Anthony

Unrelated, but this is what happens.

I met Anthony David Moore in September of 1992. We spent ten weeks together on Orcas Island -- two of the four male counselors -- teaching outdoor environmental education to fifth and sixth grade students. Experiential education. Learn about the dynamics of the forest by walking between old growth and new, high forest canopies giving way to a new stand of birch trees where fire had gutted part of the woods decades earlier. Learn about marine life by spending time along the beach. Up at the farm, seriously, illustrate that supermarket food comes from these animals, here, and that fruits and vegetables can grow in gardens like these. The ropes course, mostly just for fun, but also an amazing opportunity for kids to challenge themselves.

You spend a lot of time with your co-workers in that kind of environment. You live in the same house, eating meals together, working different elements on the ropes course, walking into Eastsound for some free time at either of the two bars in town (The Upper, on the hill overlooking the water, or The Lower, well, down the hill).

Some people you gravitate to more than others. With some people -- Anthony was one of them -- I found myself sharing more of my story, and the impact that I'd thought it had had on my life, barely two years removed from my last hospital stay.

We talked about where we were going in our lives, what we wanted to do. Big picture. As much as I loved the San Juans, working on Orcas was an escape from hellish summer temp jobs after graduation, an attempt to get my bearings before moving on. For Anthony, it was a natural step in the right direction. It was exactly where he wanted to be.

Anthony died in 1994.

He died in a plane crash. A small, commuter plane. There was ice, wings, a loss of control. Everything ended up in pieces, scattered across a soybean field in Indiana. No survivors.

Nancy called me that night, I think, or early the next morning. I remember watching the news, thinking that she must have made a mistake because Anthony and I had played pool together in downtown Kirkland just a week or two prior, laughing, drinking beer, Jimi Hendrix in the jukebox. And besides that, there wasn't anything on any news channels about a crash. Not a word.

The words would come later. His face was on page 3 of the Seattle P-I. The front page of the Bellevue paper, The Journal American.

Anthony Moore, his co-workers said, seemed made for the work he was doing, reaching out to teenagers, involving them at the Eastside YMCA, trying to teach them values that would serve them as they struggled toward adulthood.

At 26, he was just getting started.

Moore was among 68 passengers killed Monday in the crash of a commuter flight from Indiana to Chicago.

I haven't thought about this in years.

fuck.

Part of the mourning process, then, was to compare and contrast. I didn't understand it, how their candles were extinguished while mine, somehow, managed to continue. It wasn't survivor's guilt; I didn't think that it should have been me instead. It was more like I couldn't understand how I could have been so consistently, repeatedly lucky -- finding a way through one close call after another, more complications, especially into August, than I could have ever imagined possible -- while Anthony and Laurena, for everything else that was good and wonderful in their lives, were singularly unlucky, and that's all it took.

Not that it should have been me, but that it could have been me. Easily. I had so many more opportunities to die than they did. If it had happened, anytime during the summer, it would not have been unexpected. Not at all.