It’s a great relief, after the long drive from Baltimore, to turn off Interstate 81 and merge onto the Conodoguinet Parkway. Suddenly Blue Mountain, the great guardian of Perry County, which for miles has been a dark sleeping presence in the driver’s peripheral vision, seems to wake and rise up.
The eye rises with it, liberated from the highway. There are often buzzards circling overhead, and occasionally a red-tailed hawk — maybe even two — patrolling the wide gravel shoulder near Wertzville Road.
Dead ahead, on a low rise dominated by a huge digital sign, is yet another reason to look up: the Turkey Hill convenience store. Our necks crane as we compare the price of gas in Pennsylvania to what we just paid in Maryland.
It’s not unusual to see the glint of a jet traversing the federal airway high above the mountain. Once or twice we’ve even seen a hot air balloon floating like a lost toy over the ridge.
But one thing I hadn’t seen above the parkway until last week was a Chinook CH-47, one of the army’s massive twin-rotor helicopters, circling low over the fields.
My pilot training is pretty rusty, but I can still tell when an aircraft is maneuvering below 1500 feet. At that altitude, you really get a sense of the size of a flying machine. The Chinook, for instance, which is one-and-a-half times longer than a tractor-trailer and as tall as the average flagpole.
The sight of the enormous tan chopper was strange enough, but even stranger was the curly wisp that fell from the rear of the craft, which then blossomed into a perfectly round parachute, complete with camouflaged paratrooper underneath. One by one, with assembly-line precision, five more chutes opened behind the Chinook.
Luckily, I was sitting at a red light when all of this was happening. It was too strange — and too strangely beautiful — not to watch. When the light changed, I took a left on Wertzville Road and drove until there was a safe place to pull over.
It didn’t take long — less a minute, probably — for the six soldiers to drop below the tree line. The Chinook followed soon after. When it, too, disappeared from view, the pickup truck that had pulled over in front of me quit the soft shoulder and drove off. The show was over.
But I was curious. Where had the paratroopers landed? Was there a secret landing strip near the base of the mountain, tucked behind the innocent-looking hayfields?
Or had something serious happened? It had been a summer of violence, with deadly shooting sprees in Colorado and Wisconsin, and one just that day, in New York City, at the foot of the Empire State building. Had a whiff of that madness blown down the Cumberland valley? I felt I owed it to my readers to find out.
Following my nose, I turned down Glendale Drive and meandered along tall hedgerows and past well-kept barns. Then the landscape suddenly opened up. There, in the middle of a pristine meadow, looking like a spaceship fallen to earth, sat the Chinook, its rotors whirling, surrounded by tiny figures gathering up the fluttering chutes.
And there, driving slowly towards me on Glendale, was a TV van.
I’d been scooped!
The driver rolled down his window, cracked a professional smile, and said, “Mind if we talk to you for a minute?”
While he was digging out a camera, his producer hopped out the van and introduced himself. “These guys are Special Forces,” he said. “Training mission. They wouldn’t tell me where they’re from. I’m guessing Fort Indiantown Gap.”
A TV camera was stuck in my face, and I was asked some standard “man-in-the-street” questions: where are you from? What did you see? What did you think about it?
I guess I wasn’t very eloquent or interesting. The cameraman frowned, then tried to prime the pump with a classic leading question, “So, is this something you think you’re going to remember for a long time?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and with that, the TV people gave up on me.
I didn’t tell them what was truly on my mind: a complicated mix of admiration for the potency of our armed forces; relief that it had been a practice run and not something more serious; and sadness at the sight of a lovely meadow transformed into a military training ground.
Above all, I was thinking about the cost of that one helicopter — somewhere northwards of 25 million dollars — and President Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, which warned of the dangers of a new force in American life, the so-called “military-industrial complex.”
Of course, none of that stuff works as a ten second sound bite.
Seems like decent fodder for a column, though.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 06 September 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
