COLLISION — JENNIFER McGAHA
/Just past noon on July 20, 1967, Piedmont Airlines Flight 22 took off from the Asheville Regional Airport bound for Roanoke, Virginia. At the same time, a twin-engine Cessna prepared to land. The Cessna veered closer and closer to the jet, and when the planes collided at over 6,000 feet, explosions reverberated through the air. The wreckage covered a swath of fields and highway one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide. Black smoke obliterated I-26. Suitcases, clothes, plane parts, bodies rained from the sky. Still strapped in his seat, a decapitated man lodged in a hemlock. Another body plunged through the roof of a nearby home. A man's wristwatch, found in the wreckage, read 12:17 p.m. A crew of 115 men would sift through the metal for three weeks before they found and identified all the bodies—seventy-nine from the jetliner, three from the Cessna.
That same afternoon, twenty miles from the crash site, my mother labored in the maternity ward of a one-story brick building that would later become a nursing home. While recovery crews peeled fingers and toes and bits of flesh from the debris, nurses checked her pulse and her blood pressure and whispered to her of the devastation. Two months later, after hurling her body in front of a runaway car, she would return to this same hospital with a broken rib, a ruptured spleen, a punctured lung. But that night, her body wracked with a different kind of pain, she gazed out the window at the full moon illuminating the starry sky, and thought...what? Of the eighty-two people who had woken up that morning and brushed their teeth and showered and drunk their coffee and hurried to catch a plane? About her new baby, not yet a daughter or a son in her mind, just a swirl of images—her husband’s hazel eyes and round cheeks, her olive skin? Or did she simply inhale through her nose and exhale through her mouth over and over again until her baby girl fell screaming into the world, not at all what she had expected, not at all what she had planned?
Jennifer McGaha is the author of the memoir, Flat Broke with Two Goats. Her work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, The Good Men Project, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Baltimore Fishbowl, BackHome Magazine, and many other publications. An experienced teacher and workshop facilitator, Jennifer earned her MA from Western Carolina University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently teach at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
