She Walks Among Us

For A Short Time, An Angel Rested Here...

So read the hand-lettered sign near the hulking incinerator by Highway 101 just south of Cloverdale, California. Those of us who live north of Cloverdale passed the thing, a remnant of a defunct milling operation, every time we went to Santa Rosa or San Francisco and back. It resembled a big rusty metal teepee. The day I saw that sign, I was there with my camera, at long last.

I have a ferocious fear of flying. In October 1993, after almost eighteen years on the ground, I had a roundtrip ticket on Tower Air, San Francisco to New York. Tower, I knew, was a discount outfit that flew 747s bought from other airlines. Tired, rickety old planes, I was sure, maintained by bitter, underpaid mechanics, planes with broken seats flopping back and forth, that were the equivalent of a car with six hundred fifty thousand miles on it. Only other fearful fliers will understand. When I know I have to fly somewhere, I think about it and think about it as the days count down. It's with me every moment, lurking in the background or totally occupying the foreground. It feels like a date with fate, a tight bottleneck I'll be squeezing my very life through. People argue with me. You're much safer in an airplane than in a car, they always say, and then they quote statistics. It doesn't matter what they say.

Since I don't believe in Allah or Anybody Else, though, I must, in the end, put my faith in those cold and conundrum-riddled numbers. Faint comfort. They tell me that it's statistically unlikely that this plane I'm going to get on will crash, but if I happen to get on a doomed plane, then doesn't that mean that my chances of crashing were actually one hundred per cent? And who am I to seek refuge in statistical unlikelihood when my entire existence has been nothing but a series of ridiculously unlikely events, the cosmic equivalent of winning the lottery again and again and again and again?

And so it goes, telescoping in intensity as the day and proximity to the actual plane approach. By the time I'm riding to the airport, my poor brain is in a state of morbidly roiling hyperacuity, childishly scanning the landscape and faces around me for "signs" that my luck will hold, even as the harsh inner empirical cynic scoffs. This was my condition as we whizzed through Cloverdale that October on the way to SFO and my date with an ancient 747 no doubt previously owned by Aeroflot. Tower, I kept thinking, Tower. Not a name to inspire confidence. A shabby, cut-rate name, a name that whispers Doom. As I was thinking this, I glanced out the window exactly as we were passing the ugly deteriorating Cloverdale incinerator, looking now like a big tombstone: Yo, over here! it mocked. Check it out. You want a tower? I'll show you a tower. I'm a tower. So long, sucker! I rode the rest of the way to the airport full of emptiness and panic.

All over the news in October 1993 was the Polly Klaas case. She was the missing 12-year-old abducted on the first of the month from a slumber party at her house in Petaluma, just down the road from Cloverdale. Pictures, posters, and prayers petitioned the universe to bring her back alive. I'd seen the pictures: she was a beauty. Family, friends and the public breathed life into the legend that she was being held somewhere, that they'd get her back. I didn't think so. Her face, her beauty, her expression, put her, for me, in the gallery of the dead with all the other pictures we've seen of fey young murdered people: graduation portraits, wedding pictures, party snapshots. This was a semi-local case. Polly wove her way in and out of my pre-flight obsessions. I thought of her as we went past Petaluma. Her luck ran out, said the voice in my head. Why not mine?

My plane didn't crash, and Polly Klaas was not brought back alive. The details of the case--Keystone Kops police ineptitude that probably cost Polly her life, the failure of a justice system that had let Richard Allen Davis out of prison four months before the abduction, the tragic passivity of the slumber-party girls on the night she was taken, obeying his order to count to 1000 after he left with Polly instead of screaming the house down--these details are now known. 

What I could not have known as I rode past the Cloverdale incinerator and thought about death when I saw it was that Polly's body lay just a few feet from it, under a hunk of plywood, dumped by Davis after he raped and strangled her, and was still there when we rode past on the return trip a couple of weeks later. It was early December when they caught Davis and found Polly.

A "memorial garden" sprang up near the incinerator. You can see it from the highway, but only vaguely and at a distance. Almost fifteen years after Polly's murder, I'm driving by Cloverdale. I'm not in a hurry. I have a brand-new digital camera. I make an abrupt decision, exit 101, turn left and left again along the frontage road and pull up near the memorial. Nobody's there. Perfect. It's February, which, in Northern California, means it's been raining and raining and everything's green and saturated and flowers are coming up. "God's Little Angels," says a winged wooden sign. A couple of paths meander by clusters of toys, dolls, teddy bears, windmills, wreaths, and dozens of handpainted rocks with the names of murdered or missing children. Everything's been there a long, long time. The dolls and teddy bears are soaked, moldy, mossy, sagging, decaying, tangled up in vegetation, lying on their faces or staring up at the sky with their button eyes. Resting angels, indeed. Some of the memorial rocks are cracked. I take dozens of pictures, in a fever, thinking: How can I do justice to this?

I wish I could show all of them to you, but I must choose just one. This is it.