01 January - the drowning at Los Gatos

mind your business

10:24AM PST, January 28th

Country Road #496 near Coalinga, California

("At least 100 persons were watching as the plane passed over the Fresno County Road Camp.")

– The Fresno Bee

The foreman of the Fresno County work crew assembled all 100 of his men in a circle and told them, "Around here, you deserve what you get." Then he pointed the entire group to where he wanted them to start digging. "Each of you will dig a hole, fill it, and then tamp it down. No shirking. No squawking. Just hard work. Mind your business today because you gotta job to do."

In a few moments, all of their jobs would change because a damaged plane was about to fly directly overhead. There would be shock at first. Or maybe it was something simpler. Maybe it was really the most tedious form of denial. The kind where you refuse to believe the obvious because (for reasons you will never understand) God has miraculously decided to bless your life with a story to tell your grandchildren. Once the men realized their good fortune, most of them would scramble to see what help they could offer. But for now, they continued their work repairing and re-grating County Road #496.

They called this collection of men the 30-Day Group because each of them had been sentenced to thirty days of hard labor for whatever crime they weren't able to hide. On this day (as nearly every other day), the crew consisted of loiterers, sobered-out drunks, petty thieves, and not so petty thieves whose larger crimes hadn't yet been detected.

Some of the men were too young to know how to avoid getting caught. Others were too old to change. But all of them were smart enough to know that listening to instructions about how to dig a hole and then fill it back in was not part of the dream they had imagined for their lives when they were children. They were on the fifteenth day of their sentence. They were halfway to freedom.

Before the fiery comet emerged from between two brown hills, most of the men were working hard. Shovels pierced the earth as deeply as the dry soil would permit. To any who might have seen them that day, the men looked like weary autumn leaves in various shades of decay.

And then suddenly, they were all alive. All one hundred of them were alive and alert. They were no longer autumn leaves. In the instant the plane came into view; they became those floppy pale green leaves that emerge from branches in spring. Each man felt himself becoming a part of history and it was thrilling.

As a group, they watched black smoke envelope the doomed DC3. Flames from the portside engine looked like a blazing eyeball staring down from heaven.

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