We planned this weekend’s trip to the Air and Space Museum Annex a few days beforehand, we couldn’t have anticipated the coincidence. We’d been wanting to go and we had errands to run in Northern Virginia so we set Saturday afternoon aside. Even just after the accident the irony didn’t sink in, not until I was there, surrounded by every possible variation of airplane, from that nuke-dropping superfortress and the SR-71 Blackbird to human-sized stunt planes and dissected engines and gliders and flimsy prototype helicopters and the practice space shuttle Enterprise. The point was hammered home with no pretense of subtlety when my phone rang, just in front of the showcase on Japanese stewardesses. For the next ten minutes, as I wandered under a three-dimensional puzzle of suspended airplanes, Mom described the scene on the docks as they pulled Bill’s plane out of the Columbia River.

Nobody died, I should start with that. Nobody bothered to start the story that way for me. All I got was a quick: “Call me back, I need to tell you what happened with Uncle Bill’s airplane.” And she hung up. This was Friday night, and I spent the last bit of a delicious sushi dinner listening to blood pump behind my eyeballs. Minutes later I got the whole story. Grandma was wet and Bill bit his lip, but he made a perfect water landing. Mechanical failure: cause unknown. They came down from cruising altitude, some thousands of feet, and landed no more than a sled ride down the hill from my house, in the river.

It’s a good story, I suppose, with its happy end and all, but I can’t get over how horrific it all is. The airplane was brand new and, from all accounts, beautiful. Leather seats, TVs, fancy nav, some kind of absurdly lightweight carbon frame. This thing was so new I haven’t seen it, I just haven’t been home in a couple months. You might have a mental picture of some rich exec character and his private jet coated in slimy opulence, but that’s wrong. Bill is one of the most sincere, unaffected people I know. This plane represented something to him, a confluence of technology and achievement and joy. It allowed for small family luxuries, like quick weekend visits between Grandma and her youngest grandchildren. This crash is nothing less than a betrayal – like one of those stories where a well-loved pet turns on its owner.

Then there’s the image of them standing on the wing in the water. The Daily A quotes Grandma as saying her shoes were dry at first but that the water eventually reached her ankles. My grandmother cannot swim. She had to get a special medical waiver to avoid the swimming requirement and graduate from college. She put all of her grandchildren in lessons from the time we could crawl, so we would never be so terrorized, but she doesn’t even wade. I can’t even imagine that experience, knowing I’d survived 85 years plus a plane crash only to feel that inky water lapping at my ankles.

By all accounts, Bill did everything he could have. As soon as the plane shut down he spun it around, hoping to make it back to the airport. When he calculated coming up short he aimed for the river, picking a stretch of water just in front of two docked Coast Guard ships. He talked Grandma through the landing and evacuation plan and even broke the pressure seal on the door so they wouldn’t get trapped. They hit the water twice, one jarring bump and then a short skid. The bar pilot office is right there, too, and the pilot on duty perches at a full wall of plate-glass windows overlooking the river. He had called 911 and fired up his boat before the plane even stopped moving. If Grandma hadn’t grabbed the life ring (a ridiculous thing to decline, at the time) she wouldn’t have even gotten wet past her socks (as it was, she was towed through the water and hoisted up the side of the boat). They roped the plane to keep it from sinking. My dad arrived shortly thereafter at the scene of a disaster averted.

This is not a story about me at all, but I feel awful. Everybody has a nightmare of plummeting out of the sky, but this time it actually happened. I feel even worse that I wasn’t there, that I’m still not there as the pain and regret and relief and gratitude bubbles up and around my family. Dad made Grandma clam chowder from scratch and Mom made the bar pilots a couple batches of cookies, and all that homemade loving just sounds delicious. It’s not that I’m unhappy in DC, I am doing better than I even expected to, but sometimes I feel so guilty and selfish for being so far away. Couldn’t I do just as well in Portland, where I could drop by on weekends and help out in hard times?

I think it’s human nature to be this selfish, to wrap a tragedy around your own nightmares and insecurities, but it hadn’t happened to me yet at the Air and Space Annex. The shock was still fresh, the morning after, and very abstract. Wandering among all manner of air and space craft I couldn’t help but dwell on how bizarre it all is. How is it that people can build a machine that can cross the entire country in less than two hours and then, using that same logical muscle, strap themselves into it? I can’t even put fancy words on how disorienting it is to look up at the Enola Gay and imagine it as the vehicle it was, the ultimate instrument of death. This plane crash, too, was a rumor I’d heard, as abstract in its magnitude as if everybody had died after all. And yet, these were both more real than rumors because the implications rippled out beyond my disbelief. Inexplicable things happen every day, even to good people.

I had the nicest visitors over the weekend. I’m apparently the annual spring break attraction for the Oregon crowd (last year this time they were in Oslo). At least this time I only made my parents trek across the country — no oceans or language barriers — to take a peek at my new DC home. We got to do all the fun things like grocery shopping and filling my car with gas! We also enjoyed some lovely dinners, a great lunch with Auntie Ann, and even some tourist stuff. It was great timing as the cherry blossoms are sprouting, although if they’d waited just one or two more days they might have seen sunshine.

I stayed up way past my bedtime to pick them up in Baltimore Wednesday night. It was totally worth it for the chance to chat. They stayed in a lovely hotel room in Dupont that was bigger than my whole apartment. On Thursday they did a bit of touring without me, exploring the Dupont neighborhood and then driving out to Monticello with my car, but they also came out to see my office and apartment. We had dinner at my favorite neighborhood pizza place, Red Rocks, but unfortunately the pizza we chose was structurally unstable. The pepperonis were determined on sliding off with the rest of the toppings.

On Friday I was able to work from home, so I started before normal work hours and slipped out a little early in the afternoon. Our plan was to tackle Operation Spy at the Spy Museum, which is a silly interactive experience where you solve mysteries and crawl around. Or something. We didn’t get to do it because the museum fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate. When they pushed our tour time back 30 minutes we cashed it in for a refund and took our own tour of the museum. It was really silly, lots of plastic gadgets that looked like James Bond props, but I thought it was fun. We went out to dinner at an interesting place Mom’s friend recommended: IndeBleu, a French/Indian restaurant. The food was good, but they were trying way too hard to be edgy. I liked my dessert sorbets the best. The four of us — Mom, Dad, Brendan and I — went out for cocktails that night at Gibson, a faux speakeasy on U Street. It was expensive and a little affected, but the cocktails were delicious.

We devoted a chunk of Saturday to driving up to Baltimore to see Ann and Dale. We had a great seafood lunch at a place on the inner harbor and caught up on all the family gossip. They both looked healthy and spunky, and it was very nice to see them. I’ve been a wretched great-niece when it comes to visiting and responding to emails. Dad and I would have liked to see a little of Baltimore since we’d never been, but it was drizzling and we lacked direction. An attempt to drive through the inner harbor area spat us out in some quasi-residential area, and having been warned against wandering aimlessly through Baltimore neighborhoods we resigned ourselves to navigating back to DC.

We tried to explore Georgetown on Saturday afternoon, but after Dad performed a magic feat of a parallel parking job we found that it was all crowded and expensive. We breezed by Georgetown Cupcakes, but the line snaked around the block even in the rain. Mom and I made a halfhearted attempt at shopping, but that was about all we could muster.

Brendan and I were supposed to join my parents in their hotel room for wine and appetizers before dinner, but when I came home I found the sink and dishwasher overflowing with muck. We spent a fair amount of time on the phone with our landlord (who is probably the nicest landlord on the planet) to secure a plumber for the next morning. The issue is now resolved, but at the time it was a smelly nuisance. For the record, the clog was in the communal condo area of the drain and not our pipe.

It was too bad we missed appetizers because our reservation at Corduroy was delayed almost an hour due to the “rain,” whatever that meant. It was barely drizzling. We guzzled some complimentary champagne and then slouched sullenly in the bar area as the hostess ignored us. It was a lovely restaurant with stunning food, but the waiting experience put us in a bad mood. We comforted ourselves (at least Dad and Brendan did) by making fun of the absurdly loud people at the next table over.

Come to think of it, the whole weekend pretty much revolved around food. On Sunday morning we left our landlord and plumber in the apartment to enjoy brunch at the Tabard Inn. I was almost ready to cancel it, still sleepy and full from the night before, but it turned out to be very pleasant. I was expecting more of a lodgey atmosphere, but it turned out to be a quirky antiquey old building with lots of nooks and crannies and windows. Bittersweet, since it immediately preceded the drive to the airport.

It was a wonderful weekend, but it went by so fast! And we did so much walking! Now, being only Tuesday, it feels like I should have a weekend coming up somewhere soon…