Yesterday, I passed a controlled fire on the way to work. At first I wasn’t sure that it was a controlled burn. In fact, what I noticed first was a fire hose hooked up to the hydrant at Willow Avenue, which made me nervous, because I remember that when my washer caught on fire one of the firefighters said that, if it was necessary, they could hook into that hydrant. So my first thought was that someone’s house on the “Tree Streets” was on fire.....

Not that I could do anything about it.

So I went on down the road, and presently came to the area where all the fire trucks were clustered about, and people were standing around. A man was walking a little boy up the side of the road, presumably to have a look at the equipment. Most people wouldn’t do such a thing while their neighbor’s house was burning down. At least, I don’t think they would.

Then I looked over and saw that it was an old farmhouse adjacent to some new development which has just now gotten underway now that the plan to get drinking water out of the Medford Quarry is going ahead. How sad is that? That not even the old house will remain of what had once been that farm?

You know, this is going to be a sort of maudlin entry. If you’re already depressed, you may want to quit reading and come back later.

Yesterday was November 11. Month of the dead, day of the dead. I thought when I woke up. This is some piece of arcane knowledge I have from some old book, some idea that stuck with me for so long that it’s become part of me. It’s what I used to call “common knowledge” until I realized that most of the stuff I thought of that way was stuff no one else had ever heard of.

And I was thinking about an article I had been reading about ethical behavior, which suggested that, as long as care is taken, intention is the basis for the classification of an act as ethical or unethical. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, and was reviewing it, mentally, as I came upon the house burning down.

Then I had another experience which I imagine is somewhat unique to me. A picture in my mind, the way a picture from my own memory would present itself. A curving faucet, a kitchen sink, a window framed by white curtains, a girl's hands grabbing at dishes in a drainer on a sideboard. The water running. A high, girlish voice calling “Call 911!” The girl’s hands, in the picture in my mind, are where my hands would be. But they are not my hands. They are the hands of a girl with shorter fingers, normal pinkies, short nails with pink nail polish flaking off. These hands open the door below the sink too quickly for me to notice the wood. There’s a full trash can underneath.

The girl quickly pulls the trash can out and upends the contents onto the floor. There are coffee grounds. I see a tan phone cord out of the corner of my eye. I see a streak of long blond hair out of the corner of my eye. I see a ceramic rooster or a chicken or a bird of some kind – kitchen décor. The hands thrust the trash can under the stream of water. “Come on! Come on!” Out of the kitchen window, flames are leaping in the yard. But the girl’s eyes focus more on the water than they do the flame, and at the very moment when the water would start to overflow the angle of the container, she snatches it away and runs through a door, down some wooden steps. She sees a woman with dark hair dragging a garden house, and a man carrying a fire extinguisher.

These people are three of a kind, though diverse in age, background and experience. They are the people who act in a crisis, who go toward a problem to solve it rather than back away from it. They will each suffer from post traumatic stress later, but even if they knew that, they'd do the same thing again anyway. They’d do all of this and more.

But all the intention in the world won’t save the lives of the people in the small plane which has crashed in the girl’s front yard. The pilot and the young woman beside him are already dead. The man in the back will die on the way to University Hospital. And the woman in the back is Angela, who will die in 6 months, though this memory – the memory I don’t have – does not include seeing them. It ends as the water is flung out of the trash pail and into the flames. It ends with these people who do not turn away from disaster when it lands in a flaming wreck out of a clear blue sky on their lawns, who manage to put the fire out.

The reason I know this happened is because the girl whose memory it really is told it to me. She was 14 years old and sitting beside her father on the stupid blue vinyl chairs in the waiting room at Hopkins Hospital. I cannot remember her first name, though I remember her last. The reason for the pictures in my mind, the memory I don’t have, is my vivid imagination, or maybe it’s the strength of the girl’s words, or an impression of her sheer guts. Not only did she do everything she could think of, and everything that was physically possible to save the people in the plane, she is now trying to save herself from further harm from the memories of it. Working her way through it. There, in the hospital, at the recommendation of her counselor.

No matter what anybody says to her, it will never be enough, unless she can find something to say to herself. Still, though, I try to think of something. I’m supposed to be an adult, and so I tell her that she was brave and that Angela was afraid of fire. Actually, fire was the only thing Angela was afraid of, so in putting the fire out she saved her from the thing she feared most. I look at this girl and I think that she has a hard road ahead of her: she looks like she hasn’t heard me at all. But maybe she did. I have no way of knowing.

I’d like to believe that my imagination of the scene through her eyes is really a memory that I’d taken from her, and that she will remember it no more, nor relive the sickening adrenaline rush and the helplessness. But I don’t think that’s true. Of course, she WAS brave, and resourceful and quick thinking. But the mind of such a person focuses on what they didn’t or couldn’t do, not on what they did. The mind of such a person is not convinced that there are people in the world who would stand there, look out the window, and scream.

By the time I'm thinking all of this and telling it to you... by now thirteen years have gone by, I’m still driving up and down these same damn roads, actually happy, on some level, that the housing development is going up, so I’ll see something different. How I long for it to be true of this, my home town, that I no longer recognize the place!

So what did I decide about the article? Well, certainly the intentions of those people who rushed forward to help at the scene of the plane crash were ethical, both in intention and in deed. After all, even if it was a foregone conclusion that no one would survive the crash, some of the funerals could be held as open casket. An unchecked fire could have spread to homes, resulting in more suffering and loss of life. Untold and unknown good was done by those actions.

But I know another story, or maybe another side to the same story. I know that the dark haired woman had a little boy in the house at the time of the crash. I know that the little boy developed very serious mental health problems as a teenager, and as far as I know he is suffering still, and his mother suffers to see him. Maybe the boy's illness had nothing to do with the crash. Perhaps he was destined to have such an illness, but surely a flaming wreckage of an aircraft in one's neighborhood can not help such a predisposition.

Yet there is no one whose "intention" was to have a plane crash. There was a person, somewhere, who knew that the plane did not have the right kind of propeller on the front of it, yet this problem went uncorrected. There was someone, somewhere who knew the plane was over weight when it took off, probably the pilot, whom Angela's boyfriend said was a bit of a "hot dog". He probably thought it would be all right. Maybe he had flown overweight before.

If we do wrong and no harm is done then we call that luck or good fortune. If we do wrong and others suffer then maybe we call it an accident, or negligence or a lawsuit. And there is a difference, of course, between a mistake and simply not giving a shit. There are people who say that there is a universal law of karma which is absolutely just "As ye give so shall ye receive"

Could a person sitting in an office passing over dreary paperwork not willing to make a mistake about the propeller on a rental plane truly be held responsible for the mental illness of a man who witnessed that plane crash? After all, he must have thought, the plane took off and landed, maybe a hundred times.

Maybe this is why the Bible makes the point that no one stand as a moral person if held repsonsible for every consequence of his actions. The consequences are too far reaching, the ripples go too wide for our mortal minds to grasp. We can do our best to be ethical, and certainly this is better then simply mindlessly running about doing whatever is most expedient. But ultimately does it make any difference?

When I went by the site again in the evening there were still orange embers in the foundation. I could see them from the road. So I will have to chose what I see when I drive past there every day. Because I will have both the memory of what was, at one time, someone's beloved home engulfed in flames and the knowledge that new homes to be beloved by some other family are being built. Little phoenix mcmansions, if you will.

To be the kind of person who runs toward a flaming wreckage with a trash can full of water requires the belief that it will do some good, an easier idea to hold at 14 than at 41. Yet I want that kind of courage, so I will have to welcome my new, distant neighbors, even as the memory of the heat of the flames of the burning farmhouse never leaves the right side of my face.