An Appalachian Trial

Silence. Total silence. Only silence and darkness defined my world.

Slowly, impossibly, it began to dawn on me… I did not seem to be flying an airplane anymore. Although, at first, this thought was totally nonsensical to me, I could not mentally reconcile the inconsistency of flying an airplane with the fact that I was surrounded by silence and darkness. How could it be? Was I dreaming? As the mists in my mind slowly evaporated, I realized that instead of sitting in the pilot’s seat of my airplane listening to the steady drone of the engine, I seemed to be laying on the leafy, dirt, and boulder-covered terra firma of a silent black world. I was lying face down and fully stretched out with my arms extended downward, parallel to the sides of my body. Before I even moved, I realized my mouth was full of dirt and leaves, and I also became aware my teeth did not line up quite right as I started to work my jaw. I turned my head to one side and began to spit out the dirt and leaves clogging my mouth. I drifted in and out of consciousness while, in this semi-conscious state, a dreamlike image was appearing and re-appearing, playing on a continuous, slow-motion loop in my mind…

I am reaching for the radio frequency-selector knob preparing to make my call to Flight Service for an updated weather briefing when the steady drone of the airplane engine is suddenly interrupted by what sounds like large wet mops slapping against the thin aluminum skin of my airplane. The windscreen in front of my face explodes, shattering into a thousand small pieces of glittering Plexiglas. They strangely whirl in slow motion past my face as I am simultaneously hit by a hurricane-force wind intensifying the chaos unfolding in front of me. The wind screams past my face and ears and the roar like a freight train overpowers all my other senses. My arms flail uncontrollably. I have no control over anything. Something tears the watch from my left wrist but my focus seems strangely drawn to the individual Plexiglas shards glittering and twirling in an illogical slow-motion dance amidst what otherwise is a fierce maelstrom. Then my focus suddenly shifts and I see my brother mysteriously levitate rearward out of his seat. With impossible slowness, he floats rearward toward the back of the plane while simultaneously twisting into a curled, faced own posture. At the same time, the airplane’s cabin roof is being peeled backward and is replaced by the blackness of an undefined space. At the very instant Mark reaches the very rear of the cabin and seems about to disappear into the cargo storage area just behind the rear bench-seat, I am catapulted forward into oblivion by some irresistible force. My vision goes dark and the loop ends only to be rewound and replayed in my mind, over and over again…

And there, in total silence and blackness, I gradually began to comprehend: I was reliving the very last second of my flight in very slow motion and in excruciating detail.