Beach community helped and cried

OXNARD, Calif. - On the beaches that look out over the resting place of Flight 261, "Amazing Grace" has become as much an order as a hymn. And a memorial cross, planted the first night by neighbors, has bloomed into a field of remembrance.

The plane fell between oil platforms, with names like Gina and Gale, and Anacapa Island, one of the Channel Islands. In doing so, it fell into the California beach communities that hem the Pacific here.

The plane now lies on the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, one of the deepest channels around, where the weather can kick up in minutes and steal both boats and lives. The Winfield Scott crashed on Anacapa Island and shares the ocean floor with countless sport-fishing boats and sailboats. The La Jenelle crashed on Silver Strand Beach. The channel tried to take the Jeanne just last April.

The natives here speak of the ocean as if it were a person, temperamental and deep. They have grown accustomed to the loss of a boat. The loss of a plane is something new.

In the past week, they have talked of visiting Poulsbo, or growing up in Olympia, or how they fly Alaska all the time, or that they knew someone who was supposed to be on that plane. They have stood out on the beaches - and they know this might sound strange - and watched to see what the ocean might offer up.

In turn, they have offered their flowers, their sympathy, their boats and their hard work to whoever needs them.

Here are the stories of five people from the area and how they were touched by the crash of Flight 261.

Eric Hermann, 30 Boat repairman

Eric Hermann fixes boats for a living, even some from far away like the Southern Cross from Seattle, which he is preparing for a Mexico trip. He is sun-bleached and loves living near the water because every day brings something different.

The Coast Guard called him Monday, shortly before 5 p.m. - just a few minutes after Flight 261 went down. Hermann called the owner of the Wesly Q, seaworthy and fast, and asked to borrow it. He and his nephew sped to the crash site, steering straight for the helicopters.

The Wesly Q was one of the first boats to arrive.

They saw the bigger pieces of wreckage first. They wove through the water in figure-eights and circles, retrieving what they could. Pieces of the aircraft, a seat on a swivel base, a suitcase that fell open when Hermann snagged it with a boathook. The bag lost only a few toiletries before Hermann and his nephew pulled it up on deck.

The air tasted like jet fuel, and the wind kicked up a blinding mist. They filled plastic garbage sacks with sharp plane bits. They slept for short hours. They came back the next day and snared up the honeycomb skin of the plane, food trays, insulation, shoes, handbags. Three times they saw the same "occupied" sign, and finally they caught it. They filled four bags that morning.

Then they found the stroller wheel, and Hermann felt the loss. He has two children of his own; their first words were "boat" and "no."

"I really have no clue what this has done to me," he said.

On Thursday, he took the day to deliver a boat from Marina del Rey to the Channel Islands. He drove the tow boat by himself, to give himself a break, and time to think.

But his trip took him west and slightly north, forcing him to stare for hours at Anacapa Island, the landmark of the sea crash. He couldn't miss the memorial scrawled in the sky with smoke: A heart and a cross, inked by a plane.

And then he noticed all the planes, flying the same route as Flight 261.

"I never noticed, how much traffic there was," he said.

Jason Bouchard, 25 Surfer and diver

Jason Bouchard dives in this channel, to the ocean floor to scoop up sea urchins, a spiny creature that eats whatever it finds, from kelp to plastic. The good urchins, the ones that dine on the sweet kelp that grows in the channel, are popular in Japan and can bring him $1 a pound.

Bouchard surfs here, too, in a channel known for its swells.

He was working on his boat in front of his house Monday afternoon, near the beach. He learned of the crash when neighbors started filing out of their homes, looking toward the water, talking about the news. The helicopters began hovering. He wasn't sure what to do.

On Tuesday morning, Bouchard, a lanky, tattooed man who has spent his life in Port Hueneme, cried.

Later, he walked over to the memorial cross on Silver Strand Beach, which he can almost see from his house. He took note of the orchids, the birds of paradise, the teddy bears, the candles and the toy plane, the butterscotch. He picked up two photographs nestled there.

One showed smiling women. Flight attendants, he guessed.

The other showed two men, one younger, one older. The pilot, he thought.

"It's spooky, just knowing all these people are still in the water," he said, looking out toward Anacapa Island.

The water is deep out there, all silt and mud on a downward slope. No one dives for sea urchins in that canyon.

Bouchard watched men with boards tucked in their arms run past, heading for the surf. He didn't plan to go out but said it was a good day for waves.

Only one of the women in the photograph died in the plane crash. But Bouchard was right: They were flight attendants. He was also right about the pilot.

Fred Mathis, 52 Fisherman and charter-boat pilot

Fred Mathis is a looming man whose beard has a mind of its own. He fought in Vietnam and helped at military funerals for six months at Fort Dix. He has conducted memorial services at sea.

Usually, Mathis takes people fishing for sea bass or yellowtail on the Jeanne, a 50-foot boat owned by Dorothy Scuri, a bird of a woman.

On Tuesday, local officials asked Scuri if they could borrow her boat and pilot to take three grieving families out to the ocean crash site.

Mathis didn't hesitate.

"You do what you do," he said. "You don't say no to things like that if you are able to do it. You just don't."

He met 18 passengers at the dock Wednesday morning. Relatives from Seattle, San Francisco, Anchorage and Las Vegas walked on board, along with police and escorts from the American Red Cross and Alaska Airlines.

Mathis drove them out slowly, steering within a half-mile northeast of the crash site. The Coast Guard cutter Point Bridge ushered the boat.

He laid the boat into the current and kept it steady. The passengers told stories, prayed, then scattered red and white carnations and rice into the water.

Mathis maneuvered the Jeanne to circle the flowers three times, once for each family. And this is where it becomes difficult for Mathis, a lifelong fisherman, to continue his story. He kneads his fingers, picks at his fingernails, grimy with the sea, and looks out the window. Tears threaten but are blinked back.

He called the Coast Guard, he said, to say he was ready to head back to shore. The Point Bridge steered to his starboard side, some 50 feet away. The crew walked out on deck, in work uniforms and life jackets. The whistle blew, and the crew saluted.

At sea, this is known as the "Dead Man's Salute." The whistle blew again, and the Coast Guard crew dropped its salute.

"I held together, and the deckhand held together," Mathis said. "But oh, the rest of the people on the boat - it went right to them."

Donna Marshall, 50 Hair stylist

When Donna Marshall glances through the window of her shoe box of a hair salon, she can see the beach and the ocean. She was busy working Monday when the plane hit the water, smack in the middle of her view, so she didn't see a thing.

Her mother called to tell her that night. Marshall raced to the TV and began her vigil of news and prayer.

"What can you say, something like that?" she said.

Marshall is a fixture on this stretch of California beach. Neighborhood kids bring her flowers. She plays Christian music in her salon and writes gospel songs when she can. She has a voice sweet and thick as honey.

She is easily given to tears, and on Tuesday, felt numb. The town shut down. Her phone didn't ring. She couldn't bring herself to leave the house.

On Wednesday, Marshall turned 50. Someone brought her purple daisies, and a little boy gave her a white flower in a bottle. She scooped these all up and walked down to the memorial cross now planted in her beach.

Someone asked her to sing at a service the next day. She says that God gave her the song, "Call on You," as a birthday present, and she scrawled it out in 20 minutes.

"I just want to somehow touch those hearts," she said.

She sang Thursday night, in cowboy boots and a flowing red dress and a black fur coat, in front of an 11-piece band and the cross on the beach and the crowd gathered to pray. She sang again on the beach the next day, in a blue dress patterned with white fish and dusted with other people's hair. This time, she was alone.

Our hearts are filled with pain

Some things we can't explain

Seems endless and unfair

This grief we share.

Oh help us Lord to see

The treasure in your light

That takes the dark from night

And gives us rest.

Robert Scott, 49 Psychologist

Robert Scott lives some 35 miles from these beaches in a gated neighborhood with street names that sound like fancy pasta. "The Journal of Traumatic Stress" sits on the desk of a spare room in his ample home, and he drives a white Jeep with a license plate that says DEBRIEF.

Scott, a psychologist, helped start the crisis-response program now used by American Red Cross chapters everywhere. He was called on for grief counseling after a horrific plane collision over Los Angeles in 1991, and the Rodney King riots of 1992, and the southern California fire storms of 1993.

He was driving home from his private practice Monday when the news broke about Flight 261. His first reaction was more personal than professional:

No way. Not in my backyard.

At 11 p.m., the Red Cross dispatched him to the Renaissance Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. Families of the victims would be arriving soon. Scott worked for a frantic three hours, helping set up three conference rooms: one for grief counseling, one for staff and agencies, one for media briefings.

He napped for three hours, then worked for 32, listening to the families whose grief had nowhere else to land. He offered dolls, coloring books and clay to the confused children, tissues and information to the stunned adults.

Scott and the other volunteers try not to personalize these times. That was a tough line to walk Thursday, when Scott was assigned to one of the buses that carted family members to the beach for the first time.

The survivors were Muslim, Jewish, Christian. They were from India, Mexico and all over the United States. They scrawled names and notes in the sand. Two brothers rolled up their pants, waded into the ocean, wrapped their arms around each other and held on. They built shrines of driftwood and seaweed castles and planted roses.

Later, when Scott received his own counseling, for what professionals call "compassion fatigue," he couldn't stop talking about the beach.

Kim Barker's phone message number is 206-464-2255. Her e-mail address is kbarker@seattletimes.co.