When Air Florida Flight
90
crashed into a bridge
in D.C. back in 1982,
some survivors clung to
a section of the tail
while a helicopter
lowered a life ring.
A Man in the Water
would take it
and pass it to another.
He repeated this five
times
while the cold winter
water
challenged him.
When the helicopter
came back for him,
he was gone.
And we
were one less.
He was “proof (as if one needed it)
that no man is ordinary.”*
In a tail section
classroom
crashed with students,
he passed out life rings.
They looked like books,
essays and a joke or two.
Students took them.
They read brave words
on a page, wrote essays
and, with his
encouragement, spoke their minds.
He roped them in with a
friendly manner,
taught them,
and sent them down the
hall;
they, knowing or not, swam
away with a life ring.
He repeated this many
times
until cancer challenged
him.
Then he was gone.
And we
were one less.
One less man in the water
He is “proof (as if one needed it) that no
man is ordinary.”
* Time, “Man in the
Water,” Roger Rosenblatt, January 25, 1982
