The Last Sunset

I was driving west through the Cleveland National Forest, past wooded groves and small settlements, when I heard the news. A jet had crashed into the sea off Port Hueneme.

I remember the exact moment. It was at sunset.

I was 30 minutes out of Lake Elsinore on a meandering search for columns across the Inland Empire. The route I was taking, Highway 74, winds through Riverside and Orange counties, up and over a summit of about 2,000 feet.

The views from certain high points are awesome in their scope, looking down on open valleys and across to the crisp outline of other ridges, sketched in penciled detail against an early winter twilight.

The scene was especially compelling at this moment. A sunset gleaming with pastels superimposed on a sky cleansed by rain had created an iridescence that was almost blinding.

Few moments are more magical.

I stopped to stare and to marvel. The car radio was on but barely audible, a murmur in the background. But still I heard the terrible news. Years of being tuned to bulletins train one to pick out the essential words of shattering events amid the otherwise mundane.

A jetliner with 88 people aboard had gone down 45 minutes earlier. The impact of the news was in sharp contrast to the texture of the moment. And for reasons I can’t explain, I found myself wondering if those aboard had seen the sunset too.

*

It was an odd collision of pain and beauty. My first thought was, “Oh, the humanity.” It was a phrase broadcast in tears and grief by a young radio reporter, Herb Morrison, as he watched the airship Hindenburg go down in flames 63 years ago.

Oh, the humanity. Has it ever been said better?

There were 88 elements of humanity, men, women and children, aboard the Alaska Airlines jet as it dropped from the sky like a wounded bird and marked its grave with a tower of seawater shooting into the air.

One can only imagine the sudden, gasping horror of the plane’s final seconds. Did the passengers know they were going down? Was there a warning? Or did the end come too quickly for the mind to compute its terror?

The search for survivors was already underway by the time I drove out of the mountains and on to Interstate 5. Details of the crash were now coming in snippets of talk, like bits of a conversation overheard across a crowded room.

The flight path. The words of a witness. The function of a horizontal stabilizer. The reliability of an MD-83. The litany of calamity, always the same.

Oh, the humanity.

*

I don’t know how many plane crashes I’ve covered over the past four decades of newspapering. I don’t know how many body bags I’ve seen or how many fields of wreckage. But I do remember my first.

It was in the mid-1950s. A four-engine turboprop had gone down in San Francisco Bay and I was there in a small fishing boat out of Point Richmond to report on the rescue effort.

I remember seeing bits of wing and fuselage bobbing like toys on a churning surface. I remember seeing scraps of luggage and clothing. And I remember seeing bodies, torn and mutilated beyond description.

Calamity has a way of imprinting itself on memory. Years later I can still evoke those moments in vivid detail. Time and similar experiences make them no less horrifying.

*

Radio reports of Monday’s crash filled my car for the remainder of my trip from the Inland Empire to L.A.

It was late by the time I reached home and turned on the television. Harsh scenes of tragedy were repeated far into the night. Helicopters hovered over a sea illuminated by searchlights. Emergency vehicles stood ready on the shore. Body bags lay in a neat row along a walkway.

The voices of witnesses became faces. Graphics illustrated the plane’s plunge from 17,000 feet. Airport scenes were heavy with a blend of urgency and grief.

I could have gone to the rescue scene, but I didn’t. It was enough to have seen the sunset gleaming against the fading day. It was enough to wonder if those aboard Flight 261 had seen the same colors, the same iridescence, the same glory.

It was enough to ponder if, in their last moments, they had been granted one last look at a vision of life they would never see again.

Oh, the humanity.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.