At the mosquito hour, when the grills are cooling and the kids seem to shout louder than ever as they cling to the last light of the day, the people of East Moriches, New York, look up from the decks of their boats and houses and see a 747 flare, break apart and go down in the sea. In a second or two, a typically dank Long Island South Shore night goes from languor to amazement to horror. Private vessels are first to rush toward the site through the Moriches Inlet, which opens to the ocean. Zodiacs from the Coast Guard station follow. Cutters come soon after. Emergency vehicles make a long, undulating necklace of light on the roads leading to town. The air is thick with police sirens and slow, mournful fire alarms. Everyone turns on the news.
It was a fire in the plane. It was old and faulty equipment. It was the hydraulic system, the electrical system, the structure. A small aircraft hit it in midair. It was a terrorist bomb. Nearly everyone suspects that first and strongest, and the more officials say not to speculate about it, the more one speculates. Within a few hours, when it is clear that none of the 200-plus people who were on TWA Flight 800 are going to be found alive, the mood of the town is laden with sorrow. East Moriches (established early 1700s, population a little more than 4,000) is about to become America.
"When my neighbor and I headed out in his Whaler," says a construction contractor, 53, who was one of the first on the scene, "we thought we were going to find survivors. We came upon dead bodies, but we kept looking for people who were still alive. Then we realized nobody was alive. I saw legs, a head. I said, 'Please, God, don't let me see a kid.' Then I saw a kid."
This is not the Hamptons--this area of Speonk, East Moriches, Center Moriches strung out along the Old Montauk Highway, which was long ago supplanted by the ever widening Long Island Expressway. Here it is still around 1948. The people work for a living, know one another's business, tend to their green squares of land and (most of the time) love America. Take the Long Island Rail Road from Manhattan, and you understand these places at once. After the conductor calls out the suburbs, the names of the stations get rougher: "Patchogue!" "Moriches!" You are too far east to commute to the city and not far east enough, or rich enough, to occupy what a young woman here calls "those houses that nobody lives in."
Between Levittown and the Land of the Neverending Fund Raiser lies East Moriches, where people fish, farm, run "country stores" and "garden centers," teach, practice law, hang dry walls and dig swimming pools for other people. On Atlantic Avenue, which leads to the Coast Guard station, the trees are fat, the sidewalks cracked, the homes need reshingling and bikes lean on kickstands in the driveways.
"I know it's important, but I wish they wouldn't go so fast. Kids play on this street, ya know." The heavyset woman hosing down her trash cans refers to the onrushing traffic to and from the Coast Guard station, where the police, the politicians, the FBI and the press have their separate clusters and where bodies are being brought by boat to the cement pier.