Free I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Page A

wasn’t until spring that someone walking in the woods stumbled on his body.
    Five weeks ago, something broadly similar happened. A small private jet with two people aboard had to abort its approach as it came in to land at our local airport in poor weather. As the pilot swung around to the northeast to make a new approach, he radioed his intentions to the control tower.
    A moment later the little green blip that was his plane disappeared from the airport radar screen. Somewhere out there, abruptly and for reasons unknown, the plane came down in the woods.
    Over the next few days the biggest ground and air search in the state’s history was undertaken, but the plane was not found. A big element of the mystery is that an exceptionally large number of people—275 at last count—claim to have seen the jet just before it crashed. Some said they were close enough to see the two men peering out the windows. The trouble is that these witnesses were widely scattered across two states, in locations up to 175 miles apart. Clearly they can’t all have seen the plane in the moments before it crashed, so what
did
they see?
    A good deal of other news about that fateful flight has emerged in the weeks since the plane’s disappearance. The most startling news to me was that a plane vanishing in the New Hampshire woods is not that exceptional an event. In 1959, according to our local paper, two professors from the university here went down in the woods in a light plane during a winter storm. Notes they left behind showed that they survived for at least four days. Unfortunately, their plane was not found for two and a half months. Two years later, another light plane disappeared in the woods and wasn’t found for six months. A third plane crashed in 1966 and wasn’t found until 1972, long after most people had forgotten about it. The woods, it seems, can swallow a lot of wreckage and not give much away.
    Even so, the utter disappearance of a Lear jet seems inexplicable. To begin with, this was a big plane: an eighteen-seater, with a wingspan of forty feet. You wouldn’t think that something that large could vanish without trace, but evidently it can. There is a great deal more technology available today than there was in previous years—heat sensors, infrared viewers, long-range metal detectors, and the like. The U.S. Air Force has even lent a reconnaissance satellite. All to no avail. For all the looking, there have been no signs of strewn wreckage, no crash paths through the trees. The plane has simply vanished.
    I don’t mean to imply that we live on the edge of some kind of Bermuda triangle of the deciduous world, merely that the woods of New Hampshire are a rather strange and sinister place.
    To begin with, they are full of trees, and I don’t mean that as a joke. I have spent a fair amount of time hiking the woods of New England, and I can tell you that the one thing you see in numbers beyond imagining is trees. At times it’s actually unsettling because it is essentially just one endlessly repeated scene. Every bend in the path presents an outlook indistinguishable from every other, and it remains like that no matter how far you go. If you somehow lost the path, you could easily find yourself—very probably would find yourself—helplessly bereft of bearings.
    Last fall, while out for a stroll not two miles from my home, I noticed just off the path a bluff I had not seen before and, below it, in a small, secret dell, the rooftop of a house. Since there must be a road or track to the house, it occurred to me that if there was a way down to the house, it would make a nice circular walk from my home. I ventured perhaps seventy-five yards from the path and explored the bluff top, but I couldn’t see a way down and so made to return to the path. But could I find it? I could not.
    I hunted around for perhaps five or six minutes in a state of mild perplexity and retraced my steps as carefully as I could, but the path seemed to