Seeking Answers in an Archer’s Bow

It could have come from anywhere.

All kinds of things wash up on beaches, and the archer’s bow on the seaweed-festooned pile at Oxnard Shores didn’t necessarily come from the wreckage of Flight 261.

Cindy knew that. On the other hand, it was only days after the terrible crash. She and her 10-year-old son had driven up from Thousand Oaks, just to walk the beach and look out to sea. They had a long talk about how a plane can drop from the sky, about life and death, and what happens afterward.

They saw some things on the beach that brought the crash to their fingertips. Something that looked like a sodden piece of clothing was bobbing in the waves. At the water’s edge sat a jumbled heap of kelp, rocks, metal fragments, sandals, boards, twigs.

Out of the pile peeked a bow. It was faded red, and had no string, and was the kind of found object that any 10-year-old boy would want to keep.

“Can we take it home?” he asked. “Please?”

Cindy is a good citizen. She knew officials would need all the debris they could find to get at the accident’s cause. Alerted by others walking the beach, she and her son even carried some hunks of twisted metal and spongy foam to a spot where investigators would pick them up later. But would the National Transportation Safety Board need the bow? Could it possibly make a difference?

“Sure,” Cindy said. “We can take it home.”

On the phone this week, Cindy talked about her private anguish. All the articles about the anniversary of the crash, all the mourning family members, all the memorials and services and flowers tossed upon the sea: All of it made her sick with shame, so humiliated that she asked me not to use her last name in this column.

“It’s wrong to have it and it was wrong to take it,” she said. “Maybe I told myself I was protecting it, but I think I knew at the time how wrong it really was.”

Taking the bow wasn’t a mortal sin, I told her.

“It is to me,” she said. “I have a boy.”

Maybe the bow belonged to another boy about his age, she said. Maybe grieving relatives could have carried their pain a little more easily with one of the boy’s favorite things at hand, a toy that always made the boy light up.

But maybe it wasn’t that special, I ventured. Maybe someone picked it up at a flea market in Puerto Vallarta, just another quirky souvenir. Maybe it’s an object--like most of the objects in our lives--without a particular meaning.

Cindy wasn’t consoled. Really decent people aren’t as intimate with rationalization as some of us.

The bow has resided in Cindy’s closet for the past year. Her son never asks for it. A family friend who hunts examined it and confirmed, to Cindy’s chagrin, that it was the size of a bow made for youngsters.

“I couldn’t give it away and I couldn’t throw it away,” Cindy said. “I talked it over with my husband and he didn’t know what to do either.”

One night this week, she called Alaska Airlines to right the wrong. But she didn’t leave her name on the recording; confessing to a corporate message just felt wrong.

Then too, there was the question of legality.

I asked Eric Nishimoto, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, whether Cindy could be charged with a crime. “Technically speaking, she broke a law,” he said. “But practically speaking, I’d be shocked if there’s any kind of prosecution.”

Whether the fiberglass bow belonged to a child, as Cindy fears, is an open question. “It sounds tournament-caliber,” said Bob Pergson, who runs an archery supply store in Oak View. Pergson said manufacturers have made adult bows smaller over the years, and that “Bear”--the brand name stamped on the fiberglass--is one of the best. Mexico is a popular destination for bow hunters, he added.

One way or another, Cindy has vowed, she’ll get the bow back to someone who can appreciate its special meaning. I gave her the number for Kenyon International, a service contracted by Alaska Airlines to help families with their loved ones’ effects. I also asked Paige Stockley, who lost her parents on Flight 261, to spread word of the homeless bow among the families. Stockley, who helped to organize this week’s anniversary events, said she’d be glad to ask around.

However the quest turns out, Cindy is braced for disappointment.

“I’d like to believe and hope that if the bow is claimed, the family would not have been ready to accept it a year ago,” she wrote me in an e-mail. “That probably will not be the case and I’m ready to accept the guilt and sadness that may bring into my life.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at https://steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561.