It was some
weeks ago that I remembered this event. I wouldn't call it buried, but for some
reason I’d simply forgotten about it until then. After working for a while with my writing group,
the few of us walked from our regular coffee shop on the pier to the local tavern up
the street (I had coffee; the others by now preferred wine), and we got to talking
about local author Tom Robbins, who was hugely popular when I was in college in
the 1980’s. I remarked that I’d seen him speak once at the UW, back in the day.
Soon after telling the others the bare facts about this, and that he was an
engaging speaker, there was something that nagged at me, though, and I knew
there was more to the story. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Yes,
I’d gone to see the author. A friend and I drove up from Olympia for the event,
to see him at the University’s Kane Hall, a mammoth auditorium where I’d once
taken a 101 Psychology course with 700 other freshmen before transferring to
another school. The lecture hall was even more crowded on this occasion, and I
remembered that Robbins, the author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”,
“Jitterbug Perfume”, et al, was funny and entertaining, and seemed to know how
to work the audience. But I knew there was something more to it, and I was sure
there was a UFO connection. It bothered me, because this idea seemed tacked
onto my recollection of the event, like a flag or a post-it note. It felt
artificial, like I was reaching for something not there.
It wasn’t
until the next morning that the rest of it came back to me. I was surprised
that I’d not remembered it sooner, because it was something I’d been aware of
for all of my life since the day it happened. It wasn’t a buried memory or
traumatic, just weird. This would have been sometime in 1986, and my friend
Birdy and I drove the 70 miles north on I-5 in my dilapidated Impala for the event.
It was just as we entered the city, reaching downtown, with the financial
district on our left and 1st Hill on the right, where several
hospitals are (the neighborhood is nicknamed “Pill Hill”) that something
floated directly, noiselessly over the car. I think it moved from right to
left, and it flew more or less like a helicopter, crossing the freeway and going
between the tall buildings of downtown. It was easy, superficially, to dismiss
this as a helicopter, except there was no helicopter there, not that I could
see. Rather, it was all glowing and golden, seemed to have a plain shape like
an iron I-beam, and was strung with all colors of hanging lights along tangled
wires like a Christmas tree, one rather sloppily decorated. Add to that how it
flew into the narrow spaces in between buildings, and the whole picture becomes
very strange. I’d thought at the time that it must be a helicopter, though,
landing at the helipad of one of the hospitals – which maybe it was. Maybe I
remember it in reverse: that it came out from between the buildings and headed
for the hill. This was certainly how I thought of it for at least a year
afterwards. But it always haunted me, because there was something subtly not
right about it – like, for instance, the ridiculously gaudy decorations and
unsafe flight pattern.
Neither
Birdy nor I said anything about it. We’d both seen it, clear as day, although
it was night. It was impossible to miss. We had some time after parking the car
to nose around the University Campus before the reading. Still, I can’t
remember it ever coming up between us. We found a dark corner and smoked a
little weed, then went on into the lecture hall for the event. When Robbins
came to the stage, after the applause had died down and a few introductory
remarks, he read from a new story, something not yet published, which he explained,
“This is a story about how I saw a UFO.”
Addendum to
the above entry:
Riding the
airporter shuttle back to Whidbey from SeaTac last week, I had a chance, as we
passed through the above-mentioned stretch of the I-5 corridor, to take a good,
close look at the conditions there as I would have seen them so many years ago,
approaching from the same direction. The spaces between the buildings at that
exact spot were much wider than the concentration of high-rises only a block or
two further north, and there seems in fact to be a helipad at Harborview
Hospital that more or less abuts the freeway. Everything about the location
admits the likelihood that what I saw was exactly what I half-way took it as: a
Medivac helicopter coming in for a landing, or, alternately, taking off again.
Except there
is still the matter of its appearance. I perhaps didn’t see it entirely clearly,
but I have always remembered in such stark detail the weird, loose hang of that
string of lights beneath the aircraft, run from one end to the other, and the
vivid golden color of something –
these details and the lack of any coherent shape to the object. There was no “helicopter”
that I could see, only a minimal structure supporting sloppily-hung, ornamental
lights. There was also no sound as this machine floated low and directly
overhead.
Like with so
many of these “encounters”, I feel like I’m being played with, and it may be no
one but myself and my imagination in this tricksterish role. Yet there is, so
often, just enough unlikely detail to let me doubt these dismissals, and either
add support to self-delusion, or ask that I look more deeply through the cracks.
