After the terrorist attacks, President Bush spoke from the National
Cathedral: "We have seen the images of fire and ashes, and bent steel."
National Transportation Safety Board accident report, Sept. 11,
Washington, Conn.: A witness, along with her husband, reported hearing
the sound of an engine operating at high RMP, and then a loud bang
vibrated through their house. About 15 to 30 minutes after hearing the
bang, the witness started to smell the odor of something burning.
"They are the names of men and women," said the president, "who began
their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life."
The pilot purchased the airplane a couple of days before the accident .
. . and was in the process of flying it to Providence. The pilot was
scheduled to work a 16-hour day on September the 11th.
"They are the names of men and women who faced death, and in their last
moments called home. . . ."
The pilot left a voice message the day before the accident stating that
she was socked in from a storm approaching from the west. The pilot
added, "I'll get home when I get there."
THE TIMING of death, like the ending of a story, wrote anthropologist
Mary Catherine Bateson, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
Karla Carroll died on Sept. 10. As a nation was learning of the attacks
in New York and Washington, a horseback rider was discovering the wreck
of Carroll's new plane in rural Connecticut.
Carroll, a nurse-anesthesiologist at Rhode Island Hospital, and a
recreational pilot, was on the last leg of a solo cross-country journey.
Carroll's son, her only child, reasoned that perhaps the timing of her
death meant that she had been spared from having to witness her passion
-- the miracle, as she called it, of flying -- used to inflict such pain.
"It would have hurt her a lot, to see that," says James J. Carroll III.
"I just figured she wasn't meant to."
The timing of her death meant that on Sept. 11, her loved ones watched
the continuous replay of planes hurtling into buildings, and then, that
night, answered their phones to learn that an airplane crash had killed
her.
And the timing means that even the date on her death certificate --
Sept. 11, because her plane was found then -- is freighted with enormity.
Says her son: "I have had a real problem with that. I don't want it to
be Sept. 11."
"I want the last time of her life to be one of the last days of purity
in this country."
James Carroll cries as he describes the day that he learned his mother
had died.
On a recent afternoon, he sits in Starbuck's, on Warwick's Route 2, not
far from the house he had shared with his mother. He is 25, and has a
rare free moment between two jobs, and classes at The New England
Institute of Technology.
He has brought a video of his mother, and a laminated copy of her
obituary. A photo shows her long, strawberry blond hair, her freckles,
and her smile, which looks confident and assured.
"I'm nowhere near as strong as my mom was," James says.
In the weeks after Karla Carroll died, tasks carried him through:
planning her memorial service, trying to retrieve her remains from a DNA
lab already overwhelmed by the process of identifying victims of mass
terrorism. Then, for months, he didn't feel like answering the phone.
"I'm fighting my way back," he says.
While driving to work on Sept. 11, he heard Howard Stern report that a
plane had flown into a World Trade Center tower.
He grabbed the portable radio he kept in his truck and took it into his
office at the Coventry credit-card company where he was a sales
representative.
He had last heard from his mother on Sept. 9.
The week before, she had traveled to a town near Seattle, where she
purchased a 1987 Yakovlev, or "Yak 52," an agile Russian model popular
with sports' fliers. She already owned one plane, a Cessna 172, but the
Yak would allow her to do acrobatic flying.
The daughter of a Navy pilot, Carroll had given herself flying lessons
as a 30th birthday present. Her hobbies had always leaned toward making
porcelain dolls, strawberry jam, or stained glass.
"She was always told it wasn't a woman's place to fly," says her son.
"She said, 'The hell with it, I'm going to do it.' "
By last year, at age 43, Carroll's flight log showed more than 1,680
hours. Amelia Earhart she said, was her hero.
She was one of fewer than 100 female pilots, out of more than 1,000
pilots in the Rhode Island Pilots Association, and she was chairwoman of
the Eastern New England Chapter of the Ninety-Nines, an organization for
female pilots whose first president was, of course, Earhart.
In 1993, she competed in the Air Race Classic: 2,532 miles from Texas to
Rhode Island.
Before that 1993 race, in an interview with The Journal to preview the
race, Carroll recalled having taken a commercial flight where the pilot,
a woman, landed with a bump. A fellow passenger had cracked, "Well, you
can tell it was a woman flying."
"I wanted to slap them all," she said.
During another interview with The Journal for a story on female pilots,
she guided her Cessna from Worcester to Providence, and gazed down at
the lights of traffic. "I'm not there," she said, "and I'm really glad."
"I never imagined I could do this," she told the reporter as she
descended toward her familiar landing beacon, the public McDermott pool
in Warwick.
Says her son now: "My mom found something in flying she was never able
to get on the ground."
ON THAT CALL to her son on Sept. 9, on her way home from Washington with
her new plane, Carroll said she had flown over the Rockies and had
stopped in Illinois to surprise an old school friend.
Early the next evening, on Sept. 10, she called her friend Susan Habelt,
in Berkely, Mass. Habelt had met Carroll years earlier when both women
were intensive-care nurses at Miriam Hospital.
Habelt wasn't home, so Carroll left a message, saying she was at the
county airport in Wurtsboro, N.Y. She was about to leave for T.F. Green
Airport.
"I thought I'd catch you at home," she had said. "Everything is fine,
call you soon. . . ."
On Sept. 11, James, her son, spent the day monitoring the news of the
attacks, repeatedly calling a friend in the National Guard to try to
glean information, and watching TV with a customer, on a sales call in
West Warwick.
He was not immediately worried that he hadn't heard from his mother. She
had not told him exactly when she would return to Rhode Island, and that
was not unusual. She was confident, independent, and "afraid of nothing."
But as Sept. 11 went on, he says, "I had this really weird feeling.
Something wasn't right."
At home, at about 6 p.m., two Warwick police officers showed up, asking
him: Is Karla Carroll here?
When James answered that she was on her way home in her new airplane,
the officers handed him the phone number of Connecticut State Police.
Carroll's cell phone, in the wreckage, had been traced back to Warwick.
HABELT, her longtime friend, heard about Carroll's death after a long
day at Morton Hospital in Taunton, Mass., trying to maintain
concentration for nursing when the halls were filled with news of the
terrorist attacks.
"I was so frightened," she says. "We were all so frightened."
At home, she watched TV, finally climbing into bed at around 10 p.m.
James Carroll called.
"When I first heard she went down," says Habelt. "I thought that someone
shot her down. She had flown for so long. Never had she had any
problems."
In Warwick, James Carroll Jr., Karla Carroll's former husband, was
watching the rescuers at ground zero on television -- he had been
watching all day -- when their son James called. He thought his son was
calling to talk about the day's tragedy. But his son was "hysterical."
"9-11 got put on hold," says James Carroll Jr.
Although, he says, "everything got overshadowed" by the attacks.
"If it happened any other time," he says, of his former wife's death,
"it would have been on the news and everything."
Instead, because it happened that week, Carroll's death stood out not so
much as extraordinary, but perhaps as an illustration of the constancy
of the cadence of life and death.
Between 700 and 900 people die each month in Rhode Island -- a national
tragedy did not alter that number.
So on Sept. 11, as the nation mourned, so did individual families in
Rhode Island.
The family of Robert E. Gallant, in Warwick, grieved his death from
electrocution at a manufacturing company that day.
There was the death of a 91-year-old retired schoolteacher in
Woonsocket, and of an 81-year-old author in Block Island. She had just
published her fourth novel: No Chance Encounter.
And there was, on Sept. 11, the news of Karla Carroll.
THE NTSB report concluded that she likely flew into bad weather, in a
plane with tricky and unfamiliar instruments, and that she struck the
mountains of northwestern Connecticut.
Flying in heavy rain and clouds, she probably could not see the ground,
and was relying solely on instruments.
"It's usually weather that gets people in trouble," says Joseph Benker,
who runs the Pilot Shop at Norwood Municipal Airport.
Now he can still imagine her "full of life, as she stopped in the day
she was leaving for Washington, to pick up the latest visual flight
rules chart. Benker cautioned her about the Yak, "not the friendliest of
airplanes." But she was excited about the plane, he recalls, because it
was "something different, not many of them around."
She had paused in the door of his shop, with her chart under one arm,
and waved good-bye.
"We wished her great luck."
Benker learned of her death on the evening of Sept. 11. He returned to
work the next day, to an airport quiet, like the skies after the attacks.
"Devastation is the only term for it," he says.
"It's very hard to believe we're coming up on a year," he says. "The two
events were so different; was so personal. This one was so. . . . I was
involved."
Carroll was scheduled to compete in a poker run, a relay airplane race,
the weekend after Sept. 11.
Instead, her obituary appeared in The Providence Journal, next to that
of Mark Charette, a 38-year-old Warwick man who had been at a business
meeting on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
At her memorial service, recalls her friend Jean Griffin, another pilot,
the mourners "were devastated, between everything."
Griffin says her mind was full that day. She kept picturing planes
flying into the World Trade Center and then "visualizing what happened
to Karla."
"I always felt that there was a reason for everything that happens," she
says now. "We don't know that reason yet, for Karla's demise."
Susan Habelt, Carroll's friend, says she sometimes tells herself: "Maybe
because of the terrible events on Sept. 11, God needed Karla."
Still, when Habelt thinks of Sept. 11, "I think of Karla."
"It's coming up," she says, "and I have a knot in my stomach."
