifted toward Gull Rock and the air was hazy with ash and soot, small pieces of debris drifted to shore - a single intact suitcase, a singed leather jacket, a lightweight and blackened life raft. Island children collected everything they could retrieve and John and Jacob Sullivan made a list of anything they could identify and a second list of what they could not. The incredible day ended with two survivors and an oil slick. Engineers and accident investigators from the Canadian Aviation Safety Board arrived the following day and fishing was barely interrupted.

There were heroes that day and no casualties. A small isolated community came together at a moment of crisis and chaos and made sense of it all. People spoke of it for years, considering how it might've been different if it had been at night, if the wind had been more forceful, if the plane had landed on ground. Fate smiles on its own timetable.