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Out of everyone's sight, around a hook of land, workers keep bringing in the bodies. Ice trucks stand waiting to take them to nearby morgues. The press cannot go to where the bodies are brought in. Since the area has been declared a crime scene, it is difficult to get around. The Air National Guard base in Westhampton, where the C-130s are located, is off-limits. Dune Road, which runs beside the ocean, is barricaded at the point where Westhampton Beach approaches the area of the Moriches.
One can still get to the beach on one's own, but all there is to see and hear this morning are the blue-silver light on the water, cawing sea gulls and harmless, whispering waves. The crash area, now a junkyard of flotsam, is miles out of range.
For all the agitation and anxiety at the Coast Guard station, the atmosphere of East Moriches remains as it was. The library, normally quiet, is somber. People try to sound cheerful by saying the things they always say, but their voices are flat and the air feels sodden.
At the deli on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Montauk Highway, the usual customers mix with the newcomers under a hush. One of the three women owners who opened the deli only two years ago has lived in the town for 20 years. She and her husband have reared four daughters, two of whom have gone to college. Except for a devastating forest fire last year, she cannot recall anything going wrong in East Moriches until the plane crash.
When asked how she feels today, she simply says, "Very sad. Sad for the people, for the families." When asked if it would make much of a difference to her if it turned out that the crash was the work of terrorists, she says, "Not really. It's just sad. That's all."
Her answer may speak for the fact that acts of terrorism are becoming more familiar to Americans after Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center bombing, but it seems to go deeper than that. Like most of the people in this town, and perhaps in the country at large, she is not thinking globally or strategically. She is concentrating on what she understands--a grief akin to that after a death in the family.
"I can't stop talking about it," says the man who expected to find people alive in the water. "My friend who was with me can't sleep. And I can't stop talking."
The sun does not appear on Friday morning. The sky is a gray gauze, fog covers the crash site, a light rain falls, and thunderstorms are forecast for the late afternoon. The body count is more than 100, but the weather and high swells will impede the search today.
More chunks of the 747 are recovered. A fuller narrative is given of the flight, from takeoff to the explosion. The mounting testimonies of experts nearly confirm that the plane was sabotaged.
Even so, nothing seems to touch the public as painfully as the pictures of the family members, who tell stories of their suddenly dead loved ones in brave efforts to project their grief outward.
"How are they holding up?" a reporter asks a chaplain who is counseling the families. One has the image of their doing just that.