plane hit something close to the ground and that the pilot covered it up.”
“Use this,” said Bullock. “It’s from a Charlotte businessman. He said, “It was a very loud thump and the plane shuddered. The only way anyone wouldn’t have felt it is if they were dead.”
“Perfect,” Walker said. “Harper, how high was he? How much of the pole is left?”
“Twenty feet, nine inches.”
Walker looked up from his computer. “How do you know?”
“We measured it with a tape measure.”
“Excellent. How thick was the pole?”
“The same as a normal telephone pole, I assume.” I regretted saying it as soon as it left my lips. “Actually,” I admitted, “we didn’t check. You didn’t mention you needed to know how thick it was.”
“Pardner, do I have to tell you every question to ask or can you think for yourself? Now get your ass back out there and find out how thick it was. We’ll leave it for the first edition and fill in the hole in the second.” He removed his glasses, cocked his left eyebrow and stared at me. It was a familiar gesture and I grimaced. “Now, hustle.”
I grabbed Drake’s tape, jumped in the staff car and beat it back to the airport. When I got to where we had parked, my heart sank. The area between the road and the pole had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Where there had been one cop, now there were at least a dozen.
I spotted the officer we had encountered earlier and hoped he wouldn’t hold Drake against me. “Sir, I’m sorry to have to bother you but I need to get back in there just for thirty seconds.”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Feds are here now.”
“I just need to measure the pole.”
He walked away.
They say nothing focuses the attention like an impending execution and maybe that’s what suddenly inspired me. I approached two crew-cut men sitting in a dark sedan with government plates and a seal on the door that said Federal Aviation Administration.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said to the driver. “I’m Matt Harper from the Charlotte Times. I’m hoping you can help me. I need to get into the site. I’m doing a story about what happened.”
“Comment has to come from Washington.” He turned away.
“I don’t need comment,” I persisted. “I just need to get to the pole that got hit.”
“Why?”
“To measure how thick it is.”
“How thick? You mean how tall.”
“No, I mean thick.” I wasn’t going to tell them I already knew how tall and get into a whole controversy about how I’d been trespassing earlier.
For the first time the FAA guys looked interested, as if I had some theory about the incident that they hadn’t thought of, a theory that somehow related to the pole’s thickness. “Why?” he asked.
“To tell you the truth, I really don’t know,” I confessed. “My editor wants it in the story we got going in the morning. He wants to know something, my job is to find it out. You ever have a boss that asks you to do stupid stuff you don’t understand?” I was trust-building. After all, these were government workers and knew about stupid bosses. “You know how for a while you fight it and then you figure out the path of least resistance is best because in the end, you’re gonna end up doing it anyway?”
“Every day,” the driver said.
“Every day,” his colleague agreed.
“That’s what this is.”
“Hop in,” the driver said.
I jumped in the back seat. As we drove through the security perimeter, I gave a thumbs-up to the cop who had threatened to arrest us. When it comes to freedom of information prevailing, I am not exactly a gracious winner.
When I returned to the newsroom, Walker was still at the terminal. The first edition hadn’t yet gone to press but Walker was already hard at work doing a rewrite for the second edition.
“It was right at forty inches around,” I reported.
“What was?” he said without looking up
“The pole.”
“The pole. Oh, good,” he said it as if the information were no longer relevant. “How do you know?”
“I measured it.”
“Good. So that makes it how thick—about a foot?”
“Using sixth grade math, which is as far as I got, yes.”
“About like a normal telephone pole,” Walker concluded.
“That’s what I first said.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know. There’s a difference between what you think and what you know. Now you know.”
Walker returned to the terminal and I returned to my desk. Sometimes one of the most frustrating parts of being a reporter is waiting on all the people who have to work with your copy. After Walker, there’s the editor for the part of the paper where the story is headed—local or front page. Then it’s off to those sticklers on the copy desk who feel compelled to justify their professional existence by asking irrelevant questions and suggesting inelegant changes. If it’s big enough, the top editor will read the story and maybe even the publisher. All the while, the reporter waits with two things in mind—be available in case there’s a need to answer questions; be vigilant in case idiots fresh from journalism school start trying to butcher the copy or write an off-base headline. Two things are guaranteed: if you stick around, no one will have questions and no one will mess too much with your copy. If you don’t, there will be questions and changes galore.
Walker kept writing and editing. I knew he would have to be done soon because final deadline was approaching. Except for me, Walker, and a front page editor to handle the last edition airplane story rewrite, the rest of the newsroom had headed home. Except for sports. Because sports got the latest deadlines to accommodate news of West Coast night games, it was still fully staffed.
But no one in sports or anywhere else, including me, even looked up when the sound of human suffering, an anguished, frustrated scream, erupted from the middle of that department. “You pathetic mess!”
The sound came from Henry Garrows, one of the greatest sports writers in the history of the newspaper. Garrows attended sporting events but he didn’t write about games. Instead, he wrote about universal human themes like struggle and sacrifice and failure. Sports writing was cerebral for Garrows. It was creative and imaginative. Garrows wrote to make people see and he believed every story could be a masterpiece, every insight or turn of phrase a work of art. And Garrows was every bit the tortured artist.
As deadline approached, Garrows would prepare to create art by placing a liter bottle of diet cola just to the left of the computer screen, donning yellow noise-canceling headphones, belting himself to his chair and draping a large black shroud over the computer terminal and his head to create a light-proof tunnel between his eyes and the screen. Eliminating distraction and creating focus, Garrows believed, was the only way all of his genius could emerge in the short period of writing time mandated by covering sports news for newspapers on deadline.
The system was not foolproof, however, and Garrows, increasingly anguished as deadline closed in, would resort to verbal self-abuse, as in “you pathetic mess” and much worse. It happened frequently enough that no one commented or even looked up anymore. Staffers would, however, look up when the abuse escalated to include the physical. “You piece of worthless shit!” Garrows would howl and then pop himself in the jaw, hard, with his own clenched first. “You total screw-up!” Once, still belted to the chair, he knocked himself over and struggled like a turtle flipped on its back for several