FAA. What horseshit. Bullock, give me your best quote from a passenger.”
“I got a lady from Rock Hill who says it was as if an occult hand reached down and . . .”
“Cut the shit,” Walker barked. It was a time-honored Charlotte Times tradition that Walker would give you the day off if you could manage to get the phrase “it was as if an occult hand had . . .” into the newspaper. Walker had to pay off so infrequently that reporters had taken to asking questions this way (as in the case of a tornado): “Would you say it was as if an occult hand had reached down and tore through the trailer park?” Sometimes the puzzled interviewee would say, “Yeah, I guess so,” and the quote would be written up and submitted, only to be caught and edited out by Walker.
“Bullock, what I’m looking for is something that says there’s no way the pilot could have not known that he hit something. There’s two great angles here: that the 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
