Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 20

For over thirty years now, in icy January I remember “the man in the water.”

On January 13, 1982, less than one minute after taking off in a heavy snowstorm, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into Washington D. C.’s 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River. Four of the five crew members and seventy of seventy-four passengers perished.

I have remembered two things from the live television coverage of the crash. One was the temperature—24 degrees. The other was the sight of about a half dozen survivors of the crash clinging to the plane’s tail section as it sank below the icy waters. What I have remembered most was the man in the water. For several days, no one knew the middle-aged, balding man’s name. But all who watched cannot forget what he did.

As a helicopter crew dropped life vests and flotation devices, he passed lifelines they lowered to him—that could have pulled him to safety—to others. Three times he handed off to strangers his ticket to salvation. By the time the helicopter crew made their last round trip to hoist the one last survivor, the tail section and the man in the water had disappeared.

The coroner determined that the cause of death for only one of the seventy four bodies was drowning. His name was Arland Williams Jr., a balding, forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner and father of two.9 He had lived his life conservatively until that January day when he magnanimously gave it up for total strangers.

Richard Dawkins discusses in The Selfish Gene10 how in nature red in tooth and claw bees sting (and die) to protect the hive. Birds risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk. Our species alone, he argues, has the power to choose to rebel against the designs of our selfish gene.

Our species, fully evolved, might look a lot like Arland Williams Jr.